Trek Again

Scott Hardie | February 21, 2016
CBS is launching a new Star Trek series, featuring new characters. It has a high enough budget for the necessary special effects, but since it's on a streaming platform, the need for high ratings isn't as strong as it would be on broadcast. However, it does need to attract a younger audience to stabilize the declining/aging fan base.

You have been hired as showrunner. You have been given carte blanche within the terms above. What creative choices do you make with this show? What kind of Trek would you want to make?

Scott Hardie | February 28, 2016
To me, Doctor Who provides both a bad example and a good example of how to revive a dormant sci-fi franchise for a new generation.

Doctor Who aired for decades on British TV, eventually ending in 1989. Naturally, it accumulated a dense sci-fi mythology, full of time-travel concepts and alien races and notable planets and high technology and so on. The Doctor alone is a terribly complicated character, what with the regenerating and the pseudo-exile on Earth and the taking of companions.

The BBC tried to revive the series in 1996, using a two-hour TV movie as a jumping-off point. It jumped off a cliff, creatively speaking. The show tried to pack all of that dense mythology into two incomprehensible hours. The show introduced the Doctor, then killed him in his first scene, then regenerated him with a new actor with no explanation to the audience, all while a recurring villain (the Master) plotted an evil scheme without the audience understanding who he was. The movie was a critical and ratings dud.

In 2005, they tried again, and this time figured out a better approach: Reintroduce slowly. Tell the story from an outsider's perspective. Establish simply that the Doctor is a good alien who protects Earth from bad aliens. Show a few glimpses of his technology without going in deep. Most importantly, keep the show exciting by focusing on adventure and mystery and forward momentum rather than boring exposition. Allow the mythology to creep in slowly; for instance, deliberately pace yourself to one recurring villain per season (Daleks in S1, Cybermen in S2, Master in S3, etc). This approach was a huge success, restoring Doctor Who to cultural-institution and ratings-juggernaut status.

If I ran the new Star Trek, I'd pretty much copy the latter formula. Start with an outsider like Kes who knows little about the galaxy or Starfleet. (The show has long specialized in outsiders interrogating humanity from outside, like Spock and Data and Odo/Quark and Doctor/Seven and T'Pol.) Flesh her/him out as a complex character, not the one-note archetypes that populated Trek's sad later years. Have her/him get stuck on a starship and swept up in an exciting adventure that occupies the first episode, and stay aboard thereafter. Spend time with a charismatic and somewhat mysterious captain in the first episode, but allow only brief glimpses of other crew members and the technology until later episodes. Introduce concepts of the mythology (Starfleet, the Federation, the Prime Directive, etc) only gradually, and avoid techno-babble as much as possible. Bring back old villains at a rate of one per season (Klingons in S1, Romulans in S2, Borg in S3, etc). Make adventure and mystery the primary qualities of the show.

Damn, I'd pay a lot to watch that show. Whatever path they choose, I hope they make a great series.

One more thought: Star Trek was usually better with serialization. (Yes, the Borg appeared too often in Voyager and the "Temporal Cold War" went on too long in Enterprise, but those were problems with going back to the same well too many times, not problems with serialized storytelling in general.) Since this show will exist on a streaming platform where the rules of viewer engagement are different and ongoing serialization is a lot easier to follow, the showrunner should take advantage of the format and consider how to incorporate some long-form storytelling.

Samir Mehta | February 29, 2016
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Scott Hardie | March 4, 2016
Good approach. I do wonder whether some material would be too controversial now. To do stories about terrorism, religious persecution, and refugees, would be to invite anger from the left and/or right depending on how the subtext was perceived. People are so sensitive now. But I suppose some of the material from the sixties, such as the scene where Bill Shatner and Nichelle NIchols kissed, was controversial at the time.