SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Michael Chabon’s job used to consist of writing novels, earning literary acclaim and receiving the occasional prestigious award. But this past June he was racing around the soundstages here at “Star Trek: Picard,” where he was working as an executive producer.
Chabon, a 56-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, strode through hallways decorated with timelines that chronicled the fictional histories of alien empires and stepped onto the set of a futuristic spacecraft. He giggled to himself as he toyed with some of the fake technology, occasionally exclaiming “Engage!,” and flashed a thumbs-up across the room to the “Picard” star Patrick Stewart as he rehearsed a scene.
These were all welcome perks in Chabon’s new line of work. But what drew him to “Star Trek” as a fan in his teens and kept him invested as a producer, he said, was an underlying message about humanity that was hopeful within reason.
“It’s not saying human beings are basically wonderful and if we just learn to agree, all our problems will go away,” he explained. “It takes work. It takes effort.”
So, too, does keeping alive a venerable science-fiction franchise like “Star Trek,” which has been in the public consciousness for nearly 54 years. What began in 1966 with a little-seen television series that was often didactic and deliberately paced has endured as a cultural institution, even as its fortunes have risen and fallen over the years. Its humble beginnings gave rise to a vibrant and dedicated fan base, multiple TV spinoffs and a film franchise that has expanded and contracted many times over.
“Star Trek” is also trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. It helped bring genre entertainment into the mainstream and gave its fans a voice in the conversation about what it should be and where it should go. But it has been eclipsed by its successors — from longtime rivals like “Star Wars” to more recent competitors like the Marvel movies — and is striving to stay relevant.
Now a new era of serialized narratives and streaming content has provided “Star Trek” with that opportunity. On Jan. 23, the first episode of “Picard,” a series that revisits Stewart’s intrepid Starfleet captain from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” will be released on CBS All Access, the network’s streaming service. There, the show joins “Star Trek: Discovery,” whose third season begins later this year. This is an expansive period for “Star Trek,” with at least three more new series in the works, and also a potentially perilous one: there’s no telling yet whether audiences will have an appetite for all of these new shows.
But at a time when entertainment franchises have become the lifeblood of media conglomerates, “Star Trek” — by no means the hippest or flashiest of these pop-cultural juggernauts — journeys on. And the people in charge of the property believe it still has plenty of longevity, as well as pliability and potential for further growth, if they stay true to its idiosyncratic values.
“If you feel that each piece is handcrafted with care, then I think people really appreciate it,” said Alex Kurtzman, an executive producer of the many new “Star Trek” series. “If you feel like a universe is being shoved down your throat for speed and dollars, there’s no faster way to lose an audience.”
Kurtzman, 46, oversees the “Star Trek” TV operations from the inconspicuous offices of his production company, Secret Hideout, in Santa Monica. His work space there is decorated with art and memorabilia celebrating a wide range of geek-culture touchstones — not just “Star Trek,” but “Superman,” “Back to the Future” and “Star Wars.” (That last one, Kurtzman said playfully, “feels like a betrayal.”)
Kurtzman has written and produced genre TV shows including “Alias” and “Fringe,” and his current portfolio includes “Clarice,” a “Silence of the Lambs” spinoff planned for CBS. He is also a writer and producer of the first two entries in the “Star Trek” movie series that was restarted in 2009 with a cast led by Chris Pine as Captain Kirk.
A few years ago, at a time when Kurtzman was encountering professional challenges — he had split with his longtime creative partner, Roberto Orci, and an update of “The Mummy” that he directed had foundered at the box office — he was also approached by CBS to help create a new “Star Trek” TV series.
“Star Trek” was similarly in need of navigational aid. The rebooted film series, which started with a splash, had gone dormant after the muted reception to the movie “Star Trek Beyond” in 2016. The franchise had no TV presence since 2005, when “Star Trek: Enterprise” ran aground.
“We needed each other,” Kurtzman said. “‘Star Trek’ was at a place where it needed to be — reinvented is the wrong word, but rebirthed, in a way.”
“I did not want ‘Star Trek’ to go down on my watch,” he added. “That was something that I knew I could never live down.”
CBS, too, saw fresh television potential for “Star Trek” as the network entered the crowded marketplace of streaming services, where the franchise’s name recognition, along with its iconography of spaceships, phaser guns and pointy-eared extraterrestrials, could help the subscription-based All Access standout.
“Discovery,” created by Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal,” “American Gods”), centered on a Starfleet officer, Michael Burnham (played by Sonequa Martin-Green), whose earliest adventures precede the original “Star Trek” by a few years.
