A hybrid format for Star Trek: Academy sounds truly awful

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has a lot of fans excited. The series is filled to the brim with fantastic actors and actresses while bringing back top-end talent from Trek's past in the form of Robert Picardo. It's a show with potential, maybe far more potential than anything else the franchise is cooking up at the moment. Be it any other show, Star Trek 4, or even, and not shockingly, Section 31.

It seems hard to not have more hype than Section 31 at this point, but I digress.

Yet, Alex Kurtzman is continuing to prove to the fandom that he can't be trusted with the Star Trek property. While we thought shows like Prodigy and Strange New Worlds were a sign of things to come, we all got rocked by the terrible Section 31 trailer, leading us to have doubts about the next round of content.

Kurtzman, not to be outdone, has given us even more trepidation over the upcoming show. He took to the Comic-Con stage and revealed (via TrekMovie) that the new show was going to be a "hybrid format". Whatever that means.

""It’s a really exciting show for us, because, well I won’t give away too much about the show, but I do think that we’re kind of finding a new format which is interesting… Kind of a hybrid format, which I’m very excited about.""

We've seen Star Trek dispel time and time again that the franchise can't be any type of genre. It can have minor elements in a singular episode, but shows that tried to be grim and dark, like Discovery and Picard don't engage with the fanbase. Likewise, despite more fans liking Lower Decks than not, it still didn't have the fan support that shows like Strange New Worlds or even Picard did.

It's because Strange New Worlds is a Star Trek show at its core. It wasn't trying to be anything it wasn't. Sure, some episodes hit better than others, but the show as a whole is great. Trying to create hybrid shows in the Star Trek universe just sounds awful. An experiment that has been tested to death with the same result; failure.

You can be mad at the fans who don't like content that isn't distinctly Star Trek, but you can't deny that it's harder to have a franchise that is ignoring its core fanbase than embracing it. If the fans of the more "hybrid' shows like Lower Decks and Discovery like that, then it's fair to say they'd like more Strange New Worlds. If that's the case, why not just make more shows like Strange New Worlds?

Or even better, give Strange New Worlds a 20-episode season. So many fans are getting tired of these types of shows, and it's probably high time that we got new leadership for the brand if this is the direction Kurtzman continues to go down.

Disregarding the long-standing fans, in an attempt to create new fans at the sake of the old ones. It's fine to want to get younger and expand your reach, but you have to do with the classic Star Trek style, not change up your gimmick every few years to whatever is hot, new and trendy. Section 31 is showing us that.