In the same way the upcoming
Star Fleet Academy could be thought of/seen as
Star Trek Discovery Season 6?
So yeah, there appears to be a precedent for things like this in the Kurtzman Trek era.
Hmmm no I don't think so really.
Starfleet Academy is clearly a spin-off. It has a distinct new location, a new main cast, and only a few characters carried over from Discovery. It’s not the same show at all. The focus is different—centered on younger characters and aimed at a different demographic—which opens up the potential for entirely new types of stories.
Star Trek: Year One, on the other hand, is very much a continuation of SNW. It picks up after the five-year mission, once Pike’s era (aka the interesting USP bit of the SNW concept) has been fully explored. The creators have even mentioned reusing the same sets and continuing with much of the same main cast. In essence, it’s SNW Season 6, still set on the Enterprise (NCC-1701), and still pre-TOS.
And we already know where this story leads: it transitions into TOS. The scope is clearly very much narrower than SFA.
SFA, despite being a spin-off from Discovery, has far more room to explore new territory. It’s not just “more Discovery”—at least, it has the potential not to be. In contrast, Year One is more constrained.
That’s not to say Year One couldn’t feel fresh—if they change the tone, the characters, or the storytelling style, it could evolve. But with the same sets, same location, and mostly the same cast, it feels much more like a continuation than a new show. Plus, the post-Pike era has a limited window before we reach WNMHGB - how much can you really mine in that year or so story-wise?. It feels more like just carrying on from where SNW should be ending up anyway than a new show.
Meanwhile, the 32nd century setting of SFA offers much broader scope, especially with a new target audience, mostly new locations, and a largely new cast - as well as of course being set in an era we only got 3 seasons of DISCO to explore, which inherently has some more scope for freshness. I don't think its a fair comparison.
Now a one-off movie for Year 1 could be fun and make a lot more sense IMO if we want to tell that first year story - and relatively inexpensive for a TV movie as long as the cast cooperate and they keep hold of the sets long enough. That could be a way you could make it sufficiently new inherently just by shaking up the format into a feature length.