New Details on Bryan Fuller's STAR TREK Series, Teases More Reveals Around Comic-Con
I would love to watch Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller's new CBS Star Trek TV series, but it's going to take a hell of a lot to get me to pay to subscribe to CBS All Access because that would literally be the only thing I'd watch on that network. But if the show does a perfect job casting and there's crazy buzz from fans, I might end up giving it a shot. Fuller is definitely excited about the challenge of bringing Trek back to the small screen, and Collider caught up with him at the Saturn Awards and managed to get him to reveal a few key pieces of information fans will want to know about.
First up, the first season will contain a single story told over the course of thirteen episodes. Fuller and his writers have the whole arc of season one already planned out, and the stories for the first six episodes have been broken (meaning, broken down into beat-by-beat moments).
He also said that he and his team have chosen sound stages and the sets will be going up soon, and streaming on CBS All Access will give them freedom when it comes to runtimes and network broadcast standards and practices. ("It will likely affect us more in terms of what we can do graphically, but Star Trek’s not necessarily a universe where I want to hear a lot of profanity, either.") They haven't settled on directors yet, but they have locked down Splice and Cube director Vincenzo Natali as a producing director (Natali also directed a few episodes of Hannibal, hence the connection). When it comes to casting, he said:
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.
Fuller stopped short of officially confirming an LGBTQ character will appear in the series, but he did say, "I think the progressive audience that loves Star Trek will be happy that we’re continuing that tradition."
He also spoke about putting his own unique spin on the world of Trek:
We have hired VFX producers, and they’re working with the companies and culling the team together because we need to do a lot of things in-house because if we start paying FX houses per shot for something for the things we want to do like digital augmentation on certain alien species, how we’re going to see the transporter beams, we’re trying to cultivate distinct looks for all of those things that are unique to our version of Star Trek and carry through the themes we love seeing in fifty years of Star Trek, but doing a slightly different approach.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Fuller said he expects to be able to start sharing some more concrete information around the time of Comic-Con, so we don't have much longer to wait. For a few more little details about what he has in store for the show, check out the rest of the interview.