I Canceled Paramount+ Before It Was Cool

Colbert fans, welcome to the club.

I am missing the current season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This makes me a little sad, not only because I enjoyed the first two seasons, but because up until recently, I was a Star Trek completist. I watched every episode of every show, and all of the movies, up until my spouse and I canceled our subscription to Paramount+ earlier this year.

I convinced my spouse to cancel because Paramount rolled back their DEI initiatives to curry favor with the Trump administration. As a private company, Paramount was under no legal obligation to comply with the mandates of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. It was particularly sad and ironic as the flagship franchise of the network, Star Trek, has always celebrated diversity, increasingly so in recent years with the inclusion of openly queer and trans characters as main cast members.

As shows from the Star Trek franchise were the only programs we watched regularly on Paramount+ — and the entire reason we subscribed to that service, back when it was named CBS All Access — it wasn’t as great a loss to our streaming selection as when we canceled Disney+ last year. It helped that the last new film we watched on Paramount+, Star Trek: Section 31, was absolutely dreadful.