Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, an episodic look at the crew of the USS Enterprise set before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series, has proved so popular that in April 2024, Paramount Plus renewed it for a fourth season while season 3 was still in production. But after laying off hundreds of employees in June 2025, the streaming service announced that SNW would be ending with an abridged fifth season.
“That was the studio’s choice,” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “We would’ve gone on forever. But what was great was, they gave us the opportunity to get up to TOS. We’ve got to reach TOS to fulfill the promise to the fans, which was ‘What happens to all these people? How do they start to become those characters we know, and what happens to the ones we don’t see in canon?’”
SNW launched with TOS characters Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), Spock (Ethan Peck), and Nyota Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) already on the Enterprise, while the ship’s future captain, James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) is a periodic guest star. Engineer Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) joins the main cast for season 3, which premieres on July 17. But doctor Leonard McCoy, senior helmsman Hikaru Sulu, and yeoman Janice Rand have yet to appear.
”You will not see [all] of the original series crew before this show wraps,” Goldsman said. But he confirmed that other legacy characters will join the show later in the series.
Beyond sharing characters, SNW mirrors TOS’ episodic structure. Season 3 bounces from a horrifying encounter with the Gorn to a whimsical wedding episode to zombie horror to a murder mystery.
“Our serialized character stories let you move from genre to genre, because we use genre as sort of a lens on emotion,” Goldsman said. “I think that the stakes of an episode in one tone and the stakes of an episode in another would be potentially quite incompatible if they were a continuous [narrative].”
The shifts also let the cast show off their range as they move between navigating potentially deadly missions and dealing with messy personal drama.
“We spend a lot of time for each episode trying to think of what we can have the actors try and do that they haven’t got a chance to try before, so it doesn’t feel like they’re just showing up to do the same thing every week,” co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers said in the interview. “Things like romance really encapsulate that.”
Paramount Plus is currently working on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which is set after the events of Star Trek: Discovery and follows some of the same characters. While Goldsman and Myers aren’t involved in that series, they hope it continues to expand Star Trek fandom, and that they’ll get another chance to work in the franchise after SNW wraps.
“I would love to get a chance to do [the Star Trek: The Next Generation era], but honestly, getting to work around the original series has been the most fun,” Myers said. “Its future is very bright and interesting. I actually think that that POV is really nice in our current world climate, because it’s hopeful.”
The 10-episode third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres on Paramount Plus on July 17, with two new episodes. Subsequent episodes will premiere weekly on Thursdays through Sept. 11.