The series faced personnel problems, ballooning costs and production delays, and Fuller left the show before its launch in 2017. His successors, Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts, were pushed out before the debut of Season 2, amid more runaway budgets and allegations of an abusive management style. (Michelle Paradise is the acting showrunner for the coming third season.)
CBS All Access said that “Discovery” is its most-watched original series, though it has not released viewership data. It was sufficiently heartened by the show’s performance to increase its “Star Trek” output.
“It came less from us saying, ‘Let’s take over the world with multiple “Star Trek” shows,’ and more from the fact that these good ideas started to pop out of the creative process,” said Julie McNamara, the executive vice president of original content at CBS All Access.
Kurtzman said he and his colleagues believed there is still a broad enough fan base for “Star Trek” — older and younger, hard-core and casual — that would respond to a range of different programs.
“You can’t feel like you’re getting the same proposition from any two shows,” he said. “They have to feel like they have a ‘Trek’ identity, but they cannot be about the same thing.”
If inclusivity is already a central doctrine of the franchise, Kurtzman said, then “‘Trek’ is perfectly poised to represent everybody, in a very profound way. If we have this platform, let’s double down on this.”
“Picard” will be the next show to test the resilience of the “Star Trek” brand. This series, which has already been renewed for a second season, is perhaps the biggest swing that the TV franchise has taken in years, resting largely on the popularity of its title character and the actor who plays him.
Stewart’s last official onscreen appearance as Jean-Luc Picard occurred in the 2002 film “Star Trek: Nemesis,” and since then he had consistently turned down any overture to return to the fold.
“It was a chapter — several chapters — of my life and career that had a powerful impact on me, and I had moved on,” Stewart said of his “Star Trek” experience. Having trained as a stage actor, he said, “You get used to saying goodbye to something, knowing the chances you will ever return to that world again are very, very unlikely.”
Despite Stewart’s professed reluctance, Kurtzman, Chabon and fellow producers Kirsten Beyer and Akiva Goldsman approached him about two years ago with an idea that had emerged from their brainstorming on “Short Treks,” a current series of “Star Trek”-theme vignettes.
The producers had started to sketch out a story that would find Picard many years after his glory days. A mystery in his life would draw him back to old allies and old enemies — and, eventually, back into space — while forcing him to confront the past circumstances that drove him out of Starfleet.
At their first meeting, Stewart said he told the producers, “I respect you all very much. But that book is closed.” Yet by the end of their conversation, Stewart said he was intrigued by their vision of a world — and a protagonist — changed significantly since “The Next Generation.”
Stewart said he appreciated how the story allowed for “the profound psychological differences in the character, who felt abandoned, distrusted and unnecessary,” rather than presenting a valiant Picard who was in command of every situation he faced.
“Where is he now?” he asked. “What matters to him? What control does he have over his life? Very little, as it turned out.”
Stewart, who is 79, said it was appropriate that Picard should change over time, just as the actor himself has. “I’m still Patrick inside this guy, and yes, there are noticeable differences from how I was 19 years ago,” he said.
As“Star Trek” has evolved over its half-century history into a monolithic and omnipresent institution, it can be easy to forget its scrappy origins. The original series, created by Gene Roddenberry, was never a ratings hit at the time of its network broadcast, which ran three seasons. But during its sustained syndication run in the 1970s, it found a wider fan base — viewers who were passionate about keeping it alive and celebrating it in whatever settings they could find.
Goldsman, a producer of several “Trek” shows and the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “A Beautiful Mind,” has been a “Trek” devotee long enough to remember attending his first fan convention as a teenager in 1976, when a guest appearance by even one cast member — in this case, Walter Koenig, who originated the role of the excitable Chekov — was regarded as a solemn consecration.
Not everything about the show has aged well. “Things that were bold then, we would find potentially insulting now,” Goldsman said — like its depiction of female officers who dressed in miniskirts. But, he added, “What’s weird about ‘Star Trek’ is that it abides.”
Central to its mission, Goldsman said, is an ethos that Roddenberry helped cultivate, one that is inherently broad-minded and representative of human diversity. “It’s not value-neutral,” he said. “‘Star Trek’ has always been upfront about going forward in a good, decent, inclusive way. That’s always its answer.”
What has changed significantly since the introduction of “Star Trek” is the degree to which media companies have grown reliant on franchises — and are reluctant to give up on old properties that might have any familiarity to audiences. “Today, anything, apparently, is worth retrying,” Goldsman said. Looking down at his lunch, he observed, “We could take this plate and reboot it.”
