Picard

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Q&A
The Star Trek TV Universe is CBS All Access’ Secret Weapon. Will It Keep Expanding Infinitely?
Talking to Star Trek showrunner Alex Kurtzman and CBS All Access' Julie McNamara about the franchise's streaming future.
BY JOY PRESS
NOVEMBER 29, 2019


Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes in the forthcoming CBS All Access series Picard.TRAE PATTON/CBS ALL ACCESS

As genre franchises go, Star Trek has one of the longest legacies. With CBS preparing to merge with Viacom, a move that will unite the movies and TV series under the same roof via Paramount, some have suggested that it could become a new Marvel Universe for the conglomerate. Right now, there are two separate movies reportedly in the works from Noah Hawley and Quentin Tarantino. Meanwhile, the Star Trek television universe, overseen by Alex Kurtzman, serves as the centerpiece of the originals slate at CBS All Access, the network’s streaming platform.

Unlike Netflix and Amazon, which whip out fresh series at a head-turning rate, CBS All Access has moved slowly, debuting a small number of original programs each year, including The Good Wife’s sterling spin-off The Good Fight, Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot and the glossy Marc Cherry drama Women Who Kill. But the Trek-verse has been the streamer’s secret weapon ever since the 2017 launch of Star Trek: Discovery. It kept doubling down on the bet with short-form series Star Trek: Short Treks and Picard (premiering in January, starring Patrick Stewart), and several more in the works like the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks and Section 31, a series that has Michelle Yeoh reprising her character from Discovery.

“We're in the middle of a merger, and there are a lot of assets that this joint company has that I don't know entirely how that will [come] together,” Julie McNamara, CBS All Access executive vice president of original content, told me last month. “I know that streaming and CBS All Access specifically are a huge priority for the company,” she said. As are originals. “The people who come for originals are by far the stickiest subscribers.... For something like the Star Trek universe, we are putting a ton of resources toward it and we're using serialized storytelling [so] that show is sort of premium version in that universe.” We were talking during the Women in Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles, where she and Kurtzman spoke to me about CBS All Access plans for Star Trek as well as Kurtzman’s other upcoming projects for the platform, like his political miniseries about James Comey, based on the FBI director’s memoir and starring Jeff Daniels and his adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth, which he will make with Jenny Lumet.

Vanity Fair: Tell me about the development process of Picard. Did the fact that you were creating it for CBS All Access change how you conceived of it?

Kurtzman: Julie and I were very excited about the idea of bringing Patrick back. But... he did not want to come back. He said he was never going to play that part again. So we entered into that knowing Patrick is going to have a major, major voice in whatever this becomes if we're going to get him to say yes. He doesn't want to repeat what he's done already, which was by the way, the best bar he could have put forward. The show is inspired by Next Gen, and it's written by people who grew up loving it but it is very much not Next Gen. It feels like a modern adult drama in the world of Star Trek, which has not actually really happened before. It's also singularly about a man in his emeritus years and there are very few franchises that would allow you to have an almost 80 year old lead and tell his story.

It's not like we ever had conversations where All Access said, "Look, we really want it to be this or we really want it to be that." If anything, I think we were coming to them and saying, "Here's what's emerging from the room," and trying to give them real time assessments as the story was breaking. It didn't follow a particularly traditional development process either. Usually there's an outline and then there's everybody reads it and they give notes. We didn't go through that either and I think that was a testament to the trust that Julie gave us.

The writers' room for Picard has Patrick Stewart as well as novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. It must’ve been an interesting room.

Kurtzman: Yes, it was a lot of very strong voices. But the thing that was great about it was that everybody wanted the same thing. So those voices formed a wonderful chorus as opposed to pulling in a bunch of different directions. And everybody has a different superpower in that room, which is exciting, you know what I mean? Because you're like, "OK, what are you going to bring?”

What was Patrick Stewart arguing for?

Kurtzman: Nothing that felt familiar. His constant refrain was: I don't want to do what I've already done. Obviously it's not a secret that the Borg were involved, and his first instinct was not to do the Borg. He was like, "I did that story. I don't want to do that story." And we couldn't just say, "Yeah, but we loved you in it so much, we just want to do that again." And what ended up emerging was actually as a result of that back and forth, a very unique and very different Borg story. Definitely not one that you could have told in Next Generation. And certainly not what I think anyone's expecting.

Star Trek: Discovery stars a number of women of color. Can you tell me about the conversation behind that?

McNamara: We certainly feel that it's important to reflect the culture on our service. And that's not just altruistic, although it is a good and important thing. It's also good business. You really want to reach people in a way that feels specific in terms of characters and story telling.

