More information has been revealed about CBS’ new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Discovery. The new details came from showrunner Bryan Fuller during an interview with Ain’t it Cool News.
Fuller, whose previous television work includes Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, revealed that the show’s lead character, a female Starfleet officer, would be called “Number One”. The name is a reference to a character played by Majel Barret in The Cage, the pilot for the original Star Trek series. Fuller also said that Number One’s real name would be revealed at some point in the first season.
Star Trek: Discovery will have a much shorter season than previous live-action Trek series, clocking in at 13 episodes. According to Fuller, the shorter season will allow him and his writers to come up with tighter story arcs and avoid “filler” episodes. When asked what he would do if CBS asked for a 26-episode season in the future, Fuller said “I would strongly recommend that we never do 26 episodes. I think it would fatigue the show. Ideally I would like to do 10 episodes. I think that’s a tighter story”.
Fuller revealed that while he and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek: Into Darkness) will be writing the first hour of the show, acclaimed director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) will be writing the second hour. Gretchen Berg (Roswell, Pushing Daisies) and Aaron Harberts (Revenge, Wonderfalls) will be joining Fuller as co-showrunners, and Jesse Alexander (Heroes, Hannibal) will be part of the writing staff.
The show will be set in the “Prime” timeline of The Original Series and The Next Generation, as opposed to the “Kelvin” timeline introduced in the J.J. Abrams-produced Star Trek films. This is in order to keep Star Trek: Discovery “independent of the films”, Fuller said. “That way we don’t have to track anything [happening in the movies], and [the movies] don’t have to track what we’re doing”.
When asked how much progress had been completed on the show so far, Fuller said that the first three scripts had been written, and that the writers “have outlines for [episodes] four and five”.
Fuller also said that “We’ll probably have some [casting] announcements in October[…]We’ve met with fantastic actors and of course there are people I’ve worked with before that I’d love to see on Star Trek. We’re trying to figure out everybody’s schedules”.
In regards to whether or not Discovery will use the classic Star Trek theme as its intro music, all Fuller had to say was: “That’s still under discussion”.
Star Trek: Discovery will premiere on CBS sometime in January 2017 in the United States, with Netflix making episodes available to stream in other countries 24 hours after their original broadcast.