Star Trek Discovery Gets Delayed After Losing Showrunner Bryan Fuller (variety.com)

It looks like we're going to have to wait even longer for CBS's upcoming Star Trek Discovery series, as the production's showrunner, Bryan Fuller, is stepping back. He will however still remain the show's executive producer. Variety reports: The decision was made late last week to hand the day-to-day showrunning reins to "Star Trek" exec producers Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts as "Discovery" gears up for the start of filming next month and a May 2017 premiere date. Fuller, who will remain an executive producer, will still be involved in breaking stories, and the show will continue to follow his vision for the universe that this latest "Trek" series will inhabit. Writer-director Akiva Goldsman is also expected to join "Discovery" in a top creative role. He's envisioned as serving as producing support for Berg and Harberts, Fuller and exec producer Alex Kurtzman as they juggle the demands of the series that CBS is counting on to be the marquee selling point for subscriptions to its CBS All Access SVOD service. Sources said there had been some strain between "Star Trek" producer CBS Television Studios and Fuller over the progress of production on the show, as Fuller is also juggling the final weeks of shooting and post-production duties on Starz's upcoming drama "American Gods" and prepping a reboot of "Amazing Stories" for NBC. Fuller has penned the first two scripts for "Discovery" and has hammered out the broader story arc and mythology for the new "Trek" realm. But it became clear that he couldn't devote the amount of time needed for "Discovery" to make its premiere date and with production scheduled to start in Toronto next month.

Comments

They tell you upfront it isn't going to be good

[Anonymous Coward]

So why worry

Set 10 years before the events of the original Star Trek series,[2] the series follows the crew of the USS Discovery as they discover new worlds and civilizations, while exploring the franchise's signature contemporary themes.[3][4] The season-long storyline revolves around "an incident and an event in Star Trek history that's been talked about but never been explored".[2]

Number One: A female minority character serving as a lieutenant commander aboard the Discovery. The decision to not make the character a starship captain, like previous Star Trek series' protagonists, was made "to see a character from a different perspective on the starship—one who has a different dynamic relationships with a captain, with subordinates, it gave us richer context".[2] The decision to call her 'Number One' was made in honor of the character of the same name portrayed by Majel Barrett in the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage". When the character was first pitched to CBS, she was to only be called Number One in the series, but her real name will ultimately be revealed before the end of the first season.[6]

They made their priority pushing diversity as the theme and put the science fiction in the back. If you want a tv show about freakish aliens pushing diversity point your browser at a San Francisco Web Cam, no need to subscribe to CBS.

Re:They tell you upfront it isn't going to be good

[gl4ss]

..look, if you write it into synopsis and PLAN for the whole series that it is a female minority then yeah it kind of is pushing diversity.

notice that they didn't specify something like "a female of asian descent" or "a funny fat black woman" - they had no idea what the plot is going to be besides facing odds and prejudice and prevailing against misogynist racist system by pure talent of the person. sounds nice yeah? sounds like star trek? of course not.

they had not decided on anything else than it is a woman and minority. never mind it has not been addressed that much which race is in minority in star trek except that nobody is really and they are all equal.

"so who is in this show? janet jackson? selma hayek?" "uh I don't know. it's just some female minority person, we can sort it out later" "so do I write the backstory as someone from .. where exactly? lost the family at a young age or what?" "hmm that doesnt matter, just make it very female struggle and put some racism in the backstory too so it's very good".

who the fuck designs a tv show like that - that's what I want to know. how many female captains there are in USA navy at the moment anyways? if you want to know why captains in star trek og series were all male. I doubt they thought up any backstory to that.

Re:They tell you upfront it isn't going to be good

[rocket rancher]

What made Star Trek great was that these things were exactly treated as non-issues. Like, say, in the future, we consider it ridiculous that we even have to mention that women can command ships or that black people hold power on stations. Even TOS had an alien as the second in command (and admittedly, it was made a theme far more often than necessary).

Well said. Roddenberry's optimistic view of the future is the reason most often cited when people talk about the appeal of ST:TOS.

Trek, in its original run, was adept at tipping the sacred cows of gender, ethnic, and political identity (Uhura, Sulu/Uhura, and Chekov, respectively).

