When CBS announced it was developing another Star Trek television series last year, most of the talk about it focused on the fact that it would exclusively be on the network's on-demand and live streaming app and that the series would not tie in to the continuity of the forthcoming movie, Star Trek Beyond. With the debut set for 2017, it was an announcement that got people excited (or at least interested), but offered few details about what the series would look like or who would run it.
Now we know a few more tidbits (tribbles?) about the forthcoming series—and its seemingly perfect captain.
Yesterday, CBS announced Bryan Fuller, creator of the sadly departed Hannibal, would be co-creator and showrunner for the new series. Fuller got his start in TV as a writer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and later worked on Star Trek: Voyager, so he's already a smart pick to run the new show. But add in his other bonafides and he's a near-genius one.
Aside from his experience on two previous Treks, Fuller's other TV work—Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, the only episodes of Heroes that still hold up—prove him to be something akin to Joss Whedon: not always commercially successful, but consistently worthy of attention. Fuller approaches television in a riskier and more creatively ambitious way than most. *Dead Like Me'*s protagonist is an 18-year-old female grim reaper in Seattle. Wonderfalls centers on a gift shop clerk who talks to various animal figures that give her cryptic instructions. Pushing Daisies' central romantic pairing can’t ever touch, because doing so would kill one of them forever. Even Mockingbird Lane, Fuller’s failed pilot (that still aired) for an update of The Munsters, centered on the black sheep of the Munster family: a normal human woman.
That kind of boundless creativity seems like a goldmine for a revival of Star Trek, and there’s already evidence for how Fuller would approach it. When asked about his ideas for a new series by Den of Geek in 2013, Fuller mentioned that he envisioned Angela Bassett and Rosario Dawson as captain and first officer, respectively, aboard the USS Reliant—the Federation ship that Khan takes control of in Star Trek II. "I would love to do that version of the show," he said. After Kate Mulgrew played Captain Janeway on Voyager and Avery Brooks played Benjamin Sisko in Deep Space Nine, Fuller’s ideas would hold with how Star Trek depicts leadership roles more progressively than almost any other franchise.
Fuller always keeps himself busy—he’s one half of the showrunner team behind the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods along with Michael Green—so it’s still uncertain just how much time he'll be able to devote to the show. But if there’s one person with a demonstrated wealth of experience building compelling, boundary-pushing TV combined with just the right history with the franchise, it’s him. So CBS got the right guy. Now all that’s left to see is whether the safest network in America, after gambling on streaming app distribution, will also trust Fuller to create the kind of weird and memorable Trek only he could make.
