Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's also the only of the four most recent Treks (I'm counting The Orville) that's decent.
The trailers made it look terrible, but it's actually pretty OK.
The Orville's the second-best—holy crap, alien cultures with values that aren't what humans want to see and who don't immediately drop them when confronted with a starship captain! If only real Trek could be so bold, more often—but the mostly-bad attempts at humor drag it down and MacFarlane probably shouldn't have starred.
Do they love Star Trek, or are they just skilled at poking fun at the silly previously unacknowledged parts of the Star Trek universe? For example, the holodeck cum filters joke.
I like the show so-so, but I feel like the non-humorous writing is a bit lazy.
Tangential:
Have you noticed in the new Star Wars movies, where a character will quote a line from a previous movie in an attempted nod to fans who eat up that sort of stuff. For me, it elicits an eye-roll, like when my dad keeps recycling the same corny jokes.
Picard and Discovery are...pretty bad, but Lower Decks has a lot of people that truly love Star Trek on it and it shines through in the sheer attention to detail and jokes delivered in every episode
