Strange New Worlds will be a return to the past for the Star Trek franchise. The next installment in the fan-favorite franchise will debut on Paramount+, and it will focus more on bringing weekly adventures to fans than on serialized storytelling. In a lengthy interview with THR, Strange New Worlds producer Akiva Goldsman bets that hardcore fans will enjoy returning to the origins.
“It’s unlike the other shows in that it’s really episodic,” he said. “If you think back to The Original Series, it was a tonally more liberal — I don’t mean in terms of politics, but it could sort of be more fluid. Like sometimes Robert Bloch would write a horror episode. Or Harlan Ellison would have “City on the Edge of Forever,” which is hard sci-fi. Then there would be comedic episodes, like “Shore Leave” or “The Trouble With Tribbles.” So [co-showrunner] Henry Alonso Myers and myself are trying to serve that. We’ve all become very enamored, myself included, with serialized storytelling. And I’m talking to you from behind the stage where we’re shooting Picard, which is deeply serialized. But Strange New Worlds is very much adventure-of-the-week but with serialized character arcs.”
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Goldsman went on to add that they have slightly adjusted the Enterprise uniforms from what fans saw in Discovery. At the same time, he stressed that they are looking at The Original Series for their new project. Ultimately, he explained that he’s the one deserving credits for convincing CBS to develop the spin-off series.
“There are few things I will take credit for in the Star Trek universe, but this is actually one of them,” he said. “When [executive producer] Alex Kurtzman called about [joining the Discovery team], I was wildly envious of any involvement in Star Trek because I love it so much — my very first Star Trek convention was in 1975. I had no idea what his show was about, so I went online and I started reading that it was clearly going to be about Captain Pike and Number One. So that’s what I thought I was going to join. Then I got there and it couldn’t have had less to do with Captain Pike and Number One. So I started agitating for them because the timelines overlapped with Discovery and the Enterprise was out there. When the Enterprise appeared at the end of season one, and once Anson [Mount] and Rebecca [Romijn] and Ethan [Peck] started living those characters in season two, it sort of became this wonderful inevitability.”
CBS has yet to announce an official release date for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. However, a late 2021 or an early 2022 debut seems likely.
What do you make of Goldsman’s words on Strange New Worlds? Let us know in the comment section below!
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