On the big screen, Star Trek remains very much in a holding pattern until Paramount decide on how exactly they want to move forward with the franchise, but on television, the brand is positively flourishing. Executive producer Alex Kurtzman already has the short-term future mapped out until at least 2027, though recent developments indicate that he’ll need a lot more content to satisfy those in the boardroom.
The imminent rebranding and expansion from CBS All Access to Paramount+ will require a huge volume of original and exclusive movies/shows as the platform tries to gain a foothold in the increasingly competitive streaming wars, and luckily, the studio has Star Trek at their disposal. There are already a multitude of either returning or new series in the works, but Executive Vice President Julie McNamara doesn’t want to stop there, as she revealed plans to have a new show drop every quarter.
“We are in discussions about the next phase of the Trek universe beyond those five shows that Alex has built. We are invested in growing the universe of Star Trek. That said, it’s important to make sure that we are curating these properly. We’re always incubating a number of things together and then working out what the right cadence is and what the right next show is. Those are active and constant conversations. There are multiple things in the hopper right now that represent that next phase but we don’t want to expand it too much, too fast to where anyone is ever saying, ‘It’s just another Trek show’. We don’t want that.”
Some fans might be thrilled about this, but there’s always the risk of overkill if the plan is to debut a brand new series every three to four months, with audience fatigue a real possibility. At the moment, we’ve already got new seasons of Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks in the works, while Prodigy will debut in a matter of months and Strange New Worlds recently kicked off production.
Then again, the mythology is so vast that none of these hypothetical quarterly Star Trek shows would even need to step on each other’s toes, and as The Next Generation veteran Ronald D. Moore recently explained, it’s not as if the franchise has ever been lacking when it comes to telling the sort of engaging long-form stories the movies simply can’t manage.