But I think you missed one sacred cow by dismissing the role Spock played in Roddenberry's attack on societal mores. Roddenberry wanted to skewer religious sensibilities as well cultural ones, so he gave one character green skin and pointed ears to make him look like a demon, and would have given him wings and a tail if it had been in the costume budget. Having a demon as a sympathetic character striving to be more human (a trope, btw, that has firmly embedded itself in the Trek franchise a la Data, Odo, and B'Ellana) Roddenberry was taking aim at the religiosity that was (and still is) a core American demographic.

The racism and religiosity that Roddenberry baited in TOS fifty years ago is still a legitimate target in the US, so it will be interesting to see which sacred cows Discovery is going to try to tip, if it remains true to its roots.

Re:Showrunner?

[Anonymous Coward]

He was a writer on Star Trek Voyager. Bad stuff.
Putting him together with Star Trek is like giving an alcoholic a drink. Much better off when kept apart.

Re:Easy win so load show up with friends

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Horse shit. It costs about as much as Netflix and all it offers is the CBS library. I already own all the Star Trek that there is, and can watch it any time without streaming on their shit service. What else am I going to watch? Murder She Wrote?

$7/month (or $10/month if I don't want to be forced to watch unskippable commercials) for one show, as opposed to all the content I can get on Netflix... fuck that.

The commercials again... UNSKIPPABLE. This isn't what the consumer wanted, this is what the network executives wanted.

Re:The Great Bird of the Galaxy....

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

This is such a sad situation, as corporations are cashing in on the legacy of Gene Roddenberry.

Since his death, the echoes of his influence have faded. Resulting in a "Star Trek in name only" sci-fi universe.

Unfortunately there are always people like you. I'll bet you watched maybe a handful of episodes of anything not TOS or STTNG (maybe not even that) and dismissed them. Or maybe you've never seen anything after STTNG. The people I know who bitch the most in the USA about airline security are people who never, ever fly. The people who bitch the most about Trek after TOS are those who never watched it either.

As a long time fan, I can tell you that Roddenberry's influence and importance to Trek is vastly overrated. Season 3 of TOS was pretty much done with him in a caretaker role. Season 3 wasn't perfect (Spock's Brain) but it did have some really good episodes too. The Next Generation only got good after Roddenberry's influence waned due to health issues and Michael Piller basically ran things. Roddenberry had a fairly negative influence on STTNG in my opinion. He demanded rewrites that weren't necessary or better just to push his own particular vision of the future. He was kind of infamous before STTNG started for maybe being way too focused on trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of TOS, not because he loved Trek, but because he loved the money it brought. He was also kind of infamous for not paying his employees very well, which led to the situation where to avoid giving some assistant a raise he gave the guy a new job title instead and in theory made that guy the sole determiner of what was and was not Star Trek canon. That led to this guy saying that Star Trek The Animated Series was not canon, a decision still not accepted by a large number of Trek fans. Note that Roddenberry himself never said that the animated series wasn't canon. He let some dude who worked for him make the determination because it allowed him to avoid giving the guy a raise. I appreciate what he did, with some reservations, for Trek. Note that good people like David Gerrold and DC Fontana had little to no impact on STTNG because of issues either directly with Roddenberry or issues with others that he could have but chose not to resolve. Roddenberry deserves some big criticism in my opinion for the whole Gates McFadden issue where she was fired after season 1 because she complained about the sexist scripts in the season. Patrick Stewart has stated that he was shocked when she was fired because he and others on the show felt the same way about the scripts. Note that Roddenberry had a huge influence on the season 1 scripts so he was either personally responsible for a lot of what she complained about or simply did nothing to tone it down. Roddenberry may not have been the person who fired her, but he sure as hell didn't fight it and jumped at the chance to bring on his old friend Diana Muldaur to replace McFadden. McFadden returned for season 3 probably because Roddenberry's health had declined to a point where he couldn't really do anything on STTNG any more. But he deserves some praise too. He let Denis Crosby out of her contract in season 1 as a person favor to her when he didn't have to. Wil Wheaton also has very good things to say about him. It's a bit of a mixed legacy.