Paramount Privates 'Star Trek: Starfleet Academy's' First Episode On YouTube After Disastrous Launch
Paramount made private the first episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy it had available for free on YouTube.
It is unclear why Paramount decided to make the first episode private, but the episode and the series has been getting ridiculed and panned by numerous people.
In the episode’s first four days it did not even achieve 160,000 total views and it had an estimated 20,000 dislikes compared to just 6,600 likes.
One of the most humiliating moments for the show was when critic Gary Buechler aka Nerdrotic was able to achieve more live viewers by simply streaming a Spock toy at his desk than the Starfleet Academy premiere.
Buechler noted, “My live stream with a Spock action figure in an empty chair beat Star Trek: Starfleet Academy's 1300+ peak live viewers on YouTube in under 3 minutes.”
In an update he noted that he had more than double the Starfleet Academy premiere at its peak.
While it is unclear why Paramount made private the episode, it is possible it did so because the episode was doing the opposite of its intended purpose, which would be to drive viewers to Paramount+ to become subscribers and watch the rest of the series. It’s likely the episode might have been having the opposite effect.
While it’s impossible to determine this, all indications is that the show is performing poorly on Paramount+. First, the show has fallen to the bottom of the top 10 most viewed shows on Paramount+. It briefly made the top 10 list following the release of the third episode on January 22nd. FlixPatrol reports it was 9th in the United States on the 24th.
It was no longer on the list the next day.
Following the release of the fourth episode yesterday, it managed to get into the 10th spot.
The show did not make Luminate’s top 10 chart for the week of January 16-22. The first two episodes premiered back on January 15th thus a majority of the watch time would have likely occurred in this week.
The only outlier to all of these signals that the show is performing poorly is an analysis done by Ted Linhart, who claims the show’s two-episode premiere “collected 2.1 million viewers for the first eight days of the first two episodes.”
He asserts this is “above the full season averages for the recent, notable Star Trek series Strange New Worlds S2 and Picard S3. Even if we compare to only the first two episodes of those two Trek series, Academy is still well ahead.”
When your new "Star Trek" show is getting hammered by reruns of NCIS and RAYMOND, there might be a problem...
People are voting with their feet. Don't believe anyone who says this show is doing well with viewers. It's awful, from start to finish. No one who writes for it has any skill in writing science fiction, let alone Star Trek. The mistakes are laughable. The characters are cardboard cutouts of diversity hires. A mealy-mouthed captain you can't understand who does nothing well except--lounge in bare feet. A short, fat officer who orders cadets in far better shape than she is to exercise. Supposed telepathic aliens who still use sign language to speak because deafness isn't a defect that science ought to correct. Pipsqueak women who somehow bully grown men. Locker-room scenes where gender is a mere detail. It's like every bad "good" idea was thrown into a blender and you get this.