I stumbled across this today: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ 2017 CBS TV series:Everything we know so far
While we don’t have much information yet about the actors who will appear in Star Trek: Discovery, we do know something about the characters that will be featured in the show.
Bryan Fuller confirmed in August 2016 that the series’ cast will include at least one gay character, as well as the expected robot and alien characters, and that the series will also feature a female lead. At the 2016 Television Critics Association (via CNN), Fuller told the crowd that the casting choices were part of Star Trek’s history of offering “a wonderful expression of diversity in its cast.” While we don’t know the lead character’s name at present, we do know more about her role — and what we can expect her to be called.
Fuller told Ain’t It Cool News that the female lead character will be referred to as “Number One” throughout much of the first season, and won’t be the captain of the ship. The showrunner promised that we’d learn the character’s real name before the end of the season, though.
Are they really planning to hide the main characters name ?
On that note, how many TNG episodes did it take Picard (the only Trek character I can recall referring to another by "Number One") to refer to Riker by name ?
We also know quite a bit about who will be behind the camera for Discovery — and there’s plenty of Star Trek history there.
Fuller, who created the popular Hannibal series, got his start on television writing for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. He’s joined by Nicholas Meyer, the writer and director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who will serve as a writer and consulting producer on the new show.
Along with Fuller and Meyer in both producer and creative roles on the series, Alex Kurtzman (the co-writer of the 2009 Star Trek movie that rebooted the franchise) and Eugene Roddenberry (the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry) will serve as executive producers on the show.
Fuller and Kurtzman will pen the first one-hour episode of the series, with Meyer scripting the second episode.
It was announced (by Deadline) just before San Diego Comic-Con that the director of the first episode of the series will be David Semel, a two-time nominee for the Primetime Emmy Award who has a long history of directing the first episodes of celebrated series. Along with directing the pilot episodes of Heroes and Person of Interest, Semel is well known for directing episodes of American Dreams, House, and the pilot episode of the recent, acclaimed Amazon Studios series The Man in the High Castle.
Boldly going … where, exactly?
At this point, CBS is keeping many of the story details for Star Trek: Discovery under wraps. However, the teaser promised “new crews,” “new villains,” “new heroes,” and “new worlds” — suggesting that we’ll see something that unfolds within the canon of the established Star Trek universe, but not directly tied to the events in the movies.
During San Diego Comic-Con, another teaser for the series was released, this time featuring the “test flight” of the U.S.S. Discovery, likely to be the space-traveling base of operations for the cast.
In mid August, Fuller confirmed that the first season of the series will be set ten years before the start of the original Star Trek television series, and unfold within the “Prime” universe (as opposed to the recently rebooted Star Trek movie universe).
“That gives us an opportunity to bridge the gap between Enterprise and the original series,” Fuller said (via CNN) of the series’ placement between the four-season prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise and the original 1966 series that spawned the entire franchise.
Fuller told Ain’t It Cool News that the series could have theoretically unfolded in either the original “Prime” universe or the “Kelvin” timeline (the rebooted movie universe), but setting it in the Prime timeline allowed the creative team to avoid the need to coordinate with the big-screen creative team on the continuity.
Instead they need to keep all of TV Trek in mind. Which seems harder than coordinating a bit with the movie writers to make sure they stay well out of each others way.
“Really when we developed the story it could take place in either Prime or Kelvin so the timeline was relatively inconsequential,” he explained. “But there was the cleanliness of keeping our series independent of the films. That way we don’t have to track anything [happening in the movie universe] and they don’t have to track what we’re doing. And you can have two distinct universes — one where Sulu is straight and one where Sulu is gay.”
Interesting that they point to Sulu's sexuality as their example of how the two universes differ. Something that really shouldn't affect this series at all.
Early rumors suggested that the series will be an anthology project of some sort, akin to American Horror Story or Fargo, with each season set in a different point in the Star Trek timeline and featuring different characters and cast members.
The latest news also confirms what CBS has made clear since the beginning: the series won’t be a spinoff of Star Trek Beyond and the rebooted franchise, so don’t expect any Marvel-style cinematic tie-ins with the rebooted film franchise.
Set phasers to ‘binge’
According to Bryan Fuller (via Collider), the first season of Star Trek: Discovery will unfold over 13 episodes, telling one complete story over the course of the season instead of a new, self-contained story each episode. The structure lends itself to the increasingly popular binge-watching habits of the modern television audience, which makes sense given that the series will air on Netflix and the network’s own streaming, on-demand video service.
Which means far less temptation to pull in an enemy of the week that everyone somehow forgets about by the time of TNG.
According to Fuller, the series isn’t likely to go beyond 13 episodes per season, and he’d actually like to see fewer episodes in a single season going forward.
“I would strongly recommend that we never do 26 episodes,” he told Ain’t It Cool News in August. “I think it would fatigue the show. Ideally I would like to do 10 episodes. I think that’s a tighter story.”
One element of the show that was confirmed early on is the show’s ties to Netflix and the CBS All Access streaming service.
In mid-July 2016, it was announced that the series will premiere on the standard CBS television network in January 2017, but subsequent episodes will be available exclusively on CBS All Access (which requires a monthly subscription) for audiences in Canada and the U.S. In addition, the series will be available on Netflix for international audiences in 188 other countries. Netflix will reportedly get each episode within 24 hours of its premiere on CBS All Access.
Statistics: Posted by bilateralrope — 2016-09-04 05:11am