Abrams has moved on to a galaxy far far away, and screenwriter Roberto Orci (who co-wrote the last two films) was hired as his replacement, hardly an inspiring choice considering he'd never directed before. Now that he's departed, Paramount is considering a list of perfectly competent replacements, most of whom are likely to do anything but a solid job with this franchise. The bigger problem is that there's no way for this Star Trek series to come off as anything but a retread. The ensemble (Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, John Cho, and Simon Pegg among others) do a great job, and the burnished high-budget visuals are unlike anything Trek ever really enjoyed, but still, it's Captain Kirk on the U.S.S. Enterprise. It's been done to death.

Paramount Pictures

A new TV version of Star Trek, though, would be refreshing and well-timed. The public's appetite for science fiction feels stronger than ever, from the swathe of superhero stories flooding the blockbuster market to super-popular cult TV like Doctor Who and Orphan Black. There's a definite marketplace gap for cerebral, non-superhero genre TV, especially since Battlestar Galactica departed. In its heyday, Star Trek was a ratings monster—people sometimes forget what a cultural phenomenon The Next Generation was—but the most recent shows, Voyager and Enterprise, struggled to leave a big ratings footprint. Good news: Wide viewership is not really necessary anymore to get a series order. Brand recognition, and an established fanbase, matter to networks more than ever. Netflix made the wise choice of buying four shows that figure into the Marvel universe. Why wouldn't they, or another streaming service, want a new Star Trek?

Besides, television is a much better sandbox for the broad universe of the show. While Abrams's recent films took advantage of big budgets to give viewers cool action storytelling, that's nothing a thousand other franchises can't do. But Star Trek could always attempt much more than that, exploring ethical dilemmas of diplomacy on a galactic scale. And it did that in a much more conservative era of television. The one time Star Trek really tried long-form serialized storytelling was the Dominion War arc in the later seasons of Deep Space Nine—absolutely the series' highest point. As TV, especially online networks like Netflix, embrace serialization, imagine what more could be accomplished.

There has, in fact, been rumbling about a new Star Trek TV show for years, but it hasn't amounted to much. Director Bryan Singer worked on an idea for a show called Federation set centuries after The Next Generation, in an era of decline for Starfleet, but it never got past the pitch stage when Paramount hired Abrams to make the 2009 film. Other Trek luminaries, like Jonathan Frakes (Riker of The Next Generation) and William Shatner have also apparently made pitches, to more understandable disinterest from studios.