Star Trek turns 60 on 8 September 2026, six decades to the day since "The Man Trap" first aired on NBC. In that time it has produced 13 feature films, twelve television series and a 79-episode original run that was cancelled after three seasons and then never went away. That footprint is why it keeps showing up on lists that have nothing to do with each other: prestige television, film sequels, film scores, spaceship design, actors' filmographies.
Below it appears in 16 rankings — some where it has a real claim to the top, some where it is one small name among giants, and two where the honest answer is unflattering.
Star Trek is treated as the greatest television ever made and as a second-tier movie franchise at the same time. Which one you get depends entirely on which list you opened.
The biggest list there is
"What is the best TV show ever?" is the broadest question on this site — 64 shows, every genre, no era limit. Star Trek's entry is The Next Generation, which ran 178 episodes between 1987 and 1994.
It is a strange fit and a completely defensible one. The competition here is Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire — serialised prestige drama, mostly post-2000, mostly about morally compromised men.
The Next Generation is none of that. It is an episodic syndicated show with a bald diplomat as its lead, and it argued weekly about ethics rather than showing consequences.
What it has instead is reach. It is the entry a general audience recognises without ever having watched a full season, which is exactly the quality this kind of list rewards.
Filed as a film series instead
Move Star Trek onto a list of movie franchises and its position changes immediately. This ranking holds 32 of them, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to James Bond.
Star Trek has 13 films, which is more than most franchises here ever manage. Bond is the only entry with a longer continuous run on screen.
The problem is that the films were always the side project. Trek built its audience on television, and the movies were made for people who already knew who these characters were — The Wrath of Khan is a sequel to a 1967 episode, and it assumes you remember it.
Star Wars, sitting right next to it, was built the other way round: a film first, everything else afterwards. That difference is most of the gap between them on a list like this.
Narrow it to science fiction and it multiplies
Restrict the field to sci-fi television and something odd happens: Star Trek stops being one entry and becomes three. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and The Original Series all make this 16-show list independently.
No other property does that here. Doctor Who appears once despite running since 1963, because it is treated as a single continuous show rather than separate series.
The rivals are strong. Battlestar Galactica (2004) is the show critics reach for when they want to argue that sci-fi television grew up, and The Twilight Zone invented most of the grammar everything else uses.
Three entries out of sixteen is also a fair measure of how much shelf space one franchise occupies in its own genre.
The argument Trek fans have with each other
Take the outside world away entirely and rank the eleven Star Trek series against each other. This is the franchise's oldest internal argument and it has never been settled.
The Next Generation is the popular answer — the show that proved Trek could work without Kirk and Spock, and the one that ran longest in first-run syndication.
Deep Space Nine is the critics' answer. It ran from 1993 to 1999, stayed in one place instead of exploring, and told a serialised war story years before serialised television was normal. Its ratings never matched The Next Generation's, and its reputation has risen further since it ended than any other Trek show's.
Then there is everything else: Voyager, Enterprise, the animated comedy Lower Decks, and a 1973 cartoon that spent decades outside canon.
All thirteen films, side by side
Star Trek's film run splits cleanly into three eras: six with the original cast between 1979 and 1991, four with the Next Generation cast, and three rebooted entries from 2009 onwards.
The 1982 sequel The Wrath of Khan is the consensus peak. Nicholas Meyer directed it as a naval story rather than a science-fiction one, and its ending killed off Spock — a decision the next two films spent their runtime undoing.
First Contact (1996) is the other film with real defenders. Jonathan Frakes directed it while also playing Riker in it, and it is the best-reviewed of the four Next Generation movies.
The rest range from the well-liked comedy of The Voyage Home to entries the fandom treats as cautionary tales.
The one film category Trek can actually win
Sci-fi sequels are the narrowest useful film category Star Trek belongs to, and the one where it has a genuine case for the top.
The Wrath of Khan is on almost every serious list of the form. It took a franchise that had just produced a slow, expensive 1979 debut and turned it into a tight revenge picture about ageing, made for a fraction of the first film's budget.
The Empire Strikes Back is the obstacle, and it is a large one. Released two years earlier, it is the sequel most often named the best film in any franchise.
Behind those two sit Aliens, Terminator 2 and Blade Runner 2049 — a category with an unusually high ceiling, which is why placing well in it means something.
Same film, different decade-shaped question
Keep The Wrath of Khan and change only the frame — from "best sequel" to "best sci-fi film of the 1980s" — and the company gets much harder.
The 1980s were the densest decade science fiction cinema has had. Blade Runner, The Terminator, E.T., Aliens, The Thing, RoboCop, Akira and Back to the Future all arrived inside eight years.
Against that, a 1982 sequel built on a television episode is a specialist pick. Its strengths — Ricardo Montalbán's performance, the submarine-battle staging, the cost of Spock's death — reward viewers who already know the characters.
The films above it mostly need nothing from the viewer at all, and that is usually what decides a decade list.
Reduced to a silhouette
This ranking is not about a show or a film. It is about 16 fictional spacecraft, judged as objects.
The USS Enterprise is the reason most of the others look the way they do. Matt Jefferies designed it in 1964 with a deliberate rule — no visible engines, no fins, nothing that looked like a rocket — and the saucer-and-nacelles arrangement became the default shape for "starship" across the next sixty years.
The Millennium Falcon is the counter-argument, and a strong one. It is the ship people draw from memory, and it works precisely by breaking every rule the Enterprise established.
The rest of the field is more varied than the category sounds: a police box, a moon-sized weapon, a towing vessel and a Futurama delivery van.
Ten captains, one chair
Every Star Trek series is built around whoever is in command, so ranking the captains is close to ranking the shows themselves — with the personalities pulled out front.
