Star Trek’s Civil War: Part 2
Star Trek’s Civil War Part 2 — Star Trek’s Revival And Subsequent Downfall
Greetings fellow Star Trek fans! This is the second part of my examination surrounding the mismanagement of the Star Trek franchise by the corporate entities which own it. If you have not yet read part one, please do so by clicking this link:
The first article in the series was meant to establish the history of Star Trek and its rise to prominence in the late 80s and early 90s. It was also meant to establish its ultimate downfall at the hands of Viacom and their failed attempt to launch the UPN network, which ultimately destroyed the franchise on television.
This article will focus on Star Trek’s revival by Paramount Studios at the hands of J.J. Abrams and his production company Bad Robot. It will also touch on how Star Trek was brought back to TV through CBS All-Access with the release of its latest entry, Star Trek: Discovery, bringing us to the current state of Star Trek across all platforms.
Though this article is very long, this is merely the end of the background portion of this series. Other articles in this series will follow that are meant to dive deeper into the inner-workings of the corporate side of Star Trek’s owners and how they continually mismanage and even attempt to destroy this beloved franchise. So just be warned, this journey into the horrors of what I’ve deemed “Star Trek’s Civil War” is far from over.
J.J. Abrams And The Return Of Star Trek
After Enterprise had been shuttered, the powers that be at the studio had resigned themselves to giving the Star Trek brand a rest for a period of two-to-three years in order for the property to recover from the audience fatigue that had set in. At least, that was the public reason for the years-long hiatus of Star Trek. The actual reason was that Star Trek suddenly found itself embroiled in a custody battle between two parents.
The rights to the Star Trek brand had been owned by Paramount since it had been acquired along with Desilu productions as far back as the late 1960s. In 2005, Viacom, the parent company of Paramount Studios, announced that it was going to split into two separate companies. The break-up was the idea of Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, who had become frustrated with stagnation in the company’s stock price. Redstone reasoned that splitting the company into two separate entities would spur investment from Wall Street by allowing investors to evaluate its array of companies separately rather than as a combined portfolio under a single mega-conglomerate umbrella.
The plan was to spin CBS Corp., which Viacom had acquired a mere six years earlier, into its own entity called “CBS Corporation,” which was to include Viacom’s “slow growth businesses” for value-oriented investors. CBS Corporation would encompass major TV, radio, publishing, and outdoor advertising properties. This included both CBS and UPN networks. The company was to be led by Les Moonves, who was the head of CBS at the time.
The other company, which would retain the Viacom name, would include Viacom’s “high growth businesses” and encompassed cable networks (such as MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, & BET) as well as Paramount studios and all its movie properties. The new Viacom would be led by Tom Freston, the creator and longtime chief of MTV.
Before the split, Viacom’s COO Mel Karmazin had left the company in 2004. Rather than replace him outright, Redstone had brought on both Moonves and Freston as co-presidents, dividing the duties of the company’s president and COO between the two executives. However, the coequal position lead to a great deal of internal rivalry between Moonves and Freston, especially when it came to the question of who would be set to replace Redstone as Viacom’s chairman after he retired. It’s believed that the breakup of Viacom was supported, in part, so that Moonves and Freston could each get their own kingdom to run and would no longer have to compete for Redstone’s CEO position since it would no longer exist. Instead, Redstone would be the chairman and controlling shareholder of both companies through his company National Amusements.
The split went into effect at the start of 2006, and already the old rivalry between Moonves and Freston had flared up again, this time over the “crown jewel” of the old Viacom, the Star Trek franchise. The issue came down to this: Paramount Studios owned the movie rights to Star Trek, but CBS owned the TV rights to Star Trek due to it having control over Paramount Television, which it got in the breakup. Both companies wanted to develop their own Star Trek content, but it was believed that should both movie and TV properties be developed at the same time, it would create confusion in the marketplace and negatively impact one or both companies (all this despite the fact that Star Trek films had been made in conjunction with TV series for over a decade).
Moonves insisted that Star Trek was a TV show and that CBS should be the one to develop a new Star Trek property. However, Fenton was adamant that Star Trek be given the feature film treatment, as Paramount Studios had precious few successful franchises at the time. Gail Berman, then the president of Paramount, convinced Moonves to allow her a chance to reboot Star Trek as a tentpole franchise for the studio (presumably under the auspices that movies can push more merchandise than TV shows and would build the value of the licenses CBS owned better than a TV show could). Moonves agreed to give her 18 months to get the cameras rolling or lose the film rights to Star Trek (if you’re confused as to how this could happen, I will dive deeper into how licensing works in the next article of this series).