The Marvel movies, which have grossed billions of dollars worldwide, have provided a modern-day template for franchise success: Start with fantasy or science-fiction source material, and create a shared universe in which its characters coexist and cross paths.
“Star Trek” helped set these cultural and financial dynamics in motion many years ago, but its rivals have surpassed it. Even “Star Wars,” whose path as a movie series isn’t immediately clear following “The Rise of Skywalker,” is learning to extend its reach into streaming shows like the Disney Plus series “The Mandalorian.”
Goldsman said he felt that “Star Wars” was the only natural franchise competitor that “Star Trek” faces, and even then it’s not a fair fight. “Because I think ‘Star Wars’ wins,” he said. “‘Star Wars’ has a much bigger footprint. I think they coexist beautifully.”
Chabon has explored the shaky and sometimes destructive relationships among media companies, creators and fans in his novels like “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and has contributed to films based on fantasy properties, like “Spider-Man 2” and “John Carter.”
He has been a “Star Trek” enthusiast since his teens, and credits its obsessive fans with sustaining the franchise in fallow periods when there were no active series or films. “‘Star Trek’ fandom kept ‘Star Trek’ alive,” he said.
But he also has a wariness of fan culture, which he has seen turn fetishistic in a way that is easy for corporations to exploit. He pointed, for example, to the glut of “May the Fourth Be With You” posts that annually fill his Instagram feed on May 4, which has become a “Star Wars” holiday of sorts.
“It’s not like Rosh Hashana, and that’s cool,” Chabon said. “But every time I see that, my next thought is: that’s more money going into the Disney cash registers. You’re engaging in participatory advertising for a product that you’ll never see any profit from.”
Chabon said he was still nursing old wounds from the era of “Enterprise,” which underwent several changes in its creative direction during its four-season run on the low-rated UPN network. “I had gotten excited, like, oh, this sounds cool, and then I felt burned by that one,” he said.
Even when “Discovery” was first announced, Chabon said he was doubtful about it, “in that inherently conservative way that fans are skeptical.”
“I was like, ehhh,” he said. “On the basis of nothing. I didn’t look at it.”
Though Chabon might not seem like an obvious candidate for a career in franchise entertainment, he said that after he turned 50, he told himself, “I’m going to start saying yes to things that I probably would have said no to in the past.” (That included a project where he helped Goldsman create a shared media universe for forgotten toys like Micronauts and Rom the Spaceknight.)
The pleasure of working on “Star Trek,” Chabon said, lies in the push-and-pull of honoring its complex internal history while trying to innovate and add to that canon. “You can let your imagination run wild, and yet, you’re trying to hook onto previously existing stuff in a way that feels consistent and coherent,” he said.
If “Star Trek” ever reaches a point of “supersaturation,” Goldsman said, then people will turn it off. “And then it will do what ‘Star Trek’ does, which is, it’ll go away,” he said. “And hopefully it’ll come back again.”
That is an event horizon the franchise could already be nearing: In addition to “Discovery” and “Picard,” Kurtzman and his company are helping to produce an animated comedy series, “Lower Decks,” and a new live-action series starring Michelle Yeoh, both for CBS All Access, as well as a children’s animated series for Nickelodeon.
As he and his colleagues continue to develop new “Star Trek” ideas, Kurtzman said, “We’re not trying to rush.”
“What I want to make sure of is that each show is a unique proposition,” he said. “Because it only takes one to mess it all up. I understand that we’re playing a little bit of Russian roulette, the more bullets we load into the gun.”
It also remains to be seen how the “Star Trek” TV team will cooperate with the franchise’s film operations, which were resuscitated this past November when Paramount chose Noah Hawley, the creator of TV’s “Fargo,” to write and direct a new “Star Trek” movie. (The movie and TV units became siblings again when Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, merged with CBS last year.)
Kurtzman said that there had not been “any real conversations” between the “Star Trek” movie and TV hemispheres for nearly a decade, adding: “The ink’s not quite dry on the merger, so it’ll take a bit of time for the integration of the two companies to bear fruit. Time will tell. I think a shared universe could be great for ‘Star Trek.’”
Not even the makers of “Star Trek” know exactly what the future holds. But Martin-Green expressed confidence that, whatever shape or form the series takes, there will always be a place for the imaginative parables that it has helped pioneer.
“There are few things in this world that can shift paradigms and change people’s beliefs like sci-fi,” she said, “and so I love the genre for that reason. Because you have these fantastic circumstances that allow people an easy door into these themes. We fall for it. It’s a good fall.”
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