Re: Is A New Star Trek TV Series Doomed Even More Because of Star Trek
CBS has no motive to think twice or even once about Star Trek. They have very few slots they need to fill next season because their strategy of hewing to police procedurals, sitcoms and reality TV is working out very well and cancellations are not merited. Maybe someday this strategy will no longer work - their audience ain't getting any younger - but that's not even on the horizon yet.
So if you were in charge of CBS, why would you bother with a real outlier like Star Trek? It's not part of your strategy. The audience for Star Trek isn't your audience, which will make it hard to cross-promote. Pushing Star Trek isn't going to help your career. The only shows that get made are the ones that help someone's career.
Which makes one wonder why CBS owns it in the first place.
I don't know either. If they have no plans to use it, they should sell it. It's not making them any money the way things are now, and there's no prospect of that changing.
But I wonder if they could sell it, considering Paramount certainly wants to hang onto the movie franchise - and that would put the TV and movie franchises in different hands - that would never fly - so CBS and
Star Trek are stuck with each other.
The only way a new TV series will be done is to borrow heavily from what Abrams did. OldTrek is dead.
However, the fact that Pocket continues to produce books based on the original timeline sort of proves you wrong. "OldTrek" may not be raising the roof these days, but it's far from dead.
The division of rights between Paramount and CBS makes it more likely that any new series would be based upon the original timeline, because that's the part that CBS owns.
Simple economics; it's cheaper for CBS to produce a show that they don't have to pay the other side of the house for.
What works in the book industry is not necessarily relevant to TV or movies (and TV and movies are not necessarily relevant to each other) - those are vastly different industries.
For CBS to take interest in
Star Trek at all, they would need to think they can make some $$$ off it that they can't from another
CSI spinoff. Abrams Trek vs Old Trek is a minor issue. However, I think they'd opt for Abrams Trek - expensive, higher profile, more possible profit - vs Old Trek - less expensive, lower profile, less possible profit. Ya gotta spend money to make money.
One way to get around this is to introduce a new character and a ship (from the distant future or ancient past) that is not bound to one quadrant, or timeline... or universe. One minute the gang is on a mission in the Sixties TOS universe, the next they're on the Abramsprise, bumping into Spock.
It would be difficult to communicate to audiences that you are dealing with two different realities, unless the 60s TOS actually looks like TOS did, with the beehive hairdo's and all, and then the audience will think you're trying to be funny. Different universes have got to be more blatant - MU vs regular universe. If you ask the average
Trek XI viewer what universe that movie took place in, you'd get a blank look. I don't think that nuance necessarily got across at all. Really, what the TV show needs is to look and feel like
Trek XI did, and have Chris Pine or Zachary Quinto show up in ratings-boosting cameos. And of course, Vulcan has to stay blowed up - that's one element that would confuse the audience if changed. But a visit to an alternate reality where Vulcan still exists is not out of the question. Whether that's the original universe or another one won't matter much to the audience.
This produced a bit of a quandry with regard to Star Trek, because it straddled both areas, so an interesting solution was enacted. CBS would get the tv part of the franchise (and since the movies to that point all derived from the tv shows, they got those, too), Paramount would get any future movies.
Is there anything stopping Paramount from producing a TV series? They're the ones with the motive to capitalize on
Trek. CBS will never bother.
Typical grasping for straws logic.
. CBS owns (and has rebranded) all the former Paramount TV shows--including all the Star Trek TV shows--and actually spent two years (2007-2009) gradually phasing Paramount out of the television business.
) and name it "Vulcan"? Paramount doesn't need to tell the audience overtly what they're doing. They just need to avoid confusing the audience who's going to expect something that doesn't contradict the movie, to the extent they even remember what happened in the movie after a coupla years.
