More Star Trek TV shows are "totally possible" - Kurtzman

If they remain true first and foremost to examining the human condition, or do Shakespeare in Space (metaphor, I don't mean cherrypicking quotes from plays and having characters spout them as a movie, "in the original Klingon" or otherwise... not that it didn't work, but Shakespeare was about exploring human nature, "Trek" writers are capable of the same and making new quotes rather than lifting his like how Marta had in "Whom Gods Destroy".

 

2~5 million sounds more like a dedicated fanbase and not going after general audiences as much. Or at least akin to first-run syndication shows... Aren't the latter (general audiences) were always more important, especially when it came into ratings and production costs?

 

Hahaha. Good call. I love Daredevil and Jessica Jones and there are like maybe a half dozen SHEILD episodes worth a G.D. But. Pretty much everything else has been a disaster. I will say I haven't watched Agent Carter and have been told that was wonderful but yeah... you gotta be careful not to over do it.

I was really stoked on the early rumors under Fuller's tenure that Discovery would be an anthology series though. I think thats a lovely idea. Season long explorations of uncharted aspects of the Trek verse with no limit on how obscure or strange you could go... I hope a little of that is able to manifest because the almost 100 years between ST VI and TNG is ripe for expansion as well as the trasnitionary time between TOS and TMP. I'm not so keen on post VOY/NEM series just because I think that getting Brooks, Stewart, and Mulgrew to be a part of anything would be nigh impossible and finding a writing staff capable of creating a worthy 25th century allegory of space exploration and humanity is probably slim to none... BUT... I'd love to be proven wrong.

 

That 2 to 5 million figure probably includes the general audience these days. IMO, Trek's fanbase is fractured as hell now and isn't that dedicated anymore. Not all of them will support everything called Star Trek.

 

If they did a post-Nemesis series, that wouldn't matter.

And there's no "supposed" lack of stylistic cohesion between Discovery, Pike, and Kirk. It's blatantly obvious that Discovery looks nothing like the Pike era.

Why would we need any of them? I'd watch a post-Voyager series that has Jeri Ryan in it as Seven of Nine, simply because she's such a good actress. Add a couple of the other younger characters from whichever series, some original characters, figure out what the series is supposed to be about, and get on with it.

That way, the Voyager fans could have at least a little closure as to what happened after they got back to Earth, besides Janeway's promotion (who cares?).

 

I could live with more than one trek show at a time, but they'd need to be good, and diverse. DS9 and Voyager got away with some mediocre episodes, but there wasn't a lot of competition, not of the on demand magnitude that we have now.

I think three thematically different shows could coexist if they were done well and didn't rely on the old clichés.

A battleship series, engaging the enemy. Patrolling the frontier. Much like discovery.

An explorer ship series, investigating some great mystery of the universe, something akin to the Chase, but told over three or so years, with many twists and turns.

And then something less conventional, set on a star base, or even multiple locations across the galaxy, an epic conspiracy story maybe, again, told across several seasons.

Three vaguely inter connected series, produced concurrently, but only one releasing episodes at any given time. That could work.

 

I'd be happy if once in a while, they did a small 4 hour mini-series. I'm sure the problem would be the budget, though. How much money are they willing to spend on something like that? A lot of development went into making sets and costumes etc Discovery for example...I doubt they'd want to do all that for just a 4 hour outing.

It DOES make things like the "Khan" mini-series rumor make sense though. Not a whole lot of sets and development would be needed necessarily for that kind of story. You could do a number of small canon-filler mini series stories in this way, though...quick stories done "on the cheap":

Khan on Ceti Alpha V
Kirk as a young man on Tarsus IV leading up to the Kodos incident
Picard's mission that resulted in Jack Crusher's death
etc, etc...

I'd prefer this approach than making the full blown "Post-Nemesis Cameos by Everyone Fanwank Series" or some of the other obvious and bland ideas that are out there. I'd also rather the primary ongoing Trek series be limited to Discovery at this point. Let's make that the best it can be and not start thinning out the writing and producing talent across multiple series. That didn't work too great last time they did it by my recollection.

 

The Orville proves you wrong.

 

I also like the idea of doing some mini-series at first. Not to keen on the Khan idea and if you do something with Khan it should be about the Eugenic's War which is something we have all wanted to see, I suspect. After that a closure mini-series to the Berman era were you build a story around Picard,Janeway and Sisko and various other characters from those shows. Maybe even do the "Arrested Development" idea in that each episode focuses on just one character and while you have some crossovers it means you can say goodbye to each character in a individual episode. After that that is when they should do post-Berman show and then after that a complete reset where you start the entire universe from scratch from which characters you want to re-invent to what kind of new stuff you want to add. At some point I wouldn't mind a cartoon as well and any setting I think would work but I would actually go with a Starfleet Academy setting. Younger characters would appeal to younger people coming to the show because it's a cartoon but the show would still not just be crappy kid stuff but something older people can like. A kind "Futurama" kind of Trek show.

Jason

 

It's too bad that some of the novels couldn't be adapted to a series or miniseries.

 

Why couldn't they? Between recasting or cartoons you would think you could adapt any novels.

Jason

 

It's a matter of copyright and who owns the rights to the novels. You can't just pick a book, write a script, and expect it to be produced. And it's even more complicated if there are multiple authors.

I wonder if @Greg Cox might be able to offer some insight into this.

 

What if they changed some names abit.. That isn't Lt. Bearclaw but instead it is Lt. Bareclaw?

Jason

 

That's okay for a fanfic parody that can't be professionally published.

It won't fly for professional, commercial Trek. Just changing a few names wouldn't make it not-plagiarism.

 

I know I was mostly just making a joke. I could have also maybe use "Orville" as the punchline instead.

Jason

 

I've never seen Orville.

 

First episode's free to watch on Amazon.com.

If TNG plus dick jokes is your thing.

 

If there are more Trek shows after Discovery, I suspect another reboot—a return to the Enterprise with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Either that or Pike and Spock.

 

More like TOS plus dick jokes.

This is a good thing.