Strange New Worlds picks up as a spin-off of Discovery Season 2. If there’s one Nu Trek to watch, it’s this.
Discovery and SNW are prequels to TOS. However, Season 1 of Disco is very weak with the exception of one or two episodes. Season 2 is much better and you can probably start here. Then go into S3 or SNW.
Season 3 is where I believe Discovery really shines. It also changes setting entirely. 4 is good too.
Lower Decks takes places shortly after/around DS9/Voy era. So if you’re familiar with 90’s trek, this show is basically like home cooking. You can watch it anytime.
Picard Season 1 and 2 are bad. But if you think of it as non-canon Fan Fiction written by Patrick Stewart, it’s just kinda fun. Season 3 is the final season and is basically the show everyone actually wanted. It’s an epilogue to TNG. There’s a few references to Season 1 and 2, but you can Google the small gaps. You can watch it anytime.
Also, watch The Orville. It’s a love letter to Star Trek, has Trek writers, producers and actors. It’s starts as a dumb comedy that didn’t really know what it’s doing, but by episode 3 they start to find their footing.
Season 2 and 3 and pretty much perfect and IMO as good as the best of Trek. The show gets more serious and the humor takes a backseat to the human element.
There’s also Prodigy, which doesn’t run concurrent to Lower Decks or Picard. It takes place a year or two after Lower Decks, meaning Lower Decks may catch up with it. Some of the flashbacks in Picard take place at about the same time as Prodigy, though the main show is a few years later.
There’s isn’t any plot overlap between Prodigy and the other two post-Voyager shows. It takes a few episodes to get going, but once it finds its footing, it’s worth it.
I think whether or not DIS is mandatory for SNW depends on your classic knowledge - i bailed on it very early on, had zero issues picking up SNW - but i'm also a fourth gen trek nerd so, yannow, pike's fate is very well known to me. The addons i picked up as i went.
Without that knowledge though i could see where someone would be utterly lost on SNW
Note: if you skip the first couple of seasons of TNG, what you gain in consistency you lose in scenes of dudes in mini-dresses, so swings and roundabouts really.
C'mon mate that's quitter talk, making the mess make sense is half the fun of startrek continuity. Plus as time has gone on and the teams involved have gained hands on experience making trek the contributions have progressively gotten more constructive with the continuity rather than combative.
It doesn't really matter all that much since the shows are spread all over the timeline. There is one exception though: Strange New Worlds is a direct spinoff of Discovery. So you should watch that first. (It's also the show that takes the longest to figure itself out, maybe with the exception of Picard, so it for the most part only goes up from there)
What do you consider to be "NuTrek"?
One issue with the more-recent shows is that they don't have a lot of continuity, to the extent that they would seem to implicitly contradict each-other (and themselves, between seasons)
with that in mind, there's no good "viewing order", as they don't seem to take place in the same world
One issue with the more-recent shows is that they don’t have a lot of continuity, to the extent that they would seem to implicitly contradict each-other (and themselves, between seasons)
I may not be the OP, but the Klingons from DIS Seasons 1 and 2 are a lot different than SNW Season 2. SNW's look straight up like TNG's Klingons, while DIS looks like something from a fan remake, although there are some explanations that could explain it, but this isn't Daystrom so I'll save them.
As far as Discovery and forward go, I'd honestly recommend order of release. I'm not going to feed you any "don't watch this, do watch that", I just want to say that various bits of lore are introduced in some series, are then referenced in later episodes of other series. All of the series are making references to each other now. So, I think you get the most of the lore references, if you watch them in release order.
That said, it probably doesn't really matter -- Most of the recent series are in distinctly different places and/or times. Discovery and SNW are the closest (to start) in time and space, and Discovery S2 directly feeds to SNW. Prodigy and Lower Decks are in a similar time space, but very far apart in the galaxy, and Picard starts the farthest ahead in the timeline, though Discovery will overtake it, and Picard also has flashbacks that take place probably close to the time of Lower Decks or Prodigy.
Soooooooooo... overall, probably doesn't matter, but in my opinion, you get the most benefit of lore knowledge in release order.