A New ‘Star Trek’ TV Series Will Debut in 2017
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is going to be action schlock, a series like TNG will never be made again.
I don't want too sound too depressing, just letting you know to adjust your expectations.
So I choose to believe/hope that a TV show isn't doomed to have the same outlook as the movie. I expect I may well be wrong, but...
With the exception of Riker steering the Enterprise with that hidden Gravis Blackhawk joystick, it was very much like a feature length episode of the TV series.
The movies were different than the TV show but there was still a shadow of the values and intellectualism from the show in the movies. For the modern remakes that's simply completely absent. And imagining that a show made by people who don't understand Star Trek will somehow begin to embody its values and qualities is, frankly, magical thinking.
It'll be fast-paced, it'll be gritty, it'll be dark, it'll be chock full of action and "intrigue" but it'll be brain-dead.
Out of the pre-Abrams Star Trek films, four were generally well received (2, 4, 6, 8). The first and third films have a few people who like them, but are broadly disliked. The fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth are almost universally disliked.
Even among the four generally well received films, only #2 (The Wrath of Khan) and #4 (The Voyage Home) are generally considered as good as the best television episodes from the first two series. Maybe #6 fits in there -- that one's actually my favorite, though I might be biased because it's the only TOS one I've seen in theaters.
1) The Motion Picture: The one with V'Ger
2) The Wrath of Khan: The one with Khan
3) The Search For Spock: The one that fixed the problem caused by #2
4) The Voyage Home: The one with the whales
5) The Final Frontier: The one of which will not be spoken
6) The Undiscovered Country: The one with the Khitomer Accords
7) Generations: The one with both Kirk and Picard
8) First Contact: The one with the Borg
9) Insurrection: The one where Picard openly rebels against the exact thing he did in that one episode
10) Nemesis: The Wrath of Khan with TNG characters, by someone who didn't understand why The Wrath of Khan was good 11) Star Trek: Kirk gets promoted from Cadet to Captain in one day
12) Star Trek <missing colon> Into Darkness: Spock is angryFirst Contact did have its fair share of stupid (Borg queen, UGH). I just thought the plot made way more sense than any of the other TNG movies.
I'd love a new series, but CBS showing it mainly on their streaming service and not even on network TV doesn't bode very well.
> a series like TNG will never be made again
I have higher hopes than ever actually. With Netflix creating their own TV shows, crowdfunding booming, as well as cheap alternative movie and CGI studios popping up worldwide, we might some day see something even better than TNG.
Edit: I mean, look at Stargate Universe, that how had incredible potential, and fit pretty much with the above "new economy / new audience" description.
I wouldn't be surprised that once the equity crowdfunding JOBS act passes properly, we'll see independent Netflix style TV series be funded, at higher per-episode funding than current TV.
Was a fairly descent wrap up if you're looking for some closure.
We already saw that. http://www.startrek.com/page/star-trek-deep-space-nine
It's very good.
It takes a little while to get going, but the story is probably one of the finest arcs on TV.
Also don't forget star trek: voyager, my personal favorite.
The way the characters and the plot developed together was great. Some of the episodes were uncharacteristically dark for the Star Trek universe (introduction of Dukat's daughter, Garak and Odo, etc.)
In TNG, the only credible existential threat was the Borg, and you really only felt that for a couple of back-to-back episodes. The Borg were awesome, but DS9 had greater sustained dramatic tension.
And the camp episodes! When DS9 did silly, they did it up right--with frickin' evil mirror universe characters and tribbles!
Fringe too is a possible reason for hope, but the science still seems out on how well Kurtzman works alone without frequent collaborator and fellow Fringe showrunner Orci.
(That said, I'm running on huge cynicism for this Star Trek project and my expectations right now are indeed rather low.)
After watching Prometheus, DL is right there with Uwe Boll on my list of people to avoid.
It will most likely be targeted at the youth and have a more diverse market to have more minority characters and more female ones. Remember it is not just the USA but the world they are selling the series to.
Each new Star Trek is marketed towards the young, TOS in 1966 was for my father, TNG was for me, Voyager and Enterprise was for Generation-Y, this new one is for the younger generation world wide.
