Entertainment Weekly names the most deserving Star Trek show as "worst"

Which Star Trek is the worst?

TCA Paramount+ “Star Trek: Picard” Panel
TCA Paramount+ “Star Trek: Picard” Panel | Randy Shropshire/GettyImages

No franchise is going to hit 1.000. Whenever an entity like Star Trek has been around for as long as they've been, you're going to have some misses. No matter how good you are, you're going to struggle at some point. That's life. That's entertainment. Even the best creators stumble.

Not every Metallica album is the Black Album, not every book by J.R.R. Tolkien has the popularity of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Even your favorite steak house or pizza place will deliver subpar products every now and then. That's just life. Entertainment at this level is no different. Especially with nearly 60 years of content to search through.

You're going to find films and shows that don't live up to the lofty expectations that come with the name brand. So yes, some Star Trek shows are going to be bad. Which ones are is entirely up to you. Yet, the arguments for every show differ. Some aren't as strong, others are almost too strong to ignore. So it's not surprising that Entertainment Weekly named Star Trek: Picard as the "worst" Star Trek series.

The series was a mess from the get-go. Rotating executive producers rewrites, and inconsistent ideas of what everyone wanted the series to be. It all took a toll. Now, it found success, to a degree, with season three, but it for the most part failed in every way imaginable.

It didn't make the franchise better, it actively harmed the perception of some characters, and it rejected the franchise's values for a cheap and "modern" idea of what entertainment should be. The worst part of Picard, however, had to be the outlandish concepts that they threw against the wall. Picard dies in season one, only to have his consciousness put into a body that will eventually die of natural causes. Even though his real body just did that.

One of the few good characters in the first two seasons randomly became the Borg Queen, only to do absolutely nothing of value when the actual Borg Queen popped up in season three. On that note, the Borg Queen came back in season three and came up with an idea to infect every member of Starfleet who was under a certain age.

Instead of just, you know, everyone. It was poorly written, with incoherent concepts thrown against the wall, a parade of better-known characters keeping the fandom interested, and next to nothing of value coming out of it after it ended. This was a show to watch in the moment, maybe the greatest insult I can think of as a piece of entertainment. After the moment is over, there's no reason to watch this show again.

After all, this show was purely built on the spectacle of returns. The cheap pops if you will (to borrow a pro wrestling term). Once you get those pops, those easy hits of dopamine ('member berries'), what's left? When you build a show or a film on nostalgia, you will quickly find out that once the nostalgia fades, so does the reason to watch.

That's the biggest crime Picard committed.