Kurtzman: About three years ago when, when CBS asked me to consider doing another Star Trek, my first instinct was: it's got to be a woman and it's got to be a woman of color. I'm not interested in having another male captain. We made that very clear and a condition of our involvement and Julie was immediately supportive of it. And one thing I remember very clearly was that we were still casting the morning Trump was elected and somehow in the casting conversation this question came up like, okay, do we have to reconsider this? And we doubled down and said, this is exactly why we have to do this right now. And for me personally, I have a harder time writing men—that's the truth. I don't know why. It's always been the case.

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Michelle Yeoh is going to be the lead of a spinoff based on her role as Philippa Georgiou. Where are you with that show?

McNamara: We are very excited about the Section 31 show and Michelle Yeoh is excited to do it. She is in the current season of Discovery so she's working on that right now but we have scripts getting written, and Alex has a writer's room. We love what we've heard so far. It's yet another tonality of Trek. As Alex has mapped it all out, each show has its own unique sort of voice and vision.

What’s the tonality of this one?

Kurtzman: What we don't want is for you to watch one show and be like, well I don't really need to watch that other Star Trek show cause I've already watched Discovery or whatever. So to me Section 31 is sort of like the black ops CIA division of Star Trek and it was established in Deep Space 9. Full credit goes to Michelle Yeoh for coming to me and saying in season one, before we even launched, “I want to do a spin off of my character!” With Michelle Yeoh, it's very hard to say no.

This was like a year before Crazy Rich Asians came out and we had not launched Discovery yet. No one had seen it. So I was like, let's have one show that hopefully people like and we can talk about it. Once Discovery happened, I brought it to Julie and she immediately said, great, let's develop it. Erica [Lippoldt] and Bo Yeon [Kim], two writers on our Discovery staff, started writing a pilot and it's really different. It occupies an area of the Trek universe that's never really been explored geographically. It has a new mythology to it, which is very interesting. And it puts Michelle's character to the test in a lot of ways that Discovery can't. In some ways it will be her Unforgiven, I would say.

When we're talking about inclusivity we're also talking in terms of age, too, because these are some seasoned actors and actresses.

Kurtzman: The beauty of Star Trek and its vision—and I take no credit for this at all—is that it imagined a world where all of these things that we're talking about now were not conversation pieces. Race, diversity, gender, sexual preference. Those are things we don't talk about in the world of Star Trek. We've just moved past all that and it's gorgeous. It's the most amazing ideal and it's part of why I think it's survived for 50 plus years—because there's people who would like to believe that our best selves will emerge in the future…..Star Trek was a pioneer in allowing people to see themselves on screen in a genre that they had never seen themselves before. This has never hit harder for me than when I got to spend an afternoon with Dr. Mae Jemison, who was the first female African American astronaut in space. I fell madly in love with her and I asked, why [become] an astronaut? And she said, “Uhura! I saw Uhura!” So I felt that responsibility... to create more Uhurus.

There's a real tug of war over over talent these days. Why go with CBS All Access?

Kurtzman: Julie and I met, what was it, 18 years ago? We have a long relationship with each other and the thing that I need most, anywhere I go, is trust…. Julie never says, this is what you can and can't do. It's, what can you dream up and how can I make it possible? On network there's rigid time constraints and there's rules about what you can and can't say or can't show. We don't have any of those strictures on All Access.

You’re also working together on a miniseries about James Comey. The news moves so fast that it’s impossible to imagine what the political world will look like when your project is ready. Does that matter?

Kurtzman : I don't think it will because it is honestly a documentation of what happened—it has been crafted to be a historical record. We actually are not interested in rewriting the past. Many people are, but we're not!

McNamara: I think of it in the sense of something like Game Change or Recount, where you felt like it was very much about the events of a relatively small period of time. And the important thing is that it feel resonant and relevant to an audience when they're watching that. And it'll be interesting to see where the culture is and who is running the country...but I think what the material essentially talks about is way bigger in terms of our democracy.

As a character, Comey is not your prestige cable antihero...

Kurtzman: He's divisive. ... We all have a bias. We all were like, he's the guy whose choices ended up turning the election. And the fact is that it's much more complicated than that. ... It was a confluence of many, many people and many, many events.

McNamara: I also think it's fascinating to look at individuals in what turns out to be a pivotal moment in history. Let's say, hypothetically, you're taking an essentially good man and you're putting him in a situation where the tides of the culture are shifting in ways that maybe he doesn't see.... They're just real people making decisions in real time.

This interview has has been edited and condensed for clarity.

We don't have a Picard thread yet, just a trailer on the kung fu star trek people thread. Maybe we'll split that off some day.

We do have a Section 31 thread. It's Michelle.

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I like that the CBS Access Star Treks have upped their fight choreo. ST: DISCO had some decent hand-to-hand, largely due to Michelle Yeoh. TOS had good fight choreo for its day, largely due to Shatner. It was caricature, but hey, they were in space.