It will sort of be like that Battlestar Galactica reboot Syfy did. Original fans won't like it but new fans will.
So I'm cautiously optimistic.
On a somewhat related note, CBS apparently tries to get a good start for their streaming site, this means that they will try to limit risk. So they will probably go for a darker tone and something like Game of Thrones in space.
I never heard any exposition on the details, but the Federation is supposedly an essentially egalitarian post-scarcity economy with a religion of space exploration. In contrast, the Ferengi always seemed much closer to our own society: they are cold blooded capitalists with misogynistic tendencies, but still manage to maintain a vibrant civilization in space, in which they uphold contracts and maintain infrastructure. And so it would seem that at the hypothetical interface between the Ferengi and the Federation there would be not just a huge culture clash, but moral and political scandals of the highest order, mostly concentrated around (1) the exploitation of Federation members by Ferengi (2) incidental macroeconomic chaos within Ferengi society due to the Federation sending free aid, setting artificial price restrictions within their markets, etc.
If one redesigned the Ferengi with a non-goofy appearance and a cool demeanor they could be made relatable, in the same way that one can relate to the various capitalist villain archetypes: wall street narcissists, oil tycoons, drug kingpins and so on.
I think it would be much more interesting to explore the creepier side of this supposedly egalitarian post-scarcity economy... I mean think of how wierd it is that a military organization is in charge of scientific exploration, that all the individuals on the starship are tracked at all times, etc...
don't we already do that on our spaceships?
Kirk always had a mixed-bag relationship with Starfleet and had to go to bat up against them in Spock's favor. Picard also foiled a number of infiltrations on Earth during the early seasons of TNG. Dr. Bashir and Chief O'Brien repeatedly tussled with agents of Section 31 on DS9. Tom Riker ended up fleeing Starfleet so he could fight with the Maquis, who were betrayed by the Federation and tortured by Cardassian overlords. Sisko himself murdered an ambassador and implicated the Dominion in a diplomatic plot to get Romulans to join the war.
There's a hell of a lot of well-intentioned extremists, even in Star Trek's utopia. Now what happens when you take away the biggest voice of reason? Sends shivers down my spine to think about what kind of darkness in the hearts of men the crew of the Possibly-Enterprise will wrestle with.
The tracking as such seems to be pretty passive most of the time - the computer has to be asked before telling the bridge crew where someone is (for dramatic effect), even if they've been confined to quarters, or sucked into a parallel universe. It could be that the computer is constantly monitoring the crew, or that while it has the capability to track anyone on the ship at any time (which is plausible) this is only used when necessary.
Edit: now that I think about it, the latter would make sense on a ship which would be expected to occasionally house diplomats or dignitaries, who might expect some degree of privacy. Also, we can infer from episodes like The Ultimate Computer that there is kind of a mistrust of strong AI among the Federation, which would justify the computer defaulting to privacy unless explicitly being commanded to do otherwise.
Maybe having a combadge meant the computer was only allowed to track the badge and not that person under normal circumstances.
One thing that always bothered me was why people weren't basically just spending their time hanging around the food replicators and fornicating in the hologram machine. I can buy that the crew of a starship would be chosen for a strange combination of discipline and risk-aversion (not to mention Starfleet adding something to the water), but it seemed to me that there would have to be all kinds of exotic hedonism, resource intensive "art" projects and crazy philosophies on the surface of the planets.
I thought it had some interesting "Okay, so no more scarcity, now what?" plots.
Why do the holodeck doors[0] look like they have massive locking mechanisms? The holodeck is apparently one of the most advanced pieces of technology in Starfleet, a system of such vast complexity it can be create sentient life on command, and simulate the experience of entire worlds down to the atomic level. Why would such a system have what appears to be a peripheral role on the ship, serving as little more than entertainment, and why is it apparently locked up tighter than even the bridge?
It's implied that humans for the most part have evolved beyond beyond base desires like greed and hatred, but this is rarely backed up by any of the series. But what if, among Federation society, displays of "unevolved" human behavior are generally forbidden or frowned upon outside of a controlled environment like the holodeck?
