if a fella wanted to get into star trek, where do you recommend they start🤨
It depends on how much you enjoy and gel with older media.
I grew up on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, then went back and watched the original, as well as seeing the 2009 film went it came out. I personally think that one of those three is the best place to start as a new fan - The Original Series (3 seasons, 1966-69, later they got movies as well), The Next Generation (7 seasons, 1987-1994, also movies), and then Star Trek (2009).
2009 I only mention basically if you're trying to fishhook less easily convinced people into watching Star Trek with you. It lacks a lot of the philosophical core of what I would call real Trek - it "reboots" the characters of The Original Series and takes place in a separate timeline from The Original Series and the Next Generation, and is basically a shlocky, fast-paced, stupider, and less-intellectual version of the actual Star Trek series-es.
It's fun, which is why I mention it, and it's a neat and easy, very digestible (being that it's the first movie rather than a bunch of episodes) version of something that's actually good - kind of like, I don't know, McDonalds plastic food compared to an actual burger made with real mince on a brioche bun.
2009 introduces all the characters of TOS and gives you a rough version of them that you can then use to follow TOS better - there are three movies, the second one is a really bad, very racist version of one of the TOS movies and I do not recommend watching it. I hear good things about the third one, but I haven't gotten around to watching it myself.
I personally really love The Original Series, and also a parallel animated series that only came out a few years later.
If you like the original Man from UNCLE, the 60s Batman TV show, those sorts of shows - and with TAS, the original Scooby Doo, Wacky Races - etc, you will almost certainly appreciate TOS. It's camp as fuck and even before it was adopted by larger queer fannish circles, many of its screenwriters were queer, which is part of why Spock and Kirk particularly are often written with very poignant consideration as to their identities, and why the series often delves so well, in my opinion, into themes of masculine and feminine performance versus personal identity, emotional honesty, etc.
TOS follows the voyages of the USS Starship Enterprise, which is on a five-year mission to map and explore uncharted areas of space, largely making contact with new peoples and civilisations, so a lot of the planets of the week are new planets they've never been to before. Because the Enterprise is part of Starfleet, which is the space-naval and military wing of a United Federation of planets, including Earth, they also regularly do stuff like escort transports of valuable or important goods, or go on ambassadorial missions.
The central premise of the show is that by the 2200s, the planet Earth is post-scarcity, as well as fellow planets within the Federation - people often jokingly describe it as a communist utopia, because almost nobody has to work, there is no poverty or homelessness on Earth or other planets within the UFoP, and basically everybody who is a part of Starfleet and serves on its vessels do so because they have a passion for sciences or exploration. None of them, in short, is doing it for a salary or other recompense.
It's only three seasons, and it mostly follows an adventure of the week format with a few two-part episodes amongst those. Gene Roddenberry created it with a mind for a unified future, so there's a lot of interesting diversity amongst the main cast:
Captain James T. Kirk is a genocide survivor who is very bookish and well-read, and is often very quietly charismatic in his approach to command
First Officer Spock is half-human and half-Vulcan, is more logical and much more bitchy, and often experiences pathos and pain caused by some of his crew's bigotry toward and distrust of his species
Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy, a south US American, is the bitchiest of the three, and without a doubt the most emotional.
Apart from those core three officers, the main regular crew are:
Hikaru Sulu, who is a pan-Asian navigation officer who is very flirty and outgoing
Pavel Chekov, who is a dry and sarcastic Russian who can be a little goofy
Nyota Uhura, an extremely graceful and compassionate Black American who runs the comm, who sings as well as speaking loads of languages
Nurse Christine Chapel, who is often torn between her natural sympathy and ship stresses and demands
Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, an emotive and delightfully duplicitous Scotsman who is literally in love with their ship.
There are other recurring characters - like Doctor M'Benga and Janice Rand - but the above are the primary characters that get complex plotlines with each other and with the broader world around them. It was very intentional to have a Japanese-Chinese American as part of the main cast, sitting next to a Russian, and a Black woman all in the central control room - especially because with all these, you get stuff like one of the first interracial kisses on television, as well as some very rich and complex discussions (for the period) of identity between races and nations, especially with Spock, who is a bridge between two very disparate cultures.
The first I think two episodes are a bit rougher than the rest of the first season - Spock's character is a little different, there are some different main cast members and some different uniforms, etc - but once the show gets into its stride, it's genuinely really fun, often very cute and heartfelt, often dryly funny, has a bunch of literary references.
The characters are genuinely really layered and interesting and the show is extremely philosophical, with a lot of carefully considered moral questions and ethical dilemmas, as well as some beautiful explorations of the breadth of wonder possible in speculative fiction - I definitely think it's more emotionally complex than other shows of the same period, but it is still goofy in places, and for every beautiful philosophical exploration of the depths of human emotion and expression, there's also an insane dumb episode where someone's brain gets transplanted.
