There was always going to be new Star Trek shows, with our without Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is calling it a journey, having been canceled ahead of its fifth season on Paramount+. The reason for cancellation isn't talked about much, but an exorbitant budget, potentially unimpressive ratings, and an overall financial crisis with the streaming service (Paramount+), have seemingly doomed the show and others like it. Picard and Prodigy were also ended by the service, while Section 31, likely due to a financial situation, was reduced from a regular series to a one-off film.

The money issue is really at the heart of the situation for all of these massive moves, as streaming services were willing to overspend to have quality content for people to watch after subscribing. Now that the model doesn't seem to work, things are changing. Discovery is a casualty of that, but that's not the only issue the series has faced, as the show was never embraced by a majority of the fanbase for a variety of reasons.

The show is seen as a failure in many circles of the fandom, even though it does have a fanbase. With the show ending, Alex Kurtzman, the head of Star Trek, is doing his best to spin the narrative of the series, by saying it helped start all of the better Trek shows that fans largely like.

Kurtzman made the claim at the SXSW conference last week (via TrekCore) that without Discovery, none of the current lineup of Treks shows would be airing, saying;

"“I feel very special about the fact that there would be no new era of Star Trek without Discovery. It just wouldn’t exist. Disco was the first wan in the door… and you’re gonna take a lot of fire when you’re the first ones in, right? But you take a lot of that fire so that everyone else can take the hill. And that has been true for Discovery, for good and for bad.""

And that takes a lot of hubris to say such a thing. Firstly, the idea that Star Trek wasn't going to be back on television at some point is preposterous. If it wasn't Discovery, it would've been something else. Trek wasn't some dead, dormant franchise. It hasn't stopped making new content for 30 years. Let's not pretend that Discovery saved or started something. They didn't. The franchise was and always is looking at new content to create, be it films, shows, books, games or whatever else they can think of.

It's a cash cow, and Discovery did nothing to help bring back the franchise. Restarting the show franchise was long in the works before Beyond even hit the screens, so stop with that over-infantilizing of the impact of the series. Be more like series showrunner, Michelle Paradise, who admitted we won't truly know the impact of Discovery for 20-odd years, saying at the same conference;

""In terms of the legacy of Discovery, I’m not sure. I suppose that’s for people 10 or 20 years from now to [have that] perspective. [But] what is most meaningful [for me] is the impact it has had on individuals.""

Discovery's impact is unknown, it's reputation isn't, however, as fans know that the show was a mess. It made so many boneheaded moves that fans rejected it early and apparently often. It committed the greatest sin a Trek show could make; it tried to be anything but Star Trek and did so by changing established lore because they felt they were entitled to. They thought they could make Star Trek "better", and when you tell someone the thing they love isn't good enough, you're never going to truly be able to win them back.