Mike McMahon wants Star Trek: Lower Decks to get 100 episodes

Star Trek: Lower Decks is getting a fourth season, but then?

The folks at Paramount seem to love making new shows and fans are pretty over it. A lot of fans want more episodes of the shows they already like. One of those shows, Star Trek: Lower Decks, is a well-received show.

Well-enough received, anyway. It’s a show that fans have liked enough to get three seasons, while a fourth is being produced as we speak. That doesn’t mean that four seasons is enough for series creator Mike McMahon.

McMahon spoke with TrekMovie.com about the idea of doing more than just four seasons and the idea of a fifth and sixth season seems to resonate with the creator of the series, but 100 episodes are the goal he hopes to get to, that is if he can’t keep making the show forever.

"The best thing for us is to get a pickup by the end of this year to start writing at the beginning of next year. But I’ll take a pickup right now if CBS is handing them out. But we’ve got all [season] 4 to work on, we are hoping for [season] 5.…I would like to hope, I don’t have any hints whatsoever. We are fully in on 4. And we’re focusing on making that the best season possible. If it were up to me, I’d pick us up for 100 episodes, and we would just keep going forever. But you just have to keep your fingers crossed and hope that we get to make more Lower Decks."

Star Trek: Lower Decks should get 100 episodes

I don’t personally like Star Trek: Lower Decks. It’s a show that I feel doesn’t capture the essence of what Star Trek is. It’s like Crystal Pepsi or New Coke. Fans just didn’t want it. That’s Star Trek, Star Trek is a specific thing that fans want in specific ways.

That said, Lower Decks is already in production, already has a cast and crew, and an infrastructure that exists. The show may go up in cost due to rising costs, but it’ll be easier to maintain this series for another 60 episodes than it would be to greenlight two brand-new shows every other year.

Shows like Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds should follow Prodigy’s 20+ episodes per season approach and develop shows more in line with how they were on terrestrial television. Star Trek fans will accept three series if they’re getting 60 episodes between them. There’s no reason to have 60 episodes spread across six series, especially when three of them are awful.