At the time, Paramount had just inked a mammoth $60 million development deal for film and television with J.J. Abram’s production company Bad Robot, which was then working with Paramount on the Tom Cruise vehicle Mission: Impossible III. The writers Abrams had tapped for the MI:3 script, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, heard about the Star Trek reboot and approached the studio with ideas about the project. Bolstered by the interest from the Bad Robot writer/producers, Gail Berman then went to J.J. Abrams, who was in post-production of Mission: Impossible III at the time, about producing the new Trek films as part of Bad Robot’s deal with the studio.
While at first uninterested in the opportunity, Abrams eventually agreed to produce the new Trek film as a way to support Kurtzman and Orci, who were actively lobbying for the film. Abrams also brought on his other long-time collaborators Damon Lindelof and Bryan Burk to help with development. It was an odd pairing of talents, with Orci and Lindelof being the only real “trekies” of the group, while Kurtzman and Abrams were casual fans, and Burk wasn’t a fan at all.
Kurtzman and Orci went on to develop a script for the new Star Trek film that impressed Abrams so much, he decided to come on board the project as director after being solely attached as a producer at first. With a script and a director in place, Paramount gave the greenlight to the new film version of Star Trek, well within the 18-month timeframe given to them by Moonves. With production underway, CBS put Star Trek on the backburner, allowing Paramount to run with the franchise, culminating in the release of the new Bad Robot produced Star Trek film in 2009.
Here’s Where Things Start To Get “Dark”
Star Trek 2009 opened to big box office numbers, taking in $257 million domestic total gross, cementing it as the all-time best grossing film in the franchise. Star Trek 2009 was a success, and J.J. Abrams was lauded as not only breathing new life into the failing franchise, but finally making it “cool” for the mainstream to like Star Trek. With the new “Abrams Star Trek” off to the races, a sequel was quick to be put into the pipeline (in fact, Paramount was so high on Abram’s reboot of Trek, development on the sequel was announced a month before Abram’s Star Trek had even premiered).
The same creative team behind Star Trek 2009 was set to return for the follow-up, with Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof tapped to write the script and Abrams along with his producing partner Bryan Burk contributing to the story. Paramount was eager to have a new Trek movie ready in two years for a summer 2011 release to capitalize on the momentum the first film had generated for the franchise. Paramount executives were expecting to get a script for the second Star Trek film from Bad Robot by December 2009 so that preproduction could begin to meet the summer 2011 release window.
But when December came, there was no script.
There appeared to be a situation in Bad Robot where “too many cooks were spoiling the soup.” The dream team of Abrams, Burk, Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof were so focused on creating a quality sequel that would satisfy long-term Star Trek fans while also appealing to general audiences, that they couldn’t settle on an idea for the script. According to Kurtzman, it took an entire year of debate just to settle on the concept for the sequel, forcing Paramount to push the scheduled release date back to the summer of 2012.
After the writing team had reached a compromise on the story, a script was begun on October of 2010 and completed in February of 2011, with preproduction beginning in April. However, even though a script was complete, the production was working off a detailed 70-page outline of the story because J.J. Abrams hadn’t yet approved the completed script, due to him being busy completing his next movie Super 8. In fact, at this point, Abram’s involvement in the sequel beyond that of producer was still uncertain. Abrams had not decided whether or not he would direct the sequel until he had a chance to see a completed script, and when the script was finally delivered, he was too busy to pay much attention to it. Due to his focus being on his next film, Abrams essentially dropped the ball on the Star Trek sequel’s production, putting its development behind by roughly six months.
This issue was also compounded by the fact that those writing the script — Kurtzman, Orci, and Lindelof — were only intermittently working on Star Trek, as they each had a variety of other projects keeping them busy. With Abrams and Burk busy with Super 8, there was no one around to oversee the project and establish concrete deadlines for the writers to meet, allowing them to be distracted by other projects. Once Abrams had made the decision to return as director, the production was further complicated by the difficulty of finding an actor for the sequel’s main villain, with Abrams choosing to take his time rather than rush the production to meet the studio’s release date. This once more forced Paramount to push back the film’s release to the summer of 2013.
