Star Trek's first kid-friendly series 'Prodigy' lands second season renewal at Paramount+

Star Trek: Prodigy is officially a bold success at Paramount+.

The ViacomCBS-owned subscription platform has handed down the green light for a second season of the franchise's first kid-friendly series, just a little over a week after debuting on Oct. 28 with a special one-hour premiere. Developed for television by Kevin and Dan Hageman (the screenwriting duo behind 2019's big screen adaptation of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark), Prodigy takes place aboard the USS Protostar, a starship crewed by six young aliens searching the galaxy for a better future.

Brett Gray (Dal), Ella Purnell (Gwyn), Rylee Alazraqui (Rok-Tahk), Angus Imrie (Zero), Jason Mantzoukas (Jankom Pog), Dee Bradley Baker (Murf), John Noble (The Diviner), and Jimmi Simpson (Drednok) make up the central voice cast. Star Trek veteran Kate Mulgrew returns as a hologram version of her iconic Voyager character, Kathryn Janeway.

"Yes, it has, in essence, the ambition to tell this story from a kid's perspective and focus on this entry point for a brand-new generation of Trek fans," director, executive producer, and series creative lead Ben Hibon explained during the show's Comic-Con@Home panel over the summer. "But it was not designed just for kids. It's just designed for lovers of animation, for lovers of sci-fi. The ambition of the show is that kids should watch it with their parents and vice versa."

"We knew that people were gonna look at our show and go, 'Oh, this is the little brother or little sister of the Star Trek universe,'" added Dan Hageman. "We wanted to be that little brother or little sister that smacks the bigger sibling and says, 'Don't underestimate us.'"

A collaborative effort between Nickelodeon Animation Studio and CBS Studios’ Eye Animation Production, Star Trek: Prodigy is also executive-produced by the Hagemans, Alex Kurtzman (mastermind behind the current slate of Trek programming), Heather Kadin, Aaron Baiers, Katie Krentz, Rod Roddenberry (son of Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry), and Trevor Roth.

"When this was proposed to me sometime ago, after a moment's deliberation, I thought, 'What could be better than possibly handing this to the next generation? To a demographic that heretofore has not known anything about Star Trek?'" Mulgrew also said at the second virtual edition of SDCC. "The beauty of it; the philosophy of it; the depth of it; the hope and the promise of it. If there's any age group that's going to take this thing and embrace it with a whole-heartedness not seen before, it's the young kids."

New episodes premiere on Paramount+ every Thursday with a mid-season hiatus starting on Nov. 18. The remaining five episodes of Season 1 will start to roll out beginning Jan. 6.