I find it a bit strange that the showrunners or producers need fans to convince Paramount to greenlight a show. I'd expect the producers to do their job and come up with such a strong pitch that Paramount wouldn't have a choice but to say yes.
I'm totally on board with writing letters to save a show from getting canceled.
But this particular campaign—while clearly well-intentioned—makes me wonder if the producers themselves aren't entirely confident the show would actually work.
In truth, even letter-writing campaigns rarely actually save a show from cancellation, since what makes the difference to a network is whether advertisers are willing to invest in a show, not whether a few thousand viewers like it enough to write their opinions down. Gene Roddenberry played up the mythology that the fan letter campaign "saved" TOS from cancellation after season 2, but the fact is that the show was merely "on the bubble," its fate undecided, and what made the difference in favor of renewal was Roddenberry's agreement to reduce the season length by 2 episodes and lower the per-episode budget, which is why we got fewer guest stars and hardly any location work in season 3. Almost always, it's that kind of budget cut that gets a struggling show renewed, by lowering the overhead enough that it doesn't eat up all the projected profit. NBC's famous announcement about renewing the show didn't mean "Okay, we've caved into your demands and will change our minds about cancelling it," it meant "Look, folks, we already decided to renew it, so please stop making things hard on our mailroom crew by flooding them with unnecessary letters." And the myth that the campaign brought in as much as a million letters was inflated two orders of magnitude from the actual figures (per
Inside Star Trek by Solow & Justman).
Sometimes a fan campaign can make a difference, but it depends on whether the executives are amenable to renewal in the first place.
Alien Nation (1989) was a critical darling beloved by most of the FOX network and affiliate executives as well as its loyal fanbase (including me), but FOX's then-president Barry Diller disliked the show, and the smash success of
The Simpsons made him decide to reorient the young network toward sitcoms, four of which could be made for the cost of
Alien Nation, letting FOX add more nights to their broadcast schedule. So Diller shot down all the internal attempts to save the show from cancellation by reducing its budget, doing it as periodic TV movies, etc. (Two movie scripts were written, but Diller rejected them unread.) It wasn't until Diller left four years later and was replaced by a studio head who'd loved the show that it was revived and the two movies (and three more) were finally made.
And then there's the
Justice League Snyder Cut, which only got made because Warner Bros. needed new content to launch their streaming service and the pandemic had shut down the production pipeline. The public hype campaign was just something they latched onto to help them promote the film after they'd decided to do it.
So the influence that fan campaigns can have is feeble next to internal factors like budget calculations, larger studio strategies, and executive preferences. At most, it can be one of the factors weighed in the decision, but a minor one.
And personally, I'm not really into the whole "First Year Kirk Show," especially with the current actor playing Kirk (though that’s a separate issue). My ideal would be something set during the Lost Era between Star Trek VI and TNG, or maybe a series in the 28th century focusing on Starfleet’s first timeship. Honestly, I’ve just hit a bit of TOS-era fatigue, and I can’t quite bring myself to write a letter for something I’m not excited about.
I do think it would be kind of interesting to see this cast assemble into the TOS ensemble (although we came close to that in "The Sehlat..."), and to see who they cast as McCoy and Sulu, and to finally let Sulu get the kind of development that Chapel and Uhura have had. But I would see a modern take on TOS more as an interesting novelty than anything else. I like the suggestion someone made of jumping forward to the post-TMP era, which would fit Paul Wesley's age better anyway. (It would knock more of my novels out of continuity with canon, but that's already happened with about 2/5 of my stuff.) But my preference would be to flesh out underexplored eras like post-
Nemesis and post-
Discovery.
