Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) is currently hard at work crafting the first new Star Trek television series in over a decade for CBS All Access. The Star Trek films have always been fun, but the franchise is at its best on the small screen, so I'm quite excited to see what this new series will bring. Collider spoke with Fuller on the red carpet for the Saturn Awards recently and managed to get a new new details about the upcoming series out of him.
On how excited he is to be given the keys to the "Lamborghini":
It’s interesting you say “Lamborghini” because we’re looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It’s wonderful. It’s surreal. I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven’t been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it’s a dream come true. It’s hard to articulate that.
On when he can start revealing specifics about the new series:
I imagine around Comic-Con. It’s interesting because normally I love talking about everything, and I’m sort of relieved I’ve been muzzled by CBS on it because I do less interviews, so I can spend more time writing, but I love talking about Star Trek and I love being involved in it, so I’ll be very excited to share when the muzzle comes off of me.
On where they're at with casting:
I’ve met with a few actors, and it’s an interesting process. There’s a few people that we like and we want to carry on what Star Trek does best, which is being progressive. So it’s fascinating to look at all of these roles through a colorblind prism and a gender-blind prism, so that’s exciting.
The new series will also contain fewer episodes than we've been used to with a Star Trek show as Fuller says that it will consist of 13 episodes. I've always preferred shorter seasons for just about every series, so this a welcome confirmation. Also, because the series is being set up at CBS All Access they won't be subject to network broadcast standards and practices, which will give them a little more leeway with the type of content they can present. It will also mean that the series won't have to fit into the 44 minutes common to most hour-long series; Fuller didn't give specifics but he hinted that episodes could fall anywhere between 40-60 minutes depending on what the story called for.
The new series will begin shooting in Toronto this September and Fuller says that they're "got the arc of the first season entirely written, or arced out, and we’ve got the first six episodes entirely broken." Meanwhile, STAR TREK BEYOND, the next film in the Star Trek franchise, hits theaters on July 22, 2016.