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i thought starfleet academy already came out? 😜
Kurtzman does confirm Klingons will be a part of the show; more specifically a “Klingon hybrid species who are several of our main characters.”
And then we have this, seen on TrekCore’s Bluesky:
Kling’Hadar?
Has to be.
Not much concrete here beyond the images, so I’ll just comment on those:
- Lots of amber lighting. Seems like it’s always sunset at the academy.
- I’m really digging the new uniforms.
- Curious about the significance of the wall of names. A whole lot of familiar names on there from almost every era of the franchise.
- Picardo looks like he’s ready to have a lot of fun in the role.
- Nice to see the new bridge, but that’s an ugly captain’s chair. Obviously supposed to harken back to the TOS style, but while TOS had a minimalistic elegance to its blockiness, this one feels way too busy.
My excitement was starting to die down thanks to the dearth of news, but hot damn, this show looks gorgeous. There’s some really interesting stuff in the interview, too:
“If you’re going to do a show about a young generation facing the future and you want it, as all Star Trek does, to be a mirror that holds itself up to the world as it is now, to situate the show in the halcyon days of the Federation would, in some ways, be dishonest,” Kurtzman, a showrunner on Starfleet Academy with Noga Landau, tells Entertainment Weekly. (The halycon days was a time period when the Federation of Planets enjoyed peace and prosperity.) “Our children are facing a lot of challenges right now and they are our hope for the future…They’ve got a lot riding on their shoulders, and they are meant to reestablish and rebuild everything that we all know and love about Star Trek,” Kurtzman continues. “They convey hope and they search for hope, and that felt like an extremely relevant message to talk about now.”
Landau adds, “It’s wish fulfillment. Every week it’s about a new part of coming of age. One week that can be a prank, war erupts another week, a romance begins another week, we encounter an alien species for the first time and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing [another week]. But at the end of every episode, what we want our audience to feel is, ‘I want to go to Starfleet Academy.’ Even in the deepest, darkest depths of character problems and drama, you get such a good feeling from watching this show [of] how much you want to be there so badly.”
“One of the things that we see all across the world now is how much hate is relied on to sow division between things that connect us as human beings and how hate is used as a bludgeon to destroy empathy, which I think is ultimately what Star Trek is about,” Kurtzman explains. “At its core, it’s about: We may not look the same, but we are the same. Finding that common ground and figuring out a way to understand our differences is at the heart of what [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry was talking about.”
Without revealing too much, Kurtzman explains that Giamatti’s character “represents a tide that has swept across the world in a very profound and upsetting way,” he continues. “I say this without taking a political stance. That is part of what it means to invite everybody into the tent. One of my favorite things about Star Trek is that it reaches across the aisle. People on all sides of the political spectrum love it for different reasons. That is something that we really wanted to hold true to here.”
It also seems like we might learn a lot more tomorrow:
The creative leads are keeping many of the character details under wraps until the big Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con this Saturday, but they confirm Holly Hunter plays the lead of the series, that of the captain and chancellor of the academy.
I agree. The more we see, the more enthusiastic I am.
The concept of an Academy show was in development hell for so long - basically, since the hiatus after Discovery’s first season.
And we know that it was originally kicked around before TNG went into production.
So, this seems to have been a hard one to make work. The cost to produce a high quality VFX-rich show that appeals to a teen and young adult demographic, requires that the show must also be rich enough elements to draw the wider Trek base.
I’m hopeful that, as with Prodigy, Starfleet Academy may be one of the rare shows that satisfies a mass demographic despite the streaming era.
The risk is that, like Prodigy, Paramount may not promote it broadly enough.
However, with A-listers heading the cast, one can hope that it will get a lot of promotion beyond the genre media.
Honestly, my biggest fear is that Paramount+ may not have a lot of the demographic they’re trying to capture.
How many young adults subscribe to that thing?
We’ll have to see whether David Ellison reorients the scheduling strategically. It’s hard to imagine he will not.
5 years ago, as the transition was happening after the remerger, the demographic statistics I saw showed that CBSAA/P+ had the best range of demographics. And it had the best youth/teen/kids audience after Disney+.
Unlike, NBC Universal’s problem with Peacock and Discovery+, which had two very different demographics with little interest the content the other offered, Paramount+ launched with a broad and diverse base.
But the programming and production choices of the past five years have brutally squandered that. It seems that the millennial, middle age Bro, and older male audience has been the target — live sports, Taylor Sheridan everything etc.
It already feels as though P+ has been reprogrammed to make the current US administration happy, pushing a certain kind of American exceptionalism, but that’s not a successful global business strategy.
It’s really only the content coming in from CBS linear and Star Trek that’s kept the balance on the platform.
We keep hearing about content being produced in Paramount’s South American studios or in agreements with partners in Spain and France, but none of that richness in offerings are making it to the North American platform. Netflix remains dominant in offering high quality content from outside Hollywood.
one of the photos shows a wall with many known names. it seems nothing interesting happened in starfleet between LD and DSC.
also. why is Joseph Mbenga listed as CDR instead of CMDR? (assuming it is him)
Commodore?
Commodore should be abbreviated to Cmdre (Canadian Navy), CDRE (former US Navy) or CMDE (several including India).
But given all the oddities of NCOs in Trek, this a weird acronym for Commodore seems on-brand.
Still, I think it may be some kind of physicians’ designation the writers came up with. One would expect some kind of Medical Officer such as CMO, but could it be Commanding Doctor or something bizarre like that?
This looks very slick, but I hope it isn’t style over substance like Discovery was. Discovery was terrible but it sure did look nice. I’m keeping my expectations on the floor for this show.
That’s a cool pattern
