Most of the episodes are pretty much mix and match in any order. Only a handful have to take place in a particular order.
Strange New Worlds' showrunners advise fans to write to Skydance and Paramount if they're interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series
- Thread starter Quinton
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Yup!
Given the content, it's only very generally important.
That said, there is the order in which the shows were produced. While not having anything to do with canon, it's occasionally worthwhile to be aware that at thus-and-such a point in the evolution of the stories, a given element had or had not been introduced for reference.
I wish this group of creative folks would do a follow-on series, because I like Star Trek in a general sense and would have that to look forward to. Other than SNW, Trek has been pretty barren for some decades now.
It wasn't just sets, it was the show's whole production infrastructure.
Right, that makes sense. Shooting a whole series in Hawai'i instead of LA was an exceptional thing, and naturally they wouldn't have wanted everything they'd built up there to go to waste, and for all the people they employed locally to lose their jobs. (Like the hit the New Zealand economy took a couple of years ago when Power Rangers ended production there after 20 straight years.)
And the show was supposed to be good for tourism, even though it portrayed Honolulu as the murder capital of the world.
Cabot Cove has entered the chat.
Maybe, but it showed the killers always getting caught, I presume. (And then booked by Danno.) Thus projecting a sense of law and order prevailing.
Slight comfort if you or your loved one is the victim of a gruesome killing.
Which is only the case for the characters within the story, not for the audience. The appeal of the mystery and procedural genres is that they allow the reader or viewer to feel that law and justice will prevail in the end. That's how there can be such a thing as "cozy mystery," stories that feel comfortable and pleasant and relaxing even though they revolve around homicides. It doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it, but it's more about feeling than thinking.
Connie III?
#StarTrekLegacy
Wouldn't hold my breath.
Why in the world would they want to do that, when so far they have wonderful actors playing beautifully realized versions of the TOS characters?
Saving on fees, more creative freedom...
Or they could have just undone the cancellation of SNW.
There'd be no substantial change in creative freedom. Star Trek has a universal format to tell any kind of story.
No one here on the outside like we are really know what the financial bottlenecks are.
However, to succeed a show has to have appeal. Trading in characters who have appeal for unknowns who by definition don't at the outset must incur some risk of the show losing appeal. Casting unknown actors, ditto.
Just the fact that they’ve already started production on a truncated season 5 right after season 4 wrapped shows that CBS is interested in ending the show as soon as possible. Why anyone would think that CBS would now want to produce a new show using the same sets, costumes, production assets, and which basically continues right from where SNW ends, just with a different cast, makes little sense to me. Especially since I’d bet dollars to donuts that Skydance will want to do something completely different.
They must have focus group reports and other data that suggest the value of relying on old material, but I wonder how many viewers really rushed to Strange New Worlds thinking "oh my god, it's got Doctor M'Benga!!! I have got to watch this!"
I can believe that the 23rd Century aesthetic trappings drew in some people - the brightly-coloured uniforms and original Enterprise probably make people go "ooh, looks a bit Star Trek" more than Discovery's visuals do - but I wonder if SNW would have done any worse if it had just been an entirely orignal crew. I get the feeling the Star Trek brand name does as much heavy lifting as anything else.
Focus groups' predictive power is limited (Buffy the Vampire Slayer did lousy with focus groups. It would go on to become a monster hit.)
It's not an "official" thing but Hollywood tries to keep something filming in Hawaii at all times since starting the local film industry back up after everyone is out of work would be monstrously difficult. So if they want to shoot anything in Hawaii in the future they need to shoot there now.
No, because if they were interested in ending it as soon as possible, they wouldn't have approved season 5 at all. I'll never understand people who think that all network/studio decisions are only about what the executives want to do. Making television is not free. You can only do it if advertisers and investors are willing to pay for it, and that only happens if enough people watch it. No matter how much a network or studio may want to keep making a show, they can't keep it if the ratings are too low for them to afford it. And no matter how much a network or studio may hate lowering themselves to churning out cheapo reality-TV crap, they can't afford to cancel it if audiences eat it up and it's the main thing keeping them in business. It's not about what they want, it's about what they make enough profit from that they can afford to keep making it. NBC in 1969 would've been happy to make a fourth season of TOS, but the ratings just weren't there, so they couldn't afford to.
Because for some reason you're assuming that a show is defined by its sets and costumes rather than its story and characters. As we've been discussing, there are a number of cases where sets and production assets for one show were reused in an entirely different show, for instance the precinct sets from the mainstream cop drama Cagney & Lacey being used for the science fiction series Alien Nation.
The reason why a studio would want to reuse existing sets in a new show is self-evident as long as you recognize that making TV costs money, and reusing assets saves money. Every decision in the film/TV industry is fundamentally about money. If you fail to consider that, then of course their decisions won't make sense to you.
Of course, I'm not saying that the opportunity to reuse existing sets would guarantee that CBS and P+ would go for Goldman's Year One idea, but I can understand why he'd think it would be an incentive. I mean, I'm sure that TNG's reuse of sets and miniatures from the movies was part of what made it affordable enough for Paramount to agree to make, and ditto for Voyager's reuse of TNG sets. It's happened twice in Trek history already, so why couldn't it happen a third time?
Nice work if you can get it.
Are you unaware of the circumstances? CBS was ready to cancel SNW after season 4. But the producers still needed time to end the show properly, so CBS gave them a two hour movie in lieu of S5. The producers begged with them to give them more, because two hours still wasn’t enough. So CBS relented and gave them six episodes.
My point: CBS isn’t a heartless company that doesn’t give a shit about Star Trek. But at the same time, they still clearly want to end the show as soon as they can, while offering olive branches to the producers. But that’s where it ends. There will be no Star Trek: Year One, because that’s not on their horizon for 2026-27, when Skydance will start doing what they want.
Star Trek: Hawai'i
Make it so, Paramount!
I would think it self-evident that that proves they did not want to cancel it "as soon as possible." On the contrary, they chose to extend it as much as they could justify.
And my point is that it is erroneous to cast executive decisions in terms of what they want or are interested in. It's not about their wishes or preferences, it's about what they can afford to do based on the ratings. People always want to blame executives for killing shows, but it's the audience that decides a show's fate by whether they watch it in enough numbers. Giving a show a few more episodes when the numbers tell them to end it sooner is an expression of their desire to keep it as long as they can manage, not to end it as soon as they can.
