Star Trek Discovery Gets Delayed Again As Spock's Father Is Cast (hollywoodreporter.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hollywood Reporter: CBS All Access' Star Trek: Discovery has been delayed again as the series continues casting. The revival for the streaming platform has cast James Frain as Spock's father, producer CBS Television Studios announced Wednesday, as sources confirm that the show's planned May debut has been pushed. "Production on Star Trek: Discovery begins next week. We love the cast, the scripts and are excited about the world the producers have created," reps for CBS All Access said in a statement. "This is an ambitious project; we will be flexible on a launch date if it's best for the show. We've said from the beginning it's more important to do this right than to do it fast. There is also added flexibility presenting on CBS All Access, which isn't beholden to seasonal premieres or launch windows." Frain will play Sarek, the famed father of Spock who was first introduced in the original Star Trek and who has made several appearances throughout the franchise's many incarnations over the past five decades. The CBS All Access show features the franchise's Enterprise, now known as the U.S.S. Discovery. The drama will introduce new characters seeking new worlds and civilizations while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966. Star Trek: Discovery was originally scheduled to debut in January and was pushed back to May, with The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight now set to be the first scripted offering on CBS All Access, the network's VOD platform. This marks the second delay for the series, which saw former showrunner Bryan Fuller step down to focus on his Starz drama American Gods.

Comments

Re:Dramatic contemporary issues

[AmiMoJo]

Star Trek has always been "SJW". Its vision of the future is idealized, mostly free from prejudice and highly progressive, mostly atheist in the Federation, and with a strong sense of fairness and social justice. Many, many episodes are based on some kind of prejudice or social injustice, and the members of Starfleet getting involved and resolving them.

For example, Data is a machine but has at least some of the rights afforded to other lifeforms, which he had to repeatedly fight for, awful SJWs that he and his friends and advocates were. There were numerous TOS episodes where they alluded to race relations. In The Drumhead a rabid right wing nut starts a McCarthyesq witch hunt for enemies of the federation, and Picard defends her victim's rights with an impassioned speech.

Re:Jumped the shark a long while ago

[AmiMoJo]

Have you seen Star Trek Continues? You can watch it for free on YouTube. It has the original characters, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Checkov, but played by new actors. They filmed it in the original style, 4:3 with the same lighting, music, even 60s style direction and camera angles. And it's brilliant. Better than the original series in many ways.

I guess they thought something like that would be too niche, or were not brave enough to have new actors do what amount to impressions of the old ones. The guy who plays Kirk in Continues has it down to perfection, every mannerism, speech pattern, facial expression...

But no, they went with the crappy reboot, which is basically an action movie in space, barely related to Trek at all. Generic, forgettable bad guys... Khan was nearly good, but ultimately under-used and overshadowed by the enemy-within storyline.

This new show, going back to the prime timeline, has the potential to be good. It's an interesting time in Trek's fictional history. Women apparently can't be starship captains, the Federation is fairly new and not as solid as it is by the Next Generation era. The galaxy is a more dangerous place, and people are still struggling to get to the level of social justice and post-everything society that we see a century later. It's just that there will be inevitable demands to make it action oriented and dumbed down, so it needs strong advocates for real Trek values and ideas.