Star Trek is Ambitious.

[Arpy]

Haven't been here for a while. I just watched the trailer for the nBSG series Blood & Chrome, and I thought to myself as I was watching it, "This is Star Trek". Blood & Chrome is not Star Trek. I don't know what the hell it's gonna be like - it'll probably be very different from Trek - but that's fine.

What made me think of it as Trek though is that it wowed me in the way that when I was a kid I knew I was going to have my mind blown by the sci-fi goodness of Star Trek. By its stories and also in its storytelling abilities - its crazy aliens and effects and directing. Both were part and parcel of the experience. This trailer has me giddy with anticipation like I used to feel.

Blood & Chrome isn't going to series I understand. Fine, whatever. But when a new Trek series does get green-lit, I hope that it will be as ambitious as this so far appears to be.

I hope the new Trek will be as deft and ambitious both inside and out. Much of the Trek philosophy seems naive these days - to me as well. I think it will need updating, refining, more nuance, complexity, etc. But I believe in one of the core tenets of Trek: the ascent of man...that "the human adventure is just beginning". I believe it to be a worthy ambition. One that I think many Trek writers and producers and actors don't necessarily believe in. Again, whatever.

But I think that also even nBSG, for all its oft-noted grit and genocide, was very much about the ascent of man. History repeat itself, but ultimately it did so with the hope that there was enough distortion in the plan to allow for change.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Blood & Chrome is more kinetic and violent than we're used to in TV Star Trek, and that's a good thing. After yakking with some fans of The Walking Dead online - I was curious how a sci fi series could get 9M viewers, on cable no less - I've realized that the way to lure the young male audience back to TV is simple: blood and guts and violence.

They abandoned TV in part for video games, and have had their tastes shaped by video games. Without the young male audience, Star Trek just can't get the numbers up to a survival level. But any series that can grab that audience would be of great interest to advertisers, because they're hard to reach through TV nowadays.

Which doesn't mean Star Trek needs to be a "dumb video game." The Walking Dead is not dumb. It's got a lot of valid human drama, in between the insane zombie violence. But Star Trek can never again be as sanitized as TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY-ENT were. It can be as smart, or even smarter, but it's also got to blow people's heads off every once in a while. A small price to pay to get the show back on TV, and hey, they've always told us that Starfleet is a dangerous job, so it's not like it would be wrong, per se...

So the point is, don't look to a failed pilot like Blood & Chrome for ideas for the future. All a failure can tell you is what not to do. Instead, look at the successful example of a sci fi series that can get a broadcast-level audience on cable: The Walking Dead.