Look, I love the Kirk version of Star Trek, but what you're asking is that writers of the caliber that created the Sopranos, Games of Thrones, Deadwood, Carnivale and Band of Brothers among others be made to swallow wholesale many of the ludicrous impossibilities imposed on the show by Gene Roddenberry as a necessary compromise to help get his program on the air. Impossibilities that, when we think about them, buckle and break apart the very nature of the show...
If HBO/Showtime writers were tasked with rethinking Star Trek, many of its distinctive aspects would have to be completely re-imagined or jettisoned for a modern audience. What would result would be unrecognizable from what we know as Star Trek...
The very first aspect that would have to be changed dramatically would be all of the alien species. Say goodbye to the Vulcans, the Klingons and the Romulans (and especially ALL of the bumpy foreheaded freaks!). Are we actually to believe that in faraway galaxies, in completely alien environments, their dominant lifeforms would also evolve as they did on this planet, resulting in close variations of Homo Sapiens?
Logically you would actually have alien species akin to the Hortas and even the single-celled organisms from OPERATION ANNIHILATE, long before we would ever encounter another creature with two arms-two legs.
But If ever we must have more humanoid-looking aliens, wouldn't they be more likely to look like the 'prawns' from DISTRICT 9, or the Alien from the same-named film series?
Second of all, what kind of insane government (in this case, Starfleet) would send ONLY 400 people inside of ONE ship out in deep space, alone and without backup, for 5 years? The U.S. doesn't even send less than 100,000 men in another COUNTRY in its last few wars...Starfleet asks these refugees from an insane asylum to go out in totally unknown and uncharted space, with no backup and months perhaps before help can arrive, risking probable death...
Someone who would take more than 5 seconds to analyze the series would probably have a GROUP of starships in formation, well-armed with a reasonable amount of military specialists to protect the foolhardy scientists (similar to the Galactica, perhaps?)...
Third: just how many Class-M planets ARE there in deep space? Likely almost nil, necessitating 99% of away teams to wear heavy protective suits, as in The THOLIAN WEB, minus the shiny aluminum...
The good thing is with a HBO ST, first contact encounters would stop being as commonplace as they became, and go back to the raw sweaty tension of episodes like The CORBOMITE MANEUVER, but cranked all the way up (think Dallas, Kane and Lambert floating inside the derelict spaceship in Ridley Scott's ALIEN movie).
Fourth: we'd probably never get that far from the Milky Way galaxy, as each new system with its bizarre atmospheric conditions, hostile landscape and unexpected native lifeforms would probably tax the resources of each ship. McCoy is great, but NO WAY could that guy so easily figure out how to keep alive most of his crew. Heck we still have new diseases on THIS planet almost every year (avian flu, flesh-eating disease, H1N1) that elude a planetfull of doctors and researchers...
I could go on...
For over 40 years Star Trek has been billed as a science-fiction show, when the real truth of the matter is that Star Trek is a space-fantasy show with some actual science-based aspects.
But asking a bunch of sharp-eyed award-winning writers to ignore all of its inherent logic-defying hocus pocus as if it is not really there, and to merely tack on some gritty soap opera would only result in a half-hearted retooling.
We were lucky for so long that Star Trek thrilled us the way it did. Like Aladdin's lamp, perhaps it should remain a work with its share of whimsy...
