Updated: August 24, 2023

Star Trek: The Next Generation ( abbreviated as TNG and ST:TNG ) is an American science-fiction television series in the Star Trek franchise created by Gene Roddenberry that ran from 1987 to 1994. Roddenberry, Maurice Hurley, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor served as executive producers at different times throughout its production.

The show was very popular reaching almost 12 million viewers in its 5th season and the season seven finale in 1994 was watched by over 30 million viewers. The show spawned two reasonably popular spin-offs set in the same sci-fi universe time and place, and 4 theater films with the cast of the show. In the early 2000s the show Enterprise, although more oriented towards re-booting the series was also in the same fictional universe, but an earlier time.

The series involves a starship named Enterprise and is set in the nearby regions of the Milky Way galaxy, the Alpha Quadrant. The first episode takes place in the year 2364, 99 years after the start of the five-year mission described in the original series, which began in 2265.

It features a new cast and a new starship Enterprise, the fifth to bear the name within the franchise's storyline. An introductory statement, performed by Patrick Stewart and featured at the beginning of each episode's title sequence, stated the starship's purpose in language similar to the opening statement of The Original Series, but was updated to reflect an ongoing mission, and to be gender-neutral:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. TNG premiered the week of September 28, 1987, drawing 27 million viewers, with the two-hour pilot "Encounter at Farpoint". In total, 176 episodes were made ( including several two-parters ), ending with the two-hour finale "All Good Things..." the week of May 23, 1994.

The series (1987 94) was broadcast in first-run syndication with dates and times varying among individual television stations. Further Star Trek spin-offs followed The Next Generation: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993 99), Star Trek: Voyager ( 1995-2001 ), Star Trek: Enterprise ( 2001-2005 ), and Star Trek: Discovery ( 2017 present ). The series formed the basis for the seventh through the tenth of the Star Trek films, and is also the setting of numerous novels, comic books, and video games.

In its seventh season, Star Trek: The Next Generation became the first and only syndicated television series to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. The series received a number of accolades, including 19 Emmy Awards, two Hugo Awards, five Saturn Awards, and "The Big Goodbye" ( S1E12 ) won a Peabody Award. Some of the highest rated shows by Nielsen ratings were the pilot, the finale, Unification ( Diology ), Aquiel, A Matter of Time, and Relics. Unification included the classic characters Spock and his father Sarek, and Relics includes Scotty. Other famous episodes include the Best of Both Worlds diology, Inner Light, and The Measure of Man, which was released in an extended version in 2012 in 1080p