He mentioned signing a NDA for something recently...I'd say those are good odds that he's on board.
Bryan Fuller is Showrunner on New Trek Series
- Thread starter SilentBen
- Start date
All the nitpicking over what universe it will be set in, what aliens we'll see, what characters might appear what we want and don't want-- well suffice to say it's a bit silly to even get caught up in all that right now for me (though I get that with so little info, it's fun to speculate)-- i'm just excited that:
a) Star Trek is coming back
b) Bryan Fuller is in charge
a) Star Trek is coming back
b) Bryan Fuller is in charge
Indeed. So far this is looking great. I think I'll save the panicking until we at least have a trailer for the first episode. This quote keeps coming to mind:
Kent Brockman: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
Professor: Yes I would, Kent.
Kent Brockman: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
Professor: Yes I would, Kent.
All I'm saying is why hire a guy from the Berman and Braga staff if you're not going to utilize his knowledge of those shows and that continuity?
If they're smart, they won't mention any timeline at all and just go with it...
Can you imagine, fans arguing about which timeline it is until the show ends and never get an answer?
Fuller seems like a great choice. Loved Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me (first season).
Can you imagine, fans arguing about which timeline it is until the show ends and never get an answer?
Fuller seems like a great choice. Loved Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me (first season).
All I'm saying is why hire one of the two guys who created nuTrek to be Fuller's boss if you're not going to utilize his creative taste and knowledge of those movies and that continuity?
Bingo!
Part of me wonders if Kurtzman's involvement is simply part of his negotiated contract to extend his paycheck, and he will have little say in the creative direction. Perhaps his placement is a Paramount mandate for all we know, and his sole task is to keep the JJ-verse firmly separate ("this is too close to what we're planning on the next movie").
Maybe he's just an advisor. Maybe he's just an investor.
Point is, who cares? With Bryan Fuller as showrunner, he's going to have a lot more impact on the quality of the show than Kurtzman.
Maybe he's just an advisor. Maybe he's just an investor.
Point is, who cares? With Bryan Fuller as showrunner, he's going to have a lot more impact on the quality of the show than Kurtzman.
But not necessarily the premise or setting. Kurtzman is a successful Star Trek writer and doubtless had ideas about the show when he started interviewing other producers.
And no, Kurtzman is not running this show as a "chair filler;" that's Bad Robot Conspiracy thinking. He and CBS have been happily doing successful business on TV together for years now. Since he's written and produced two of the most successful Star Trek movies ever, which have carried the franchise for a decade since the oldTrek universe tanked, it's only natural that they ask him to create this series.
And no, Kurtzman is not running this show as a "chair filler;" that's Bad Robot Conspiracy thinking. He and CBS have been happily doing successful business on TV together for years now. Since he's written and produced two of the most successful Star Trek movies ever, which have carried the franchise for a decade since the oldTrek universe tanked, it's only natural that they ask him to create this series.
First of all, the only time "Berman and Braga" really existed as a partnership was on Enterprise. I'll never understand why people assume they were joined at the hip, unless they just can't resist the alliteration. Braga ran only two seasons of Voyager, and he was working for Berman in that capacity, just as Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, and Maurice Hurley had before him and just as Kenneth Biller did on VGR after him. Braga and Fuller were both part of the Berman staff; Braga just came onboard a few years earlier.
Second, continuity is not the overriding preoccupation for producers the way it is for fans. They're too busy worrying about actual reality -- the practicalities of producing and marketing an expensive television series and earning enough profit from it to justify its continuation -- to be all that concerned with the niceties of the imaginary reality within the shows. So experience at television production is what matters. Keep in mind that Fuller's Star Trek work is a very, very small part of his overall resume. They hired him because of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies and Heroes and the rest, because he's an accomplished veteran producer that they know can do the job of getting a weekly television series made on time, on budget, and with a high degree of quality. The fact that he has Star Trek experience and cachet with the fans is a bonus.
Third, it's not unprecedented for the same creator to work on multiple different incarnations/continuities of a fictional franchise. Look at Alan Burnett, the veteran producer of DC animated series. He started out as a writer on Super Friends, then became one of the founding producers of Batman: The Animated Series and the rest of the DC Animated Universe (even producing the two DCAU shows that Bruce Timm was uninvolved with, Static Shock and The Zeta Project). He went on to be a producer on The Batman, Krypto the Superdog, and the various one-shot DVD movies from WB animation, starting with Green Lantern: First Flight. And he's a producer on the upcoming Justice League Action TV series that was recently announced. By my count, that's nearly two dozen distinct versions of the DC Universe that Burnett has had a hand in creating. Again, when it comes to producer qualifications, experience with the franchise and its essentials counts more than the niceties of continuity. Different continuities are just variations on a theme.
He's an executive producer, the same as he is on Hawaii Five-O and Sleepy Hollow and Limitless and Scorpion. He's an executive in the business who runs a production company (Secret Hideout) that provides content for television networks. It's the same deal as J.J. Abrams's Bad Robot producing shows like Person of Interest and Revolution and Almost Human, or Steven Spielberg's Amblin producing Terra Nova, Under the Dome, and Extant.
