The curious case of the Star Trek show that went missing

Imagine you are a streaming service, but you’re not one of the giants in the field. The only two intellectual properties you possess that have made any waves in the culture are Star Trek and westerns penned by Taylor Sheridan. You frequently and loudly advertise yourself as the “streaming home of Star Trek”.

Wouldn’t you prefer to actually show all of Star Trek and not hold any series back? Customers are generally happier when they receive what they paid for, and if you were anything like me, the incompleteness of providing 12 out of 13 series would drive you a little up the wall with O.C.D.

This wouldn’t be a mystery if, say, the missing series were difficult to obtain. The history of television is littered with lost media—back in the day, the high cost of videotape (and their sheer physical bulk that would fill up warehouses) meant that already-broadcast episodes were often taped over (and tape was even sometimes burned). A whopping 95 episodes remain missing today from Doctor Who (the longest running sci-fi show in television history (1963-2025), followed by The Twilight Zone (1959-2020), Ultraman (1966-ongoing), and then Star Trek (1966-ongoing, behind Ultraman by only a few months)).

But this missing Star Trek series ran from 2021 to 2024. Paramount has all the episodes, and currently possesses all the rights. To my knowledge, there are no legal or physical barriers to Paramount streaming this series—yet they are choosing not to. And they’ve been choosing not to since January 1, 2026 (or earlier, depending on how you count).

Neither is the series notably offensive or controversial (at least as of this writing). It was generally well received by critics, and though it didn’t land for some fans, there are who loved it. I started this post after my dad lamented to me its absence on Paramount+, sharing how he’d enjoyed it more than other recent Star Trek offerings (such as the latest season of Strange New Worlds, which I’ve seen described as neither Strange nor New nor particularly world-spanning).

Star Trek: Prodigy is a family animation about young aliens who discover an abandoned starship and, under the guidance of a holographic artificially intelligent Captain Janeway, do the whole coming-of-age thing. Kate Mulgrew, Wil Wheaton, and Robert Picardo reprise popular roles from previous series, joined by a variety of beloved B-list newcomers. I mention this on the off chance your reaction might end up similar to mine: “I can’t believe Ella Purnell, Jameela Jamil, Jason Alexander and Daveed Diggs were all on a Star Trek show I only realized existed two weeks ago.”

Here’s the timeline of Prodigy’s odd lifespan:

1. Oct 28, 2021: Season 1 premiered on Paramount.
2. Jun 23, 2023: Paramount announced Prodigy’s removal.
3. Jun 26, 2023: Prodigy was removed.
4. Oct 11, 2023: Netflix is announced as the new home for Prodigy.
5. Dec 25, 2023: Netflix starts streaming Prodigy.
6. Jul 1, 2024: Season 2 premiered on Netflix.
7. Jun 24, 2025: Netflix removed Season 1.
8. Jan 1, 2026: Netflix removed Season 2

Notably you have Paramount announcing Prodigy’s removal while its second season was still in production, and you have Netflix removing the two seasons on a staggered schedule as the disparate rights expired and reverted to Paramount.

This isn’t a unique story. Back in the mid aughts, Westworld was HBO’s biggest show to rival their flagship Game of Thrones. Originally planned for (at least?) five seasons, Westworld was canceled after the release of its fourth season in 2022. In December of that same year, its removal from HBO was announced, then a week later executed; in 2023 it became available on Tubi and Roku, which expired earlier this year. It has yet to return to HBO.

Any attempt to explain this behavior should undoubtedly start with money. Paramount and HBO obviously care more about their bottom lines than about consistency or truth in advertising. Most of the existing subscriber base interested in a show will have watched it after given enough years. Other services are likely to have many more interested subscribers. If Tubi/Roku stand to gain more money from acquiring Westworld than HBO would stand to lose from forfeiting the offering, that opens the door for mutually beneficial trade.

Except that doesn’t explain why they wouldn’t return the shows to their own catalogues the very moment the deals expire.

In the case of HBO, the upcoming Westworld movie might be the key: Hold off on the show’s return; build up demand; make a big announcement about Westworld’s return to HBO, and thereby kick off the hype cycle for the new movie. This might plausibly work even when the new movie will purportedly share no continuity with the show (and might hew closer to Michael Crichton’s 1974 original).

But what of Prodigy? To the extent that I’ve been able to research: There is no public information regarding any other deals with Netflix or other services, ongoing or in the works, that would incentivize Paramount to keep holding Prodigy in limbo.

The money part

Again, our story will start with money (though it won’t end there). In the case of reruns, DVD releases, and streaming, the money that gets paid out to original creators is called “residuals”. The residuals that Prodigy needs to pay out isn’t public information, but we can guesstimate the cost by understanding how residuals work.

The SAG-AFTRA union defines a formula that considers an actor’s original compensation (up to $3,128 per episode; anything more than that is ignored), the streaming service’s subscriber count, and the age of the show.

Prodigy had 40 episodes. Let’s say Jason Mantzoukas, its top-billing actor, was originally paid $5,000 per each of those episodes. That $5k gets capped by the $3,128/ep limit, which I’ll round down to an even $3k to make the math easier, and which would come out to a baseline of $120,000 to Mantzoukas for one year of Paramount streaming all 40 episodes.

Paramount’s subscriber count is over 83 million, which is considered “large” by the standards of SAG-AFTRA, which means that $120k baseline will get multiplied up 50% up to $180k.

However, this number then gets adjusted down based on the age of the show:

1. 45% on year 1
2. 40% on year 2
3. 35% on year 3
4. …5% on year 9
5. …1.5% on year 13 and every year after

(Although if Paramount keeps Prodigy off the air for a decade, it won’t be able to switch over to dirt cheap residuals; the “age” of the show is determined by how many years it’s been streamed.)