A few years after the series was cancelled and it had gained a cult following, they did a bunch of Star Trek movies with the original cast, and after five, those movies blend in with the events of the movies that followed the latter end of The Next Generation, crossing over some of the original cast.
If you start with TOS and you like it, there's built-in transitions and references to get you into TNG - the first episode actually has Doctor Leonard McCoy on the ship, and then later on Scotty has a guest episode, as well as Kirk appearing in the TNG crossover movie.
If you watch a few episodes of TOS and it's a bit too campy for you to enjoy off-the-bat, The Next Generation is the next best place to start.
In the 1980s, a lot of television was beginning to be seen more seriously than it had been in the 70s and 60s - TV wasn't a rival for film and cinema as it is today, but there was a shift towards more complex television, with more layered serialised onscreen stories and subplots outside of soaps. There was a desire in TV to make use of the extended timeline inherent to TV episodes and to have more multi-part episode sequences, which once you get into TNG a bit, becomes very very clear.
The Next Generation (as well as, to be honest, The Simpsons) is actually an excellent time capsule for the history and evolution of television, and as a continuation of and sequel to The Original Series, it also builds heavily on the philosophy of the original show, builds up the broader universe within the series and creates the foundation for the larger franchise that comes later, and matures a lot of the original thoughts TOS has.
The Next Generation has the same central premise as TOS - the new USS Enterprise is on a new mission, and it's doing the same thing its predecessor did. It's exploring new worlds and new civilisations with a planet of the week format, and when it's not doing exploration and helping people on non-Federation planets with stuff here and there, it's doing a lot of ambassador stuff, it's escorting transports, etc.
The Next Generation is set in the 2300s, and it regularly responds to and is in conversation with the events of The Original Series, as well as building a more complex picture of the world as TOS has presented itself to us.
TOS presents the boundaries of the United Federation of Planets, for example, as well as introducing the Romulan and Klingon Empires who are often in conflict with the UFoP, and various planets and peoples that are also part of the Federation, with their own cultures and politics.
The Next Generation's cast has more complex characters than TOS, and we get whole episode and multi-episode arcs that explore not just their personalities and responses to various situations, but also their own backstories and futures, as well as recurring characters outside of the main crew that we see develop over time.
The show is a lot more upfront about having its main cast have flaws and very obvious traumas, as well as just letting them have imperfect selves and relationships, and because of its multi-ep approach to these things, you get more of a sense of them as fully developed characters rather than having to read between-the-lines as you do with TOS.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a deeply autistic Frenchman possessed of a bunch of gravitas. Like Kirk, he is very educated and very well-read, as well as having fat tits for days - he also attracts a lot of female attention, but is a lot less comfortable with it than Kirk is. He's a horse girl. He doesn't like children and is really uncomfortable with them. He struggles a lot with sitting emotionally with accountability, and often philosophises to distance himself from it. He's played by Patrick Stewart, who at the time was considered a big Shakespearean powerhouse almost "too serious" an actor to be in a silly SF show, but he takes it as seriously as he does any other project, and it rocks.
First Officer William Riker, who is a brash and deeply sexy, charismatic freak of a man - when people think of James T. Kirk as a womaniser who's horny all the time, they would be a bit closer to the mark with Riker. He's slutty and he plays the saxophone, he doesn't just fuck loads of women but falls in love with all of them, he maybe values fun a little bit too highly.
Lieutenant Commander Data is an android, and he fills a similar role to Spock as an almost-outsider who is trying to better understand humanity - where Spock's Vulcan nature is unemotive, though, Data as an android lacks the capacity for emotion, and he is frequently working to better understand human nature and to experience as much as he can.
Counsellor Deanna Troi does not have a pseudo-military or naval rank like the other cast - she is a Betazoid, a species who have empathetic and lowkey telepathic abilities, and she serves as a cultural advisor as well as using her abilities to help tell if people are lying or deceiving the crew
Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is a blind man who wears a visor to let him "see", and he's very charismatic and I would say very emotional - he also falls in love quite easily and often does really well exploring deeper pain and empathy with other characters despite being an engineer and in that sphere of the ship. He and Data are best friends, and they do shit like dress up and LARP together.
There's Tasha Yar, who is the security officer at first, and she's really great - she's no-nonsense and traumatised as fuck, is a little brittle with her anger issues, she's a bit of a hedonist but intentionally keeps herself VERY buttoned up; she's replaced with Worf, who is a Klingon, an enemy species to the Federation, who was adopted by humans and raised on Earth, and he has similar issues with added racial politics as a Klingon. There's Beverly Crusher, who starts out as the CMO - she's great fun, and she has a "genius" son called Wesley who becomes a member of the crew very early on; later on Bev is replaced with Kate Pulaski, who is a McCoy-esque character - she's racist, she's mean, she's impatient, but there's a heart of gold under her ornery nature.
