You’ve heard of it, haven’t you? The Golden Age of television? The actual term can be traced back to the early ’50s, when the small screen was teeming with hour-long anthology dramas. By the 2000s, the Golden Age took on a new form to encompass such top-tier series like Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and, more recently, HBO’s ongoing Game of Thrones.
The latter is fast approaching its penultimate season on the airwaves – July 16th is the date for your diaries – and Alex Kurtzman, director and producer of The Mummy, considers Game of Thrones to be a shining example of a property that helps blur the line between film and television. From the sprawling drama to Thrones‘ industry-standard production values, it’s difficult to argue against Kurtzman’s point, and while doing the press rounds for Universal’s eerie reboot/franchise-starter, the filmmaker touched base on Star Trek: Discovery, a project on which he holds a producing credit, to discuss why CBS’ long-anticipated reboot is also poised to push the envelope storytelling wise.
Per Collider:
Look, here’s the other thing that’s happening, and you know this to be true. The line between film and television is utterly blurred. Not just at a storytelling level, but visually now. What we’re doing on Star Trek right now, that’s not that different from what we’re doing in the movies. I think that’s what people expect when they pay for Netflix, or for HBO, or whatever they’re going to pay for. That actually makes…as a storyteller, it makes it, in the many ways, you’re not limited by ‘oh, we could never really do that on television scope wise’ because now, take a look at Game of Thrones. That’s a movie.
Once slated for a January premiere, Discovery has since been pushed back to a late 2017 premiere on CBS. It’s a tale that grew in the telling, then – quite literally, after the network bumped the episode count to 15 – and after 12 years without a small-screen Star Trek TV series, it’s small wonder why there’s a hushed excitement surrounding the impending reboot.
Headed up by First Officer Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs), Spock’s father, Sarek (James Frain), Lt. Saru (Doug Jones), and Lt. Stamets (Anthony Rapp), Sonequa Martin-Green’s Number One will spearhead Star Trek: Discovery into the dark recesses of space later in 2017.