Since Kurtzman is already an executive producer on three other successful CBS series, it's no surprise they went with him on this one, even aside from his own Trek experience.
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See, this is what I don't want. And it has nothing to do with Doug's talent as a vfx supervisor, which is considerable, and I love his work. But I've seen what his vision of Star Trek looks like. I've seen that look. I don't want this new show to quote "get the gang back together". I want new talent, and new designers, and new concepts visually. Reference the past shows if you want, but I want fresh blood in there.
But how does the ship get there? If the ship ends up in a new galaxy then either it has the technology to get back just as easily, or it's some one off anomaly in which case you're copying Voyager. You want to cut off communications? Create some random region with anti-subspace radiation and you can no longer communicate, problem solved. The ships were traveling back and forth and communicating because that's what the writers chose to do. All of that can be changed without arbitrarily moving to a new galaxy.
I see what you're saying but with new talent we end up getting things like a 725m ship and a "realistic" warp core. Doug gives a lot of thought to the details which is where the beauty lies and if he is working for Fuller then it will be what Fuller says that goes into the design and it will be Fuller's final approval.
Oh yes, the highly complex and elaborate NuTrek universe that only an expert like Alex Kurtzman could truly understand...
Saying Kurtzman's hiring means we're getting JJ-verse is just as silly as saying Fuller's hiring means we're getting Prime Trek. Also, you say Kurtzman is Fuller's boss, when it's actually the complete opposite. Kurtzman is the executive producer... while Fuller is the executive producer, showrunner AND creator of this new series. I don't think he'll be the one taking orders.
Forget how experienced Fuller or Kurtzman are in their respective Trek universes though, I think we're getting Prime Trek because CBS won't have to pay Paramount to use it unlike with NuTrek, its merchandise sells much better than NuTrek, therefore, bringing in more money for them, and past Prime Trek shows such as TNG, DS9 and Voyager are all doing extremely well in streaming according to CBS. That's not to mention how many more Trek fans want Prime than JJ-verse.
I just don't understand the arguments for a NuTrek show. Executives aren't that brain dead and short-sighted where they can't tell the difference between a summer blockbuster action film and a more grounded sci-fi TV series.
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At this point I vote that they explicitly state that the show is set in the "prime" universe, and then they intentionally contradict as much of its established lore as possible. Fans will either twist their brains into pretzel shapes trying to reconcile the two out of some misguided loyalty to the notion of a "prime" universe, or their heads will just explode Scanners style.
The universe that TOS inhabits already feels largely removed from the one TNG does, much more than 75 years could possibly be responsible for, so labeling universes seems like fatally flawed venture from the start IMO.
The universe that TOS inhabits already feels largely removed from the one TNG does, much more than 75 years could possibly be responsible for, so labeling universes seems like fatally flawed venture from the start IMO.
No, Kurtzman is higher in the pecking order, in that he runs the production company that Fuller will be working for. It's the same relationship that Kurtzman has with the respective showrunners of the four other TV series he currently executive-produces (Hawaii Five-O, Sleepy Hollow, Scorpion, and Limitless), or that J.J. Abrams has with the showrunners of Person of Interest and Revolution, or that Greg Berlanti has with the showrunners of Supergirl and Blindspot, or the like. He runs the company that makes the shows, but since he's in charge of so many shows -- as well as directing the upcoming Mummy re-remake and developing the Universal Monsters shared movie universe -- he can't be in hands-on control of any one of them.
So yes, absolutely, Fuller will be taking orders from Kurtzman, but only to the extent that Kurtzman has the time to advise him. The overall day-to-day job of making the decisions will be Fuller's. If Fuller's the captain of the starship, Kurtzman is the admiral he reports to.
Those aren't the only two options, though. Now that we've had one fresh reinvention of ST, it opens the door for others. This could be a third universe separate from either one. And that's hardly unprecedented -- Supergirl isn't in the same reality as either Man of Steel or Smallville (or any earlier Superman show). Fans like us obsess over continuities, but most viewers don't care so much about the dividing lines between realities as long as they get new stories about the characters they like.
Many of the Prime Trek movies were just as shallow and blockbustery themselves. That's not about Prime vs. Abramsverse, it's just about TV vs. movies. Star Trek works better in TV and can go deeper. A TV series set in the Abramsverse couldn't help but be more conceptually in-depth and character-driven than the movies, both because it would have more time to explore its ideas and because it couldn't afford the same level of spectacle and action. Indeed, that would be the advantage to doing a TV series in the Abramsverse -- it would allow fleshing out that reality more richly than the movies have been able to do, and maybe finally earning it legitimacy in the eyes of fans who are unhappy with the movies. (Think of how many fans dislike The Final Frontier or Nemesis or Voyager but still love TOS or TNG or DS9. No reason it has to be all-or-nothing.)
And really, it goes without saying that any show Bryan Fuller creates is going to be rich and interesting and original, regardless of what continuity it's set in. Indeed, that's why I'd prefer to see him start fresh with a complete reboot, so that his creativity could be unfettered.
I think it's still a little too early. They just announced Fuller, he still has to hire the guys who would likely be the ones hiring Drexler. Although, I suppose things could be further along...
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