'Star Trek Discovery' renewed, but many viewers complain the streaming service doesn't work

Star Trek: Discovery was renewed for a second season Monday -- even as many CBS All Access subscribers found themselves unable to view the latest episode of Season 1.

The hit show screens exclusively on the network's own streaming service, which costs $6 a month (outside the U.S., it's available to Netflix subscribers). CBS hasn't released any figures on sign-ups. But the first episode -- which screened on CBS proper and garnered 10 million viewers, almost as good as top-rated returning shows like This Is Us and NCIS -- was impressive enough on its own to give Season 2 a green light.

"In just six episodes, Star Trek: Discovery has driven subscriber growth, critical acclaim and huge global fan interest for the first premium version of this great franchise," CBS Interactive president Marc DeBevoise said in a press release.

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What DeBevoise didn't address: a bad night for the CBS All Access service. Streaming problems left a significant number of Star Trek fans dealing with a stuttering, pixelated episode 6. Many of them took to social media to express their displeasure.

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We reached out to the network, which insisted the problems were limited to a small subset of viewers (this writer included.)

"A small number of CBS All Access users, only about 5%, experienced problems with buffering last night due to technical issues with one of our delivery partners," a CBS spokesperson said. "We worked closely with them to resolve the issue."

The show itself isn't your father's Trek. It has shown itself to be inventive, creative, edgy and non-compromising; it even challenges your notions of the composition of space itself.

In some ways, the series could be thought of as a stealth course in astrobiology -- or to be more specific, astromycology, since the crew of the Discovery is figuring out how to travel on an interstellar network of mushroom spores. Space, once the final frontier, has become the fungal frontier.

Instead of providing fans with monster-of-the-week episodes, Discovery has told a single consistent story, most of it from the perspective Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). The only monster that has appeared so far turned out to be a heartbreakingly sympathetic tardigrade.

Now Discovery gets to flesh out its vision, and seek out more new life, for at least one more season. The only question remaining -- will it equal the original Star Trek by being renewed a third time?