I’m a Trekkie. I fell in love with the franchise during the Next Generation era and regularly went to the theater to see the feature films in the 1990s.

However, during J.J. Abrams’ reboot films, I gradually lost interest. When Discovery was announced, I decided to give it a try—but I stopped watching after two episodes. I never even checked out the other “new” Star Trek iterations. Maybe I will someday.

Even though I haven’t seen the latest attempt to revive the franchise—the Starfleet Academy series—I can already understand why so many people seem upset about it.

From the clips I’ve watched and the reviews I’ve read, it appears that the established brand has once again been used as a mask. Behind that mask is something that doesn’t feel like the Star Trek many fans once knew. Instead, it seems to contain stories the creators wanted to tell anyway—stories that might not attract much attention without the Star Trek label attached.

The problem with this approach is that it may buy you a season or two, but eventually fans recognize that, despite the branding, they aren’t really getting Star Trek. At that point, interest fades, and the show gets cancelled and the movies become busts.

We’ve seen this happen before—not only with Star Trek, but also with other major franchises. The pattern feels familiar enough that it’s easy to predict where Starfleet Academy might be heading.

That said, I hope I’m wrong. I still love Star Trek and want future series to capture what made it so special in the 1990s. But again, I haven’t watched a single episode of Starfleet Academy, but the online discussions surrounding it seem to echo the same concerns seen in other modern franchise shows.

The broader lesson for storytellers is: Write your own stories. Create your own worlds. Develop your own characters. If a story can’t generate interest on its own, attaching it to an established franchise won’t magically make it compelling. It will just expose weak writing and destroy the fans’ love for the franchise itself.

Brands like Star Wars and Star Trek have endured for decades. Whether they can fully recover from this era of horrible storytelling remains to be seen.