Principle photography on the sequel finally began in January of 2012, but writing on the script continued even while the movie was being shot, with Alex Kurtzman actually making changes to the script on set with his laptop. One of the reasons for so many re-writes was because unlike the first film, the movie’s cast members were collaborating with the writers on the story and their characters, necessitating more changes to the script. There was not a finalized shooting draft of the script until 5 months into production.
The movie, entitled Star Trek: Into Darkness, was eventually released on May 16th of 2013, four years after the first Bad Robot Star Trek film hit theaters — two years longer than Paramount had first wanted to have it out. The film went on to gross $467 million worldwide, making it the highest grossing film in the franchise.
One would think that a film that grossed almost half a billion dollars would be considered a success for the studio that produced it, however, that was not the case with Star Trek: Into Darkness. One of the things previous Star Trek movies always had going for them was that they were cheap to produce, so the films were extremely profitable even if they didn’t gross huge numbers. However, the budget for Into Darkness was upward of $190 million dollars. Factoring in costs for marketing and distribution, it’s estimated that the film only made a profit of $29.9 million. To put this in perspective, the first Next Generation movie, Star Trek: Generations, was made for $35 million and went on to gross $118 million worldwide for an estimated profit of $48 million.
And despite those big numbers that Into Darkness ultimately pulled in, the film actually underperformed in its opening weekend, coming in under Paramount’s projections. Reasons for this are attributed to losing the momentum Star Trek 2009 had generated for the franchise by taking twice as long to produce as Paramount had originally wanted. Another contributing factor to the film’s underperformance was the fact that Paramount was unable to effectively market the movie due to the secrecy surrounding the true identity of the film’s villain. Bad Robot had achieved CIA-levels of secrecy on set to protect certain story elements, even going so far as having Abrams and crew flat-out lie that the film’s villain was not Khan, effectively gutting one of the movie’s most marketable nostalgic features. Due to this, much of Paramount’s promotional material had to try to generate excitement over Benedict Cumberbatch (who’d yet to achieve A-list level stardom in the US) as a generic bad guy rather than as an iconic Star Trek villain.
The extended time between movie releases and the secrecy surrounding the plot hindering promotion effectively led to a lack of excitement with audiences for the film. But beyond that, despite the efforts of the film’s writers to make a sequel Star Trek fans would love, the fanbase ended up overwhelmingly rejecting the film entirely, even going so far as to vote Into Darkness “The worst Star Trek movie ever” just 3 months after the film’s release at the annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, beating out the then reigning “worst” champion Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. (And that movie was so bad it had almost ended the franchise!)
Fans were making it clear that they were unhappy with the direction Abrams and crew had taken with the franchise, moving it away from the concept of exploration and intelligent sci-fi and dumbing Star Trek down into a generic action-oriented adventure series. But beyond that, the fanbase was not appreciative of Bad Robot’s disregard for the previous canon of Star Trek, which they had all grown up loving. Though the Abram’s Star Trek takes place in a different timeline, thus freeing it from constraints of old continuity, the shoehorned-in nostalgic nods to better stories and liberties taken with the in-universe technology angered fans who valued the previous incarnations of Star Trek.
Within the span of just two movies, the reboot of Star Trek had effectively gone from a triumphant rebirth to a downward spiral.
The Return To TV And “Beyond”
The underperformance and backlash Star Trek: Into Darkness received served to make Les Moonves and others at CBS Corporation begin once more to consider flexing their muscle to developing their own Star Trek property. At the time of Into Darkness’s release, it had been 7 years since Moonves had shelved the property in favor of letting Viacom run with it. Seeing an opening in how the movie franchise had fallen off-track, discussions began at CBS over the possibility of bringing Star Trek back to the small screen.
Much of the push for bringing back Star Trek to television was spurred by CBS’s venture to competing in the “over the top subscription streaming” market that had been pioneered to great success by Netflix. Netflix’s business model was disruptive and hugely popular with consumers, and other media companies were looking at their own “over the top” services as a way to compete and cash in on the phenomenon. The “over the top” model is a term used to refer to content providers that distribute streaming media as a standalone product directly to consumers over the Internet, bypassing traditional forms of distribution. The subscription-based model was extremely attractive to CBS due to its stable and recurring nature as it looked for methods to move away from relying on ad revenue for their primary source of profit.