Jean-Luc Picard is the reference point. Patrick Stewart played him across seven television seasons, four films and a further three-season revival that ended in 2023, which is more screen time than any other Trek lead has had.
James T. Kirk is the original, and the one everyone else is defined against. William Shatner played him for three seasons and seven films, and the impulsive-captain stereotype attached to him mostly comes from parody rather than the episodes.
The list also holds Benjamin Sisko, who spent his series fighting a war rather than exploring, Kathryn Janeway, stranded 70,000 light years from home, and Christopher Pike, currently on screen in Strange New Worlds.
Trek's villain, on a list of monsters
A ranking of the greatest sci-fi movie villains is not somewhere an optimistic franchise about diplomacy expects to do well. Star Trek's entry is Khan Noonien Singh.
Khan is unusual among the names here because he barely exists on film. Ricardo Montalbán played him in one 1967 television episode, "Space Seed", and then once more fifteen years later in The Wrath of Khan — two performances, total.
That is the whole case, and it is a real one. Khan is a villain built from grievance and Melville quotations rather than menace, and he never shares a scene with Kirk in the film.
The company is brutal: Darth Vader, the Xenomorph, HAL 9000, Agent Smith, Roy Batty. These are the field's permanent fixtures, and most of them carry entire films.
A list about teachers, and a starship captain qualifies
Here is a ranking with no science fiction in its premise at all: the best mentor characters in television. Star Trek's entry is Jean-Luc Picard again, in a completely different capacity.
Picard fits because The Next Generation was structurally a workplace show about people learning their jobs. Wesley Crusher, Data and Worf all had arcs that consisted of Picard explaining something to them, usually at length.
Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender is the other name that always appears on these lists, and he is the harder act to follow — a mentor whose lessons arrive as tea metaphors rather than lectures.
Mr. Feeny, Ted Lasso and Rupert Giles round out a category that has nothing to do with genre and everything to do with tone.
Sixty seconds of music
Judge Star Trek on its theme tune and the franchise shrinks to one piece of 1966 orchestration. Alexander Courage wrote it: a rising fanfare, strings, and a wordless soprano line that no other television theme has tried to copy since.
There is a well-known piece of music-business history attached to it. Gene Roddenberry later wrote lyrics for the theme — never intended to be sung — purely so that he could claim half the royalties, which halved Courage's income from his own composition.
The competition is entirely different in kind. Cheers is regularly voted the greatest theme in television history, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is the one people can recite from memory.
A wordless fanfare is a harder sell than a chorus, whatever its pedigree.
One credit in a composer's career
This ranking belongs to Jerry Goldsmith, not to Star Trek. Goldsmith scored more than 200 films across five decades, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) is one line on that list.
It is the line with the longest afterlife. The main theme Goldsmith wrote for that film was reused eight years later as the opening title music for The Next Generation, so a 1979 movie score became the sound of Star Trek for a generation that never saw the movie.
The competition inside his own catalogue is severe: Chinatown, Planet of the Apes, Alien, The Omen and L.A. Confidential.
Filed under someone else's career, a franchise that dominates its own lists becomes one entry among thirteen.
Still on a list about this year
Most of this article is history. This ranking is not: it covers television broadcast in 2026, and Star Trek is on it.
The entry is Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premiered on Paramount+ on 15 January 2026 with Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti in its lead roles. It is the franchise's first attempt at a young-adult Trek series, set at the academy rather than on a ship.
It is not the only Trek airing right now either. Strange New Worlds returned for its fourth season on 23 July 2026, running weekly to a finale on 24 September, and a shortened six-episode fifth season will close it out.
The competition is the current prestige slate — Severance, The Bear, House of the Dragon — and a franchise this old is the underdog in that room.
Someone else's filmography
On this ranking Star Trek is not the subject at all. The subject is Benedict Cumberbatch, and Trek is one of fourteen roles competing for attention.
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) cast him as a reimagined Khan, a piece of casting the film denied publicly for months before release. It remains one of the franchise's most argued-over decisions — a British actor playing a character originally written as Sikh, in a role Ricardo Montalbán had made his own.
The rest of the list is where Cumberbatch built his reputation: Sherlock, The Imitation Game, The Power of the Dog, 12 Years a Slave.
A blockbuster villain turn is a hard sell against those, and this is the clearest example in the article of the franchise appearing on a list it does not control.
Invert the question and Trek qualifies twice
The honest way to finish is with a list nobody wants to be on. This ranking asks which sci-fi sequel disappointed hardest, and Star Trek supplies two of the fourteen entries.
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) is the serious one. It lost money, it was the lowest-grossing Trek film to that point, and it ended the Next Generation cast's run on film — the franchise did not return to cinemas for seven years, and when it did it was as a reboot with new actors.
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) is the other. William Shatner directed it, the plot involved meeting God at the centre of the galaxy, and it is the entry the original cast's own members were least willing to defend.
The competition includes Highlander II, Terminator: Genisys and Alien: Resurrection — which is at least good company for a bad list.
Sixty years, no fixed category
Greatest television ever made, or a film series that never quite worked? Both answers are in this article, and neither of them is wrong — they are answers to different questions.
That is what sixty years of output does to a thing. Star Trek has been on air long enough to be a prestige drama, a movie franchise, a design language, a composer's footnote and a 2026 streaming release, and each of those lists measures something the others ignore.
It's the same trick behind every ranking here — judging things two at a time.
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More rankings, more angles
- Star Wars: 16 Lists, 16 Different Answers — the other space franchise, measured the same way
- The Lord of the Rings Changes Category From List to List — one story, filed under books, films and scores
- 16 Rankings, One Batman — a character who has outlasted almost as many decades