Star Trek's history is littered with attempts to get back to basics, starting with Voyager and its desire, after Deep Space Nine, to go back to the planet-of-the-week storylines we'd seen with the Original Series and the Next Generation. Enterprise was a further attempt, this time going back to before TOS, although it effectively killed off the franchise for a few years. The JJ Abrams movies were another attempt, complete with recasting and timeline shenanigans, but while those movies were popular, there didn't seem much appetite to bring Trek back to TV.
Discovery changed that, and while it wasn't exactly an attempt to get back to basics, that was clearly part of its remit. How else to explain the setting, a few years before TOS, or the various references to TOS characters and storylines? I've recorded my thoughts on the first two seasons of Disco elsewhere, so won't rehash them here. I've also shared my thoughts on Picard's first season, which was at least laudable for going forward in time, rather than back.
When Lower Decks was announced, though, I was pretty skeptical. It didn't strike me as a "back to basics" type show, but the idea of animated Trek comedy just worried me a bit. This is not unreasonable: Trek has always had trouble with comedy, with DS9's absolute worst episodes coming when they tried to mine the premise, especially around the Ferengi characters, for laughs (Little Green Men isn't too bad, but it's still a bit stilted).
Nevertheless, I decided to give Lower Decks a try, and at first my fears were confirmed. Not only that, but it seemed to be mining the same vein of irreverence as Rick & Morty - a decent show, but it didn't feel like the trick was working on Star Trek. The comedy seemed to come from the straight-laced striver Ensign Boimler and the foul-mouthed, free-spirited Ensign Beckett Mariner playing off each other, and the jokes about how she did better than him by breaking all the rules initially fell flat. These were ideas I'd seen elsewhere, done better, and my tolerance for them was already not the highest.
Yet... stuff filtered through. Jokes and references and cameos. Tendi and Rutherford added a different dynamic, and the characters all developed beyond the initial sketches. I started to enjoy it more around the fifth episode, Cupid's Errant Arrow, where Boimler gets a girlfriend and Mariner thinks she's an alien. The sixth episode, which features a murderous software assistant named Badgy, was also good.
By the time the tenth episode rolled around, I was already onboard, but I remember being impressed with how the creators had turned the Pakleds from a TNG-era punchline to an actual threat. And when Riker and Troi come to the rescue, voiced by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis themselves, I was close to cheering, right there in my living room.
The second season built nicely on the events of the first, with Boimler initially stationed on Riker's ship and the Pakleds remaining a threat that popped up throughout the season. The second season finale has a moment easily as satisfying as the Titan's rescue in Season 1, where the Cerritos crew all pull together to save another ship (captained by a minor character from a second-season episode of TNG, no less) from crashing into a planet. There, rather than getting me out of my seat, that last-minute rescue moved me, which I found to be an interesting reaction.
Comparing Lower Decks to Rick & Morty again, I'd say Lower Decks has more heart. Rick & Morty seems to be based on showing how outrageous Rick can get, and excusing his bad behavior by acknowledging that it comes from a place of hurt, but not actually having him reckon with it. That may be why Rick & Morty fans are famously trollish. Lower Decks started out from the same place, but does a better job of having the characters reckon with why they are the way they are, and it's clear that they all care for one another, whereas it's never quite so clear how much Rick cares for Morty.
The other obvious comparison is the Orville, which also tries to look at Star Trek through comedy. There are some decent episodes there (I've only seen Season 1 so far), including some really thoughtful ones that could have been lifted from TNG. It's clear how much Seth MacFarlane loves TNG, though frequently the references to the absurdity of the premise get in the way of the story. On the other hand, Lower Decks is in the Trek universe, so it can comment on the most absurd parts of Trek lore directly. Importantly, those jokes are only ever throw-away lines, rather than interrupting the flow of the story by having us hone in on them.
When I say that Lower Decks is the best Trek in years, it's because the show has managed the trick of getting back to basics, through understanding what those basics were. The thing that caught fans' imaginations in the 60s was the vision of different people working together, bringing their different skills and backgrounds to bear. TNG continued this tradition, but DS9 (much as I love it) decided to tell a different kind of story. Each subsequent back-to-basics show seemed to think that the important thing was the flying around the galaxy, rather than the characters' relationships. Disco and Picard, on the other hand, suffer from their attempts to be too much like the movies: serialized storytelling is great, when done well, but at least in the first two seasons, Disco did a poor job of developing the crew, and then ended with two big space battles. Exciting, but the best old Trek was explicitly about not fighting.
Lower Decks's main characters all have different backgrounds, but play well off each other, whether they're agreeing or disagreeing. Each one gets to show what skills they bring to Starfleet, with even Boimler's approach to following the rules coming in handy from time to time. Their differences are celebrated by the show, both for themselves and for how they mesh with the others. And that, more than space battles or aliens with weird foreheads, is what Star Trek is all about.
And yeah, the jokes are finally funny, which also helps.
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