Based on the success of services such as Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, many studios were looking at rolling out their own OTT streaming services based around their exclusive library of content, which they had been licensing out to Netflix and other services up to that time. Moonves had been convinced to pursue this new direct-to-consumer model by his head of CBS Interactive, Jim Lanzone, who was responsible for building the infrastructure for rolling out CBS content to the web, mobile apps, smart phones, and tablet computers since 2011. But perhaps most attractive to Moonves was the possibility of gaining viewership of the up to 10-million broadband only households (those without cable or satellite) in the US and the growing trend in the younger demographic to consume media based solely on their devices (after all, it’s cheaper and easier to deliver content through the internet than it is dealing with TV stations and cable providers).
CBS’s revenue model is more than 50% advertising based, and the prospect of expanding the reach of CBS programming would also increase CBS’s ability to sell advertising on their OTT service in addition to gaining subscription revenue. After embracing the new direct-to-consumer model, Moonves had his team roll out CBS’s own streaming service, called CBS All-Access, with a planned launch date of 2014. Though CBS had an extensive library of content to provide via CBS All-Access, other OTT competitors were attracting and retaining subscribers with original content that could not be found outside the service. CBS All-Access was able to attract about 100,000 subscribers by the end of its first year, but the lack of original programming necessary to pull in large numbers of subscribers was an issue.
This brings us back to Star Trek, the “crown jewel” that has been helping its owners launch new endeavors since its inception. Just as Star Trek had helped to launch the new syndication model, the movie franchise, and the UPN network, Moonves was eyeing the property as a means to pull in the estimated 40 million-strong hard core Star Trek fanbase into the All-Access fold. Despite its ups-and-downs, Star Trek fans have always proven to be consistent and reliable when it comes to spending money on the property. It stood to reason that if CBS could begin offering Star Trek content exclusively on All-Access, that it could take advantage of that fanbase to create a stable foundation for the service’s growth. Despite Moonves not being a fan of science fiction, his decision to push for the series reportedly came from the fact that CBS had been approached by both Netflix and Amazon to revive Star Trek as an original series on their platforms. Reasoning that if the two biggest players in the OTT streaming market wanted Star Trek for themselves, then it was a no-brainer to steer the show to CBS All-Access, which is also home to the previous five “Trek” TV series.
Of course, Paramount was still looking to pursue its license on the property, with a third Star Trek movie in the pipeline. After the 4-year wait for Into Darkness, Paramount wanted the next Star Trek film to take less time to produce, with a projected release date of 2016 — not only to avoid the previous momentum-killing mistake of taking too long to release a follow-up, but also to capitalize on the upcoming 50th anniversary of Star Trek. Due to these factors, Paramount was insistent that Bad Robot meet the two-year deadline.
However, by this point J.J. Abrams had been wooed over to Disney to develop and direct the seventh Star Wars film after the studio acquired ownership of that franchise in 2012. In fact, it’s possible that part of Abram’s initial reluctance to return to direct Into Darkness and his distraction from the Star Trek property was because he was in talks with Disney to helm Star Wars at the time. With his new commitment to a competing franchise, Abrams would step away as director of the third Trek movie and act solely as a producer (pretty much in name only).
It’s also important to note that at this time, the Bad Robot “dream team” that had overseen the previous two Trek films had effectively disbanded, with Burk and Lindelof not participating in the new film and the writing duo of Orci and Kurtzman splitting up to focus on individual projects. Orci and Kurtzman had been writing and producing partners for decades, going back to their first meeting in high school, and were considered to be the “top” blockbuster makers in Hollywood due to their association with so many high grossing films. Despite their long-standing collaboration, both men wanted to branch out into directing and their interest lied with different film properties. Kurtzman decided to step away from the third Trek film to focus on writing The Amazing Spider-Man 2. At the time, Sony was tapping Kurtzman to come onboard and oversee the creation of a Spider-Man cinematic universe based around Spider-Man’s rogue gallery, planning out multiple films focusing on members of The Sinister Six as well as Venom (which Kurtzman was attached to direct).
But “true” Trek fan Orci wanted to step into J.J. Abram’s role of overseeing Star Trek and write the next Star Trek script with up-and-coming screenwriters J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay — two writers groomed within the Bad Robot stable of writing talent. In addition to writing the script, Orci also began lobbying to direct the film, despite never having directed a feature film before. Though Paramount was reluctant to give the inexperienced Orci the position, he had the support of both Bad Robot and Star Trek’s co-production company Skydance Productions. This eventually led to Paramount agreeing to hand over the directing duties of the next Star Trek film to Orci. Orci delivered a script for the third film in August of 2014, with an estimated production start date of February 2015. However, in December of 2014, Orci unexpectedly dropped out of directing duties, throwing the already in pre-production Trek film into a state of flux.
