I just finished the second season of Lower Decks, the animated Star Trek show that focuses primarily on four junior officers on one of Starfleet's least prestigious ships.
Kind of like the recent Harley Quinn show, Lower Decks is animated, and irreverent... to a point. The art style here is similar to Rick & Morty (I believe one of the showrunners is a Rick & Morty veteran,) and the show is emphatically comedic.
But it's not cynical. While the characters are bigger messes than one tends to see on Star Trek shows, ultimately this is a Star Trek nerd's show. And boy howdy does it pile on the fanservice. The ensigns (and even the senior officers) that make up the main cast are basically Star Trek nerds who know everything about the shows we've seen. There are also cameos from plenty of old school Star Trek characters, voiced by their original actors. Jonathan Frakes shows up as Riker (unsurprising as he's remained tied to Star Trek, directing episodes and popping up here and there since Next Gen,) and we get Robert Duncan McNeil showing up at one point as Tom Paris. Even Lycia Naff returns as Captain Sonya Gomez, who we met as an ensign on Next Generation, awkwardly spilling hot chocolate on Picard.
The references here are dense. But in a way, if any fandom is going to be excited to see that the writers really did their homework, I think Trekkies (or Trekker, or whatever nomenclature you prefer) are the ones.
Of course, the entire series is a reference to a quite good episode of Next Gen, called The Lower Decks, where we followed a group of ensigns on the Enterprise-D (an episode with a gut punch of an ending). Given that Star Trek's federation is supposed to be an egalitarian utopia, it is funny that our usual lens into that world focuses on the one aspect of that society that still has a rigid hierarchy, and traditionally we've only really followed the higher-ups on any given ship. Furthermore, we tend to focus on the flagship, or some elite crew that's doing the most important stuff for the Federation.
So, Lower Decks introduces us to the Cerritos, a California-class ship whose primary job is "second contact." Rather than being the first aliens a civilization sees, they basically go to check in on the places Starfleet has discovered and make sure everything's still working out ok. The ship's mission is, itself, the unglamorous work that our ensigns are assigned to in macrocosm.
The ensigns are Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford.
Mariner, played by Tawny Newsome, is terminally insubordinate and reckless, and has apparently been promoted and demoted multiple times. She has a certain disdain for the very idea of senior officers, and we soon discover that the reason for this might be because her parents are both high-ranking officers. Her father is an admiral, and her mother is, in fact, the captain of the Cerritos, Carol Freeman.
Boimler, played by Jack Quaid, in classic contrast, is the pathologically rules-abiding, ambitious rank-seeker. Desperate to prove himself, his sycophancy is offset by his genuine belief in Starfleet, an admiration that the show, despite its nitpicking and parody, shares.
Tendi, played by Noël Wells, is the newcomer to the ship, and new to Starfleet, and is filled with enthusiasm and a desperate need for people to like her. As an Orion (the green people), she completely flips the stereotype. Far from manipulative, she's guileless.
Rutherford, played by Eugene Cordero, is an engineer who has a cybernetic implant, and is socially clueless but has a very positive attitude.
What's fun about the show is that you get that reference-heavy parody about everything from prank-calling Armus to the apparent franchising of Quark's bar to the presence of aliens like Mugatos, but you also tend to get some enjoyable classically Star Trek stories along the way.
Very much like the recent Strange New Worlds (that is both spin-off to Discovery, prequel to the original series, and arguably the actual greenlighting of the original Star Trek pilot,) the show allows stories to be fun and done, with light serialization.
It's honestly a lot of fun.
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