Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Essential, and the best modern starting point by a distance. It is a spin-off of Discovery and needs none of it: the characters were introduced there and are reintroduced here, and the series is deliberately built so that any episode can be a first episode.

The decision that made it work was going back to self-contained stories. After five years of serialised Star Trek with season-long arcs, this is a show where an episode has a premise, examines it for fifty minutes and finishes, which is the format the franchise was always best in. One week is a courtroom drama, the next a body-swap comedy, the next a first-contact problem, and a season can contain a musical episode and an hour about a society that knowingly sustains itself on one child's suffering.

Anson Mount's Pike is the warmest captain the franchise has had, a man who cooks for his officers and who already knows, from the first episode, exactly how and when he will be maimed in a few years' time. Building a character around somebody living with a fixed and terrible future is a better idea than a prequel usually gets.

It is set roughly a decade before the original series, so it carries a certain amount of pre-ordained furniture, and the later seasons lean on that more than the first did. None of it blocks a newcomer. Start here, then go to The Next Generation.