There’s some debate over whether Orci dropped out or if Paramount decided to remove him. Apparently, there was a clause that Orci’s role as director was dependent upon Paramount’s approval of the script. Paramount reportedly clashed with Orci over the direction of the screenplay and Orci exited the director’s chair after Paramount shut down the production and scrapped his script. Orci retained his producer credit, but he, McKay, and Payne were removed from writing duties and effectively had zero involvement in the production going forward. This bad blood between Orci and Paramount is apparently a big reason why Kurtzman and Orci dissolved their joint television production company K/O Paper Products, with Orci going off to produce shows at other studios while Kurtzman created a new company to continue working with Paramount and CBS.
After going through a shortlist of potential replacements for Orci, Paramount settled on director Justin Lin, who had helped revitalize the Fast & Furious franchise for Universal Pictures. His latest entry into the series — Fast & Furious 6 — outperformed Star Trek: Into Darkness in the same month when both films were released in May of 2013. When Lin discovered that he was not beholden to any of the previous work done by Orci, he hired Simon Pegg and Doug Jung to rewrite the screenplay. Under Lin, principle photography was set to begin mid-April of 2015, giving Pegg and Jung roughly 3 months to deliver a new script.
Eventually, complications in casting and the development of the script forced production to be moved back to June of 2015. Pegg and Jung delivered their first draft of what was to become Star Trek Beyond on June 2nd and principle photography began on June 25th. The film completed principle photography on October 15th of 2015, and a round of reshoots were completed in March of 2016, four months before its scheduled release date. Star Trek Beyond went on to underperform at the box office despite receiving good reviews from both fans and critics. It was the least successful of the three Bad Robot entries, its poor performance blamed on Paramount once more failing to properly market the film by releasing trailers too late to build up proper buzz and failing to mention Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary in its promotions.
As the drama within the production of Star Trek Beyond played out, a different type of drama was occurring within the studio side of things. CBS was pushing to bring Star Trek back to TV as part of their strategy to boost CBS All-Access, and there was little Paramount could do to stop them. However, Paramount didn’t want the excitement of Star Trek’s return to TV to overshadow the release of Star Trek Beyond and possibly negatively affect the movie’s box office, thus it was agreed upon that the new Trek series CBS had in mind would not debut until 2017, a year after Star Trek Beyond hit theaters.
The new TV entry into the Star Trek universe, which would be called Star Trek Discovery, was officially announced in February of 2016 and heavily featured at the 50th Anniversary Celebration at the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, about a month after Star Trek Beyond hit theaters. Having personally attended the 50th Anniversary convention, I can honestly report that there was a great deal of excitement over the fact that Star Trek was coming back to TV.
I can also honestly report that this excitement didn’t last very long.
Discovering Discovery
Fan reaction to the reveal of Star Trek Discovery at the 50th Anniversary convention can best be described as “cautious, but optimistic.” Though fans wanted to be excited over the new Star Trek series and they loved the “All-Access” panels with the cast members, there was also a lot of stuff that caused the fans to be concerned. Things like:
- The fact that the series was a prequel to The Original Series.
- The fact that despite being a prequel, the technology seemed far more advanced than in The Original Series.
- The look of the Klingons was radically different.
- The main character of the show was a previously never-mentioned step-sister to Spock.
- The odd design of the starship Discovery.
- The uniforms were radically different from what they should have looked like according to the time period of the show.
- The dark and more adult tone of the show.
Essentially, though fans were excited for a new Star Trek show, what was killing their excitement was the fact that Discovery appeared to be Star Trek in name only. It looked as though it were a dark and gritty sci-fi show wrapped up in Star Trek window dressing. And beyond that, the idea that it could only be viewed by subscribing to CBS All-Access was a big turn off for most people, especially after what amounted to being denied new Trek adventures on TV, which had historically been free to watch, for over a decade.
But all this adds up to one question: Why does Star Trek Discovery look so radically different from everything that came before it — including the Bad Robot films?
Well, before we answer this question, let’s talk about how Discovery came to be.