Then there's some other recurring characters - Miles O'Brien is an engineer, he's an Irishman who's big into being working class and a non-comm engineer even though those things theoretically don't exist; there's Q, who is a deranged ultra-powerful god-like alien who is obsessed with Picard and shows up a few times a season to sexually harass him; there's Ro Laren later on, who is a survivor of genocide and occupation on her home planet of Bajor, and as you can imagine has beef with Starfleet for not intervening more in the occupation she survived.
TNG basically delves way more into the realistic consequences and ramifications of that world - it has a lot more episodes that seriously explore and discuss what a border looks like and how it can be enforced or how it should be, what politics and non-violent conflict resolution might look like between planets within this federation as well as planets and peoples outside of it.
All of the characters I mentioned have their own complex arcs across loads of episodes, and there's plenty more characters I haven't mentioned - multi-episode arcs explore different conflicts and wars between Starfleet and the Klingons and then the Cardassian Empire, corruption within Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, etc. As well as explicitly multi-part episode arcs, the show also has more plotlines that develop over time and that you see small details of.
The show discusses, criticises, and reckons with the impact not just of straightforward abuses and wide scale harms like, for example, war crimes and genocides and bigotry, but also the immediate aftermath of them - we see complex multi-episode story lines that explore things like the edges of a demilitarized zone and its borders, imperial and colonising actions by other federations and empires, refugees and where and how to help them, and a lot more stuff like statecraft and national identity, the limits of "post-scarcity".
I think that TNG feels a lot more accessible as a TV show for viewers that aren't familiar with retro TV - it's still 50 years old, but serialised television in the 80s bears a lot more similarity to serialised TV of the 00s and 10s, and while it has its silly and goofy moments, like any sci-fi show, I think it's a lot easier for a new viewer to sit with and take seriously, without having to do as much of a mental process of suspending your disbelief and kind of taking the show as it's intended.
My partner absolutely cannot abide TOS, for example, and genuinely finds it a little painful to watch, whereas he can sit through episodes of TNG or Deep Space Nine, which begins branching off The Original Series midway through, and explores a space station over Bajor, which has just thrown off the shackles of Cardassian occupation.
TOS you can just watch all the way through, because the movies came out later - after the latter half of TNG is where DS9 branches off, where the movies come into it, where there's other complex tie-ins movie- and comic-wise particularly, but you'll know it's coming when the show starts doing really complex plots about the Cardassians and the Borg respectively.
Star Trek: Voyager branched off of DS9 like DS9 branched off of TNG, and it's basically a Lost In Space format - the ship ends up getting slingshotted across the universe and into completely unexplored and uncharted space, far away from the UFoP, and it's all about the crew dealing with the internal power vacuum and what things they keep or not without actually being in contact with Starfleet.
I don't think DS9 and VOY are good places to start, but they're all part of the same timeline and have character crossover with TNG.
If neither TOS nor TNG feel accessible to you, Star Trek: Discovery basically tried to be to TNG what TNG was to TOS.
I personally do not think it's that good - it's okay, and it definitely feels more like Star Trek than some of the other newer series, but in its desire to make itself more franchisable and merchandisable, I feel that it weakens a lot of the interesting anti-colonial work we see in DS9 particularly, and it's also just, you know.
It tries to modernise various alien designs, but it fucks up pretty hard, in my opinion, and its take on Klingons was particularly cringe. I also hate the Mirrorverse, which is an "evil" parallel universe to the main universe, and it goes pretty hard on it.
But while I take issue with a lot of its core philosophy and weaker writing, it was an attempt to make Star Trek accessible to a completely new audience, and I think that it does accomplish that if you don't want to go back and start with TOS and TNG.
The other "original" Trek, before the 2009 movie and Discovery, was Enterprise, which came out basically right after 9/11, and is Star Trek with an American Republican at the helm and with lots of American Republican sensibilities - it's quite rapey, quite racist, very anti-immigrant, quite anxious about asserting white American cultural supremacy, etc. It is a prequel to TOS, and is not somewhere I'd recommend starting - I wouldn't watch it basically until after you've exhausted all of the good original Star Trek series.
There's then other new series - I hear good things about Prodigy, which is a cute kid's show with some of the characters from Voyager; there's Picard, which has characters from TNG and VOY, and is, uh... Well. They sure did make it, and I'm glad that the actors got paid.
Strange New World is another much newer prequel, has some of the characters from TOS, I'm not personally into it, but it doesn't seem as bad as Discovery; there's also Lower Decks, which is actually good, it's an adult animation that basically focuses on junior crew who are doing the nitty-gritty shit rather than the officers, and explores, with humour, the inherent class-like structure on a pseudo-naval vessel.
As well as all the TV and movies, there's ten million comics and books and videogames and RPGs that tie-in or crossover with most of the plotlines and characters.
I genuinely believe that there is something in the Star Trek universe for basically everybody, so long as you can find the angle that suits you and the right characters and plotlines to get into.
Sorry about such a MASSIVE wall of text, but I hope this includes useful data points for where to start between The Original Series or The Next Generation, depending on which suits you better, or to guide you to choosing another angle if neither of them suits.