Whatever happens in the holodeck, stays in the holodeck (except when it doesn't) thoroughly locked away out of sight and out of mind. It acts as a release mechanism for humanity's atavistic pleasure seeking side, but humans can't admit that it plays as central a role in their society as it must. We catch glimpses of this now and then from Barclay, or the one time Geordi's secret hologram girlfriend was discovered by the woman it was based on, but for the most part the humans maintain the pretense that that part of their psyche no longer exists.
Part of the reason for this subterfuge (that I'm concocting and that isn't canon but should be) might be that the Federation was started and run by humans, a species which is, as interstellar societies go, still practically children. Anyone spending time being tutored in civilization by the condescending (per Enterprise) Vulcans, the first alien species Humans encounter and the one that forms, if even subconsciously, their template for what "aliens" actually are, might have developed a deep species-level cultural cringe and a desire to appear more "evolved" to other species.
[0]http://api.ning.com/files/2bmZ7rAoYlF22iZQvOguNf5lHJktmIBVkr...
Within one hour it had nearly 200 up-votes, and over 120 comments. Then, suddenly, it was flagged and buried into the archives of Hacker News.
While this may not be "Hacker News" it is obviously content that resonates with a large percentage of the HN community. I hope the mods just let it be this time.
Very aggressive modding, and very silly modding.
1) copy the part of the url containing the story's title 2) paste just that part into the URL bar (to do a Google search) 3) the story will come up as the first hit, click on it, boom, no more paywall
This works for quite a few major sites. (WSJ, New Yorker, etc.)
It would probably be a bit different -- I don't know where he would take it -- but there would likely be interesting characters and character development.
As it is, I want something that returns to the kind of quality I found in the middle and later seasons of TNG, once it really caught its stride.
I also thought some of the Voyager episodes were quite engaging, particularly those involving Seven of Nine and some of the other... "trans"-human characters.
Star Trek, whatever series, has always been particularly good when it comes to exploring what it means to be... "sentient", to choose a word perhaps less open to misinterpretation that "human", though I would choose to define "human" as something other than our specific species. And characters at the boundary of "human" (I guess that is the word that really speaks to me) have often been very interesting and effective vehicles in this regard.
P.S. Perhaps it is in part that some of the other series became more interesting to me when some of the TNG writers migrated to them. I don't or no longer know the series timelines (in this world, as television shows) sufficiently to consider this more closely, off the cuff.
I'll be hoping for a Trek with new worlds filled with new solutions to current problems, but expecting another dreary Breaking Bad tinged with Walking Dead, this time--yawn--amidst the stars.
I adore Star Trek, but this ain't it. It's just action crap dressed up in Star Trek's clothes. Which is a shame because too much of Sci-Fi on television and in the theater is just action, we need more thoughtful and interesting science fiction, the sort of stuff that made Star Trek a cult hit and transformed it into a cultural phenomenon despite running for less than three seasons originally.
Lets get some Rick and Morty writers in there too.
I hope it's not too heavy on the action/drama, like _The Walking Dead_ or _Game of Thrones_. These are both excellent series that are highly entertaining to watch. But they make me _feel_ first and _think_ second.
Good Star Trek episodes are like puzzles. You're thinking "what the heck is going on?", "what strange phenomena is this?", etc. The best ones draw you in and then delight you with the reveal. They almost have a Twilight Zone quality to them.
That's why Arrested Development (in theory) can work on Netflix but not FOX.
The issue with CBS' digital efforts is that they are a strange island unto themselves and Star Trek alone is unlikely to get too many more visitors to their island. They really need to consider a partnership with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or something left field like Vudu or HBO Now. But of course they are stubborn and probably won't.
(Does it make financial sense to anyone right now to spend $5/month on just CBS shows when the same could go to most of a Netflix or Hulu subscription with a much broader content base?)
Counter point, the extremely strong viewing numbers of ST TNG...
It's how sports leagues fund their streaming: you pay a lot for the content. Sure not many sign up, but the real fans more than make up for it.
The real problem I foresee is the large overlap in star trek fandom and internet pirates.
That's right: Star Trek is off-topic in a techie geek forum.
I have officially seen everything.
I'd be very mildly ticked about this, if it weren't so amusing. :)