So for year 1, Mantzoukas might hypothetically get paid $81k versus $63k in year 3. Considering the cast as a whole and their number of appearances, we’re probably looking at something in the ballpark of a half million dollars for Paramount to resume streaming Prodigy in 2026.

Note that nowhere does this formula take into consideration a show’s actual popularity. Even if not a single Paramount subscriber watched the show, Paramount would still have to pay out the same residuals for making Prodigy available. Maybe half a million dollars is just too steep a cost for how few people are interested in watching Prodigy.

But making Prodigy again available would generate incalculable amounts of good will among Trekkies, and Paramount+ is on course to make $30 billion in revenue in 2026. Half a million is only 0.001667% of all that revenue. A tiny drop in the bucket. The Executive Vice President of Originals, Chris Parnell, is purportedly a major Star Trek fan. Why not just let Mantzoukas and his costars have their paychecks? Money makes the world go around, but pride and ego drive the actions of powerful men. Parnell joined a year ago, well after the decision had been made to sell Prodigy to Netflix. Wouldn’t it be a point of pride to return the Star Trek catalogue to its original, completionist glory?

Everyone has a boss

All explanations are equal, but some explanations are more equal than others.

“The big corporation wanted to save some money” is often an explanation that invites no follow-up questions. Everyone knows corporations are greedy! This idea might be more widely believed than other truisms like “politicians are greedy” or facts like heliocentrism.

This can be an oversimplification, however. Like with politicians being greedy—when and how exactly are they greedy? When do they actually vote along the lines their constituents would expect, and how often does that conflict with their greed? Corporations will do all sorts of underhanded or shortsighted tactics in order to save a buck, but other times they’ll waste billions upon billions on the metaverse or AI coding or they’ll close profitable studios and layoff high performers. Frugality is not a measure with which you can reliably predict the actions of companies.

Rather than trying to comprehend the mercurial and multifaceted whims of an amorphous, many-limbed corporation, imagine instead how an individual human responds to financial incentives.

Most people have some combination of rent, mortgages, auto loans, daycare, college funds, you name it. They need money, and moreover, they heavily express the preference for more money than they currently possess. While at work, that means acting in ways to impress your boss or your boss’s boss, always aiming for promotions or bonuses.

Say it’s 2023, and you’re in charge of the not-so-popular Star Trek: Prodigy. You feel confident that in the long run, Paramount will benefit from keeping Prodigy on its service. In fact, this isn’t just a confident prediction; you even have a crystal ball that can tell you the future—but no one can know you have this crystal ball, because no one would believe it. You have two options:

1. Keep Prodigy on Paramount. Its second season will grow its fandom, leading to popular third, fourth and fifth seasons and increased interest in Star Trek among families around the growth. Total profit to Paramount would amount to:
   1. 2023 - $1 million
   2. 2024 - $1 million
   3. 2025 - $1.5 million
   4. 2026 - $2 million
   5. 2027 - $3 million
   6. 2028 onwards - $5 million / year
2. Sell Prodigy to Netflix. This will entirely kill the show’s future growth. Total profits will amount to:
   1. 2023 - $5 million
   2. 2024 - zero
   3. 2025 - zero
   4. 2026 - zero
   5. 2027 and onward - $0.5 million / year

The gains from option (1), even when real, are hard to measure and harder to prove. Except in extremely obvious cases (like a subscriber who joins the day a season premieres and cancels the day of the finale), it can be basically impossible to attribute the reasons why someone might have chosen to renew their subscription, not renew, or not have joined in the first place.

Residuals, though, are easy to calculate. The revenue from a deal, likewise. Landing a $5 mil deal and might get you that promotion you’ve been angling for. If you instead keep the show on the network, it might be years before tangible benefits accrue—by which time you might not even still be working at the company.

Now let’s fast forward to 2026. Netflix isn’t willing to keep paying for Prodigy. You can choose to return the show to Paramount+, but you haven’t made any big deals this year, and you don’t want to have to justify to your boss the extra half million dollar expense with only ambiguous upsides. Better to hold off—what if another streaming service eventually becomes interested in striking a deal? Or Prodigy might turn out to have other uses. You have a colleague who’s dreaming about launching a special service tier for children’s animations in 2027. They could advertise the return of Prodigy and then owe you a favor.

Short-term incentives—defined as anything that might impact your compensation by the next promotion/bonus cycle, always a period of less than twelve months—reign supreme over the long-term. Sure, there may be exceptions to this rule—someone without a boss might disregard these incentives and simply do what they think is best, for instance—but in the corporate world, everyone has a boss. Even CEOs aren’t exempt, having to constantly impress board members and shareholders not only on a yearly basis but a quarterly one. And the strongest financial incentives are those that are easy to measure.

Fans might say, “Prodigy should be shown on Paramount; anything less than that is a disappointment; and this would even be in Paramount’s own best self interest.” And I don’t know if that’s true, but that could be true, and it won’t matter. Until a real Trekkie happens to slip into the right position of power and is willing to act against incentives, or those incentives happen to change, Star Trek: Prodigy won’t be returning to Paramount.

This is a day before Paramount integrated with SHOWTIME. I figure that’s a coincidence, but I mention it in case any readers are able to draw connections.

These numbers are not meant to be realistic, but hopefully they’re not too wildly off base. Wells Fargo estimated that Netflix paid about $81 per 1000 viewing hours in 2024. For 2024, that would mean about $5M for Blue Eye Samurai, $10M for Big Mouth, $12M for Rick and Morty, and $16M for Teen Titans Go!. If Prodigy had transformed into a household name, it probably wouldn’t have brought in Netflix numbers, but $5M isn’t unimaginable.