A reader just passed along to me this link to an interesting posting by J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5. (Volokh readers have much praised Babylon 5 to me but I could never get into it during its first run.) After a discussion of how the Star Trek franchise evolved to this point, here is how it provocatively ends:
Last year, Bryce [Zabel (recently the head of the Television Academy and creator/executive producer of Dark Skies)] and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe.
Understand: writer/producers in TV just don’t do that sort of thing on their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money.
We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.
But when it came time to bring it to Paramount, despite my track record and Bryce’s enormous and skillful record as a writer/producer, the effort stalled out because of “political considerations,” which was explained to us as not wishing to offend the powers that be.
So on behalf of myself and Bryce, I’m taking the unusual step of going right to the source…right to you guys, fueled in part by a number of recent articles and polls, including one at www.scifi.com/scifiwire in which nearly 18,000 fans voted their preference for a new Trek series,
and 48% of that figure called for a jms take on Trek. (The other choices polled at about 18% or thereabouts.)
See, if somebody doesn’t like a story, doesn’t want to buy it, that’s all well and good, that’s terrific, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
But when “political considerations” are the basis…that just doesn’t parse.
So here’s the deal, folks. If you want to see a new Trek series that’s true to Gene’s original creation, helmed by myself and Bryce, with challenging stories, contemporary themes, solid extrapolation, and the infusion of some of our best and brightest SF prose writers, then you need to let the folks at Paramount know that. If the 48% of the 18,000
folks who voted at scifi.com sent those sentiments to Paramount…there’d be a new series in the works tomorrow.
I don’t need the work, I have plenty of stuff on my plate through 2007 in TV, film and comics, so that’s not an issue. But I’d set it all aside for one shot at doing Trek right, and I know Bryce feels the same.
Update: NEVER MIND! Here is a follow up post from J. Michael Straczynski:
Actually…belay everything I just said.
In the 24 hours between the time I composed the prior note, and sent it, and it made its way through the moderation software, two things happened:
1) I heard from a trusted source that Paramount is giving the Trek TV world a rest for maybe one to two years, depending on circumstances, no matter who would come along to run it. So it’s not right to have folks putting in time doing something that ultimately would be pointless, I don’t think that’s a proper use of anybody’s time.
2) At the same time as the above, an offer came in to run a new TV series for fall of ’06, and since there’s no way anything Trek can happen in the interim, I’ve said yes (now we have to negotiate the deal, but that should be fairly straightforward).
So on two counts, the whole thing is kind of moot.
We can reconvene a year or two down the road to see where this takes us, but in the interim…my apologies for waking everybody up in the middle of the night.
As you were.
Well, THAT was fast!
Comments are closed.