Are you ready to go back to school? The cast of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy are. Entertainment Weekly unveiled photos for the upcoming Paramount+ series, set to be the next installment in the Star Trek universe. Fans get their first glimpse at cast members Holly Hunter, Paul Giamatti, Robert Picardo, Tatiana Maslany, and more. Fans are also learning more about the upcoming series. Bigger plans, per Entertainment Weekly, are being kept under wraps until the Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic Con on Saturday. The series will premiere sometime in 2026 and showrunner Alex Kurtzman tells Entertainment Weekly why telling a story about the next generation (no pun intended) of Starfleet officers was so important now:

“Our children are facing a lot of challenges right now and they are our hope for the future.”

What Else Do We Know About ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’?

The series is set in the 32nd Century with the first Starfleet cadet class in more than 120 years. Kurtzman says for the cadets in this next installment, “they’ve got a lot riding on their shoulders, and they are meant to reestablish and rebuild everything that we all know and love about Star Trek.” He says, “they convey hope and they search for hope, and that felt like an extremely relevant message to talk about now.” So yes, while it’s exciting to see the bigger names being introduced into the world of Trek, like Giamatti, like Hunter, like Maslany or returning like Picardo, like Tig Notaro, for Kurtzman it’s the “coming of age” story for the burgeoning cadets.

“It’s wish fulfillment. Every week it’s about a new part of coming of age. One week that can be a prank, war erupts another week, a romance begins another week, we encounter an alien species for the first time and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing [another week]. But at the end of every episode, what we want our audience to feel is, ‘I want to go to Starfleet Academy.’ Even in the deepest, darkest depths of character problems and drama, you get such a good feeling from watching this show [of] how much you want to be there so badly.”

With Kurtzman making it sound part teens drama and part Star Trek, Starfleet Academy most certainly looks to bring something new to world of Trek. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres next year on Paramount+.

via Collider