#I’m sure someone somewhere has figured out where to place Voyager/Enterprise/all of the other shows in the viewing order

[smol-blue-bird]

Getting into Star Trek because I think it would be good for me, should I start with DS9 or TOS?

Honestly, I’d recommend starting with either TOS or TNG!

I love, love, love TOS, but it’s very much a product of its time, so you kind of have to go in prepared for hokey special effects and weird 60s morals (which isn’t to say it wasn’t progressive for its time—it very much was—but still. It was made 50+ years ago.) If you like old TV like The Twilight Zone, you’d probably like TOS a lot, but it’s not necessarily super representative of Star Trek in its entirety. But it is iconic for a reason, so I definitely recommend watching it at some point even if it’s not the first thing you see!

TNG is a little more modern (but still a product of the late 80s/early 90s, lol), and a lot of people view it as the definitive Star Trek show—it introduced loads of concepts and characters that are now considered staples of the franchise, and it references TOS sometimes, but it’s a good intro to Star Trek on its own. Its first season is kinda shaky (mostly because it used a lot of old scripts meant for TOS, and some of them didn’t fit the new characters/setting all that well), but it gets really, really good by like, season 3 at the latest, so you just kinda have to give it time. Both TNG and TOS have the classic, episodic, optimistic-space-exploration Star Trek vibes that I adore, so imo, you can’t you wrong starting with either of them. (Also, Strange New Worlds—the newest show, set a little before TOS in the timeline—is very similar in tone to them both, so if you like either TOS/TNG, you’d probably enjoy that one, too.)

Oh, and!! DS9 is fantastic, but I actually wouldn’t recommend starting it until you’ve seen TNG. It’s not a sequel to TNG or anything, but it does reference some characters and storylines from TNG, so it might be kind of confusing to watch without that context. And a huge part of its appeal is the way it deconstructs existing Star Trek concepts, so you kind of have to know those concepts before you can really appreciate their deconstruction, you know? Idk if that makes any sense, but anyway! My recommended viewing order would be TOS/TNG, then DS9, and SNW at some point if you like the episodic space exploration stuff and you want a 2024 version of that.