Star Trek: Prodigy

Skippable, and it is the entry most likely to be underestimated. It was made for children, it is computer-animated, and it is the only series here constructed so that a viewer who knows nothing can follow everything, because its own characters know nothing either.

The premise does the work. A group of alien teenagers escape a mining colony in a stolen Starfleet ship, with no idea what the Federation is, and the ship's training hologram, a projection of Captain Janeway, starts explaining it to them. Every piece of exposition has an in-story reason to exist, and the show is genuinely about what it would mean to encounter these institutions and decide you wanted to join them.

It is also better made than it needed to be. The animation is film-quality, the arcs are properly serialised across both seasons, and the writing takes its audience seriously, including a sustained thread about a character discovering what they were built for. Kate Mulgrew voicing both the hologram and the real Janeway does more with the part than much of Voyager did.

The production history is odd: it was removed from its original streaming service after one season and picked up elsewhere, where the second season was released in full. Two seasons, around fifteen hours, and the most defensible answer to somebody who has never seen any Star Trek and wants to.