Discovery was the brainchild of writer and producer Bryan Fuller. Fuller actually began his Hollywood career working on Star Trek as a contributing writer for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Fuller was a true fan of Star Trek and a real lover of The Original Series. After his tenure on Trek, Fuller branched out from writing to producing and created the Showtime original series Dead Like Me which ran for two seasons. He then went on to work on a number of other TV series, creating and executive producing the show Pushing Daisies for ABC. Though Fuller’s star had been rising within Hollywood, it wasn’t until he found commercial and critical acclaim for his adaptation of the Hannibal Lecter series, Hannibal, for NBC that he really garnered a great deal of clout in the industry.
Over the years and the many projects Fuller had been involved in, he’d gained a reputation as someone who was uncompromising in his creative vision, which often put him at odds with the networks and studios funding his projects. I personally knew people who used to joke that “Bryan Fuller gets fired from every project he works on,” simply due to his propensity to stand his ground and not bend to studio pressure on his work (which was the complete opposite strategy followed by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who had a reputation for bending over backward for studio executives).
Though Fuller went on to produce a number of different types of television shows, he always harbored a love for his roots in Star Trek. In fact, around the time J.J. Abram’s first Star Trek film came out in 2009, Fuller was actively lobbying to produce a new live action Trek TV series. Fuller had an idea and the proper “Trek” pedigree with his work on both Voyager and Deep Space Nine, and had his agent reach out to Bad Robot to try and get his series concept rolling. At the time, Bad Robot had a lot of concepts for branching Star Trek out to multiple media platforms, but ultimately the TV show idea was killed due to Paramount’s agreement with CBS to have the focus be on the films for the time being, and CBS having control of the TV rights for the franchise.
When interest was renewed within CBS to bring Star Trek back as a series after the release of Into Darkness, Fuller reached out to the network to let them know he would “drop everything” in order to become the showrunner for a new Star Trek television series. At the time, Fuller was riding high on the critical success of Hannibal on NBC and using that to leverage his way into the creation of new projects, one of which was a high-profile original series on STARZ based on the Neil Gaiman book American Gods.
Someone else who was riding high at the time was Alex Kurtzman. Unlike his former partner Roberto Orci who’d essentially burned his bridges with CBS/Paramount, Kurtzman had a strong relationship with CBS, having produced successful shows such as Hawaii Five-O and Scorpion for the network with his production company K/O Paper Products, which he’d started with Orci. Kurtzman and Orci had inked a three-year overall deal with CBS Television Studios to develop projects for them, but after the duo parted ways, Kurtzman transitioned K/O Paper Products into a new production company called Secret Hideout, which he would be the sole owner of. In addition to Secret Hideout’s new 4-year television deal with CBS, Kurtzman also secured a three-year development deal for feature films at Universal Pictures for his new company. After the collapse of the proposed Spider-Man cinematic universe over at Sony due to the poor performance of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Kurtzman was tapped by Universal to work alongside writer/producer Chris Morgan, who helped oversee the Fast & Furious franchise, to relaunch Universal’s classic monster movie IPs for another proposed cinematic universe known as “The Dark Universe.”
It is believed that because of Kurtzman’s involvement in the first two Bad Robot Star Trek films, CBS had originally gone to his company, Secret Hideout, about developing the new Star Trek series when the executives there first began considering it. And due to Kurtzman’s ties to both Star Trek and CBS, when Fuller brought his own pitch to the CBS brass, President of CBS Television David Stapf brought Fuller and Kurtzman together to develop the series that would eventually become Star Trek Discovery, which Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout would make their first production under their deal with CBS.
It’s unclear just how much input Kurtzman had in the initial development of Discovery, since his primary focus at the time seemed to be assuming a “J.J. Abrams”-esque mega-producer role over at Universal where he was overseeing the launch of a new potential billion-dollar cinematic universe and also directing a major motion picture with superstar Tom Cruise called The Mummy. It’s most likely that Kurtzman simply offered ideas to Fuller and let him run the development of the show as Kurtzman’s attention was focused elsewhere. After all, Fuller was a TV guy, and Kurtzman was looking to establish himself as a feature film wunderkind.
Fuller’s initial concept for Discovery was quite different from what was eventually produced. When Fuller first met with CBS about the series, the company did not have a plan for what the new show would be. Fuller proposed an anthology series with each season being a standalone, serialized show set in a different era, beginning with a prequel to The Original Series that focused on an often referenced but never-before-seen event in Star Trek canon, then stories set during The Original Series, during Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then beyond to a time in Trek that’s never been seen before. Fuller compared this to what American Horror Story did for horror and described the proposal as a platform for “a universe of Trek shows”, effectively allowing the series to explore different aspects of Star Trek without being constrained by timelines or eras.
