As you may have heard, Paramount cancelled Prodigy, halting production on its almost-complete second season, and removed the show from its service. The primary reason to do this, other than to streamline their content in light of the service’s upcoming merger with Showtime, was to generate a tax loss – a disturbing trend among streaming services.
Placing the commercial question aside, this has implications for the franchise. If Prodigy has effectively been deleted from the historical record and is no longer available to watch, is it still canon? The last time something equivalent happened was when the original Animated Series was unavailable for decades, and it was largely not treated as canon by subsequent shows. Nowadays it is counted as official canon (which introduces some complications), but it’s also widely available. The likelihood that they will tell a story in the future where this makes a difference is low, but it’s still worth clarifying.
What do you think?
Prodigy is canon insofar as everything is canon when it happens on screen. I like to think of the canon containing all Star Trek works right down to your fan fiction novel or your “head canon” with some things being more canonical than others and with those things which are seen on screen either as a film or TV episode are the most canonical of the canon. Prodigy still fits that bill. I doubt that there will be anything as canonical that would “undo” what Prodigy did. But if that happened we would just incorporate the conflict into the canon like we always do.
This is how Star Wars Expanded Universe canon worked before the Disney acquisition and canon wipe. Every piece of Star Wars media (movies, TV, books, comics, games, etc) was some form of canon, but there existed different tiers of canon, with the movies in the top tier. Everything in any tier was considered fully canon, unless it was directly contradicted by something in a higher tier. I thought it was quite a cool system.
After the Disney acquisition, they switched to a binary form of canon - the movies, the 2008 Clone Wars show and everything subsequently produced by or under license from Disney was canon; everything else (including decades of Expanded Universe novels) was not.