The idea was initially met with resistance by CBS and the executives countered with the idea of creating a single serialized show to see how that performed before committing to an anthology format. The executives asked Fuller to take his concept of the first season for his anthology series, the prequel to The Original Series era, and use that as the basis for the show’s first season. Fuller agreed to the compromise, gearing the show to either be the first entry of an anthology or the beginning of a stand-alone series, depending on how things developed.
This was the first, but not the last, clash between the studio and Fuller. I’ve heard it on good authority that Fuller’s vision for Discovery was constantly questioned by CBS head Les Moonves, and that it was Moonves who mandated many of Discovery’s aesthetic changes. While Fuller was trying to maintain the spirit of Star Trek and focus on storytelling, Moonves was more concerned with the show’s uniforms, aliens, and spaceships. (There’s a big reason for this, which I will get into in the next article.)
As it became obvious Fuller and CBS were not seeing eye-to-eye on many aspects of Discovery’s development, CBS hired director David Semel to come in and oversee the creation of the pilot episode. Semel had an overall deal with CBS Television Studios and had a strong track record when it came to helming pilots that eventually went to series. Semel’s credits include Madam Secretary, Code Black, Person Of Interest, Heroes, as well as The Man In The High Castle and Goliath for Amazon studios. But despite his impressive body of work, Semel was the quintessential “company man.” A procedural director CBS could count on delivering a show quickly, efficiently, and on budget. Semel and Fuller clashed almost immediately, with Semel constantly trying to rein in Fuller’s ideas to be more in-line with what was practical and what the studio wanted. Fuller was known for bringing a distinct visual style to his shows, and he thought Semel’s “workman-like” aesthetic wasn’t a good fit for his vision, making Semel a bad choice for the job of directing the pilot in Fuller’s estimation. Fuller was petitioning for director Edgar Wright to come in and direct the Discovery pilot. However, Fuller was stuck with Semel thanks to the studio.
Even more frustrating for the CBS executives was that Fuller’s development ideas were causing the series to overrun its $6 million per episode budget allotment, ballooning the cost of the show beyond that which the executives were comfortable with. In addition to the rising cost of the show, Fuller’s development was putting the production behind schedule. CBS wanted to launch Discovery by January of 2017, but Fuller’s obsession with all aspects of the show — from the uniforms, to the sets, to the aliens, in addition to the writing of the seasonal arc — made him express that he felt that deadline was unrealistic. Not only was Fuller’s micromanaging a reason for delay, but his attention was also split between Discovery and his STARZ original program American Gods. This managing of multiple shows created great frustration among CBS executives who felt Fuller’s attention should be solely on Star Trek instead of spending so much time on his other ambitious show which was simultaneously shooting its debut season.
Fuller was not oblivious to the frustration of network executives and did take steps to try to ease the tensions of the situation. Fuller hired former collaborators on his show Pushing Daisies, Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts, to serve as co-showrunners with him on Discovery so that he could have people to pick up the slack with that show’s production while he continued his duties on American Gods. Fuller also convinced Kurtzman to support him in asking CBS to delay the series premier so that he could deliver a show closer to his vision and meet the high expectations of the fanbase. With Kurtzman’s help, Fuller was able to convince CBS to push the series premier back to May of 2017.
Though Fuller had won the battle in getting CBS to agree to push back Discovery’s release date, he was losing the war. The production delays, increasing costs, and constant creative battles had turned CBS sour on working with Fuller. The straw that broke the camel’s back had to do with Fuller’s casting of actress Sonequa Martin-Green as Discovery’s main lead. From the beginning, Fuller had wanted the main character of Discovery to be a female and an African American. After a long search, Fuller felt he finally found the perfect actress for his leading role in Martin-Green. The only problem was that Martin-Green was contracted to the AMC show The Walking Dead, and AMC would not release her from her contract until her character was killed off in April of 2017, just one month before the new premier date of Discovery had been scheduled.
Unwilling to compromise after believing he had found the perfect leading woman for his show, Fuller stuck to his guns in casting Sonequa Martin-Green, forcing CBS to delay the premier of Discovery a second time to June 2017, with the season being split into two airing blocks in order to meet the requirements for the post-production of the episodes with the shortened production schedule due to Martin-Green’s availability. But this was the last straw, and after months of tension and internal strife, CBS asked Fuller to step down as the showrunner of Discovery, essentially forcing him out.
With Fuller leaving Discovery to focus his attention entirely on American Gods, Kurtzman was required to turn attention away from his duties with The Mummy to ensure Discovery didn’t fall apart. Fuller’s co-showrunners, Berg and Harberts, were promoted to full showrunners for the series. But Kurtzman went a step further and brought writer and Hollywood veteran Akiva Goldsman in as a producer on Discovery to act as his proxy. Kurtzman had worked with Goldsman on the 2008 FOX TV series FRINGE, where Goldsman had served as a writer, director, and consulting producer (roles he would eventually perform on Discovery as well).
Goldsman has a long and varied career in Hollywood, having been involved in both major flops and major successes. He’s credited as having written the screenplay for Batman And Robin, often considered to be the movie that almost destroyed the Batman franchise. But he also wrote Cinderella Man, which won him an Academy Award for best screenplay. Despite his uneven filmography, Goldsman was considered to be a “superproducer”, working with a number of Hollywood A-List talent on both film and TV projects. Most notably, Goldsman was leading Paramount’s efforts to create a cinematic universe based around Hasbro’s Transformers franchise — a franchise that Kurtzman helped to start by writing the first movie with Orci.
With Fuller out of the picture and having no further involvement with Discovery beyond possessing the title of “producer” on the show, Berg and Harbert proceeded with Discovery’s writing and pre-production while being overseen by Goldsman. Due to the split in the season required by production, the writing for the show was re-tooled into “two mini-arcs” to deliver a full story before and after the break, while both being part of the “meta-arc” of the season which encompassed the Federation war with the Klingons.
Despite Fuller no longer being in the mix to ruffle feathers, things behind the scenes with Discovery’s production were not all sunshine and lollipops. In fact, Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts began butting heads with Goldsman as their management styles and personalities came into conflict. With Goldsman being an experienced producer and Kurtzman’s right-hand man on the production, he saw himself in more of the showrunner role with Berg and Harberts as subordinates, which often lead to passionate disagreements between the three as Goldsman pushed for changes in the story that Berg and Harberts didn’t want.
Despite the turbulent production, Star Trek Discovery met its premier date with the two-part pilot episode “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars.” CBS’s strategy with using a new Star Trek series to attract subscribers to CBS All-Access initially worked, garnering a record number of sign-ups and hitting two million subscribers on the streaming platform. In 2018, CBS Interactive President Marc DeBovoise said that CBS All-Access and Showtime’s OTT service have a combined subscriber total of around five million, with over two million of that number attributed to CBS All-Access, with the two platforms reaching a predicted 8 million combined subscribers by 2020. This success was also further bolstered by a foreign distribution deal CBS brokered with Netflix, the profit from which covered 60% of Discovery’s production costs, as well as ad revenue generated by the cheaper subscription plan for CBS All-Access.
So unlike when Paramount tried to use Star Trek to launch the ill-fated UPN network, it appears CBS has succeeded in using it to launch their new streaming platform. But despite Star Trek Discovery’s successful premier, despite the three recent major motion pictures, and despite continued sales and syndication of previous Star Trek shows and movies, the current focus of Star Trek’s owner hasn’t been on the actual content of Star Trek for quite some time.
In fact, it can be argued that Viacom (both incarnations) and CBS Corporation do not actually care about Star Trek, nor have they ever cared about it. They look at Star Trek as a money well they can tap whenever they need to as a way to exploit a dedicated fanbase, and they appear to only be interested in bilking that fanbase for all they are worth while simultaneously trying to run the very thing those fans love into the ground.
How are they doing this? And more importantly — WHY are they doing this?
Let’s find out…
To Be Continued…
In the next part of this series, we’ll look at the corporate structure of CBS and Viacom in an attempt to unravel the complicated ownership surrounding the Star Trek intellectual property. We’ll also examine the licensing business behind Star Trek, and the power that CBS Consumer Products wields over the franchise — often to its detriment. Be sure to subscribe to me here on Medium to be alerted when the next part of this series is available! And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @MatthewKadish. Thank you for reading and be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or insights you’d like to share!
And be sure to check out the next installment of this series here:
