You hope it doesn't suck?

Alex Kurtzman will serve as executive producer for the series. Kurtzman co-wrote and produced the blockbuster films Star Trek (2009) with Roberto Orci, and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) with Orci and Damon Lindelof. Both films were produced and directed by J.J. Abrams.

The new series will be produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout. Kurtzman and Heather Kadin will serve as executive producers. Kurtzman is also an executive producer for the hit CBS television series Scorpion and Limitless, along with Kadin and Orci, and for Hawaii Five-0 with Orci.

Fat chance of that. You might as well hope that a movie involving Adam Sandler will be funny.

I realize that I am not up on current pop culture, but the fact that I have never heard of, "the hit CBS television series Scorpion and Limitless" doesn't bode well for the new Trek show.

Scorpion is ummm...ok. Forgettably ok.. Haven;t seen limitless but I am aware of it.

I quite liked both of the star trek reboots

Star Trek 2009 was an okay action movie, but it wasn't anything like "Star Trek." It sacrificed any pretense of sci-fi to DUDEBRO-SEXY-ACTION-ZOWIE! That's fine for movies, I guess, though it led to some really stupid decisions for the franchise. I kind of figured us sci-fi fans that like a little steak (high concepts, character development, clever plots) with our sizzle (things blowing up, people trying to murder each other with future-tech) weren't the ones being targeted when we saw the Enterprise being built on the fucking ground along with uniforms right out of the 1970's including miniskirts and go-go boots.

It had been my hope that if they were going to reboot 'Trek, they would've done it like BSG, giving us a more grounded premise that we might believe came from our own era, not a re-hash of the 70's TV show. One of the coolest things about the early non-Abrams 'Trek movies was that they got real uniforms that looked like uniforms, sets that looked plausibly like they were on starships, and updating of a lot of the cheesy stuff into more realistic stuff.

JJ Abrams' 'Trek was basically what you got when a bunch of people who weren't fans of the show cherry-picked things they thought looked neato on the first pass and put them into their movies without any of the corresponding depth. It was even worse in the second Abrams movie, where Khan is plopped in with no real reason for being there, or one that's so contrived as to be laughable. But hey, it's Khan, right, nerds? What more do you need? Even a flimsy reason for him being such a bad-ass would be nice.

And they make the most common reboot mistake usually only seen in comic books: They fail to fix the problems the previous series had and even made them worse. Apart from not having a head writer and/or a vision of where the show is going (DS-9 only had this when it realized Babylon-5 was eating its lunch), Star Trek's biggest monument to stupidity and lazy writing is godlike technology that totally breaks the premise of the show. So far we have Khan's Resurrection Blood, so nobody should ever die again, Trans-Warp Drive, so distance means nothing, and galactic transporters, so why the fuck do you even need starships anymore?

These yahoos were making barely watchable movies that were only entertaining so long as you didn't think about them too much. They're not equipped to make a sci-fi TV show, unless they plan on turning Star Trek into a poor man's Farscape.

Star Trek could use a proper resuscitation. I haven't seen anything good from ST since the early days of DS9 - Voyager was painful, Enterprise was disappointing, Star Trek: 90210 was a dumb action flick and jettisoned the heart of the original concept because 9/11, and Into Darkness was a stupid lazy hack job that cannibalized a much better movie. Someone with some vision and talent *might* get me to care again, but the guys currently strip-mining the franchise aren't likely to pull it off (I'm not feeling any enthusiasm for the new Star Wars, either).

You're exactly right, they're just lifting the bits they think look cool but not putting any thought into the substance at all.

Nailed it.

I was listening to some of the commentary on the Battlestar Galactica DVD's ( yes, I am that big a nerd) and, among other complaints regarding writing for Voyager, he talked about the god like technology even in the TV shows making dramatic writing difficult. You always had to come up with a reason why the tech wasn't working that day to explain why the problem of the week couldn't be fixed with the push of a button. When Starbuck is lost on a moon, they have to fly their vipers in and visually look for her, not scan and beam her up. Star Trek would have needed to come up with a reason that the scanners didn't work.

Given that, the Star Trek tv shows never even made full use of their technology. I mean when the Klingons attacked Deep Space 9 and boarded it, when the shields were down, why didn't they simply use the transporter to dematerialize the defenders instead or trandsport a war head in to the controle room.

That would be cheating. Klingons prefer the glory of a real battle.

Trivia:
The reason why there are transporters in Star Trek is because Roddenberry didn't have the budget to fashion shuttle props when the show launched.

Back to tech solving everything....how is it in the future, they can beam people and things up from planets, but none of the consoles on the bridge have circuit breakers, causing countless burns to Chekov, Sulu and Spock et al...?

At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_hate_star_trek.html

Tech those guys. Seriously. Tech them hard in their techs.

And while I dug about 99% of the BSG reboot, fuck Ron Moore for (1) not having the plotline planned out in advance and (2) that dumb ending. Even if you agree with eschewing technology, the idea of forgetting history as a means of not repeating it... Stupid.

I will say I rather liked "Caprica," mostly because it seemed like an extended episode of The Outer Limits.

delete?

I just hope that this time around they at least have a consistent writing staff and directors. I was introduced to Star Trek through Voyager, and it seemed like every episode was a complete grab bag that shifted tone and characterization to suit the inconsequential bullshit plot of the week.

I hope this does well, I really do. Even if it's only Star Trek in name only. We're living in what seems like the golden age of televised drama. We have had historic dramas about Vikings, Prohibition, Ancient Rome, and Victorian England. We have zombie dramas and vampire dramas. More superhero dramas than I can count. We even have a drama that's basically one big fanfiction of all the Disney characters. What we don't have a lot of is sci-fi. Dr. Who is really popular, but what we don't have is anything about the crew of a space ship flying through the galaxy. For there to be a successful Star trek series means other networks would deem it a worthwhile investment to start their own space shows. Imagine if HBO picked up a televised adaptation of Saga or something?

Can you suspend the $6 a month account during those months that they aren't showing new episodes? Are they going to string the episodes out over the year or dump them all at once like Netflix does?

TNG: The Only Trek That Mattered™

DS9: Disproving Your Assertion™

TAS: We Got Sexy Cat Ladies And Giant Spock™

TOS: Without Me You're Nothing™

E: I've Got Faith Of The Heart™

This is what I'm talking about with the people they're putting in charge of this new show. Berman & Braga ruined 'Trek, especially when they bungled Voyager and made all but the final season of Enterprise complete crap.

Sadly, by the time they got booted from the show, nobody was going to watch decently-scripted episodes of Enterprise. Even if they were, the writing got to be far better than the cast was capable of delivering. And then they let B&B back to do the finale which was pretty much them taking a giant, steaming shit on anything good the show had done before.

B5: It'd be nice if you stopped swiping our premise and trying to ape our plots.

Yes! That's the important point. Straczynski pitched B5 to the Star Trek folks and they completely ripped him off with DS9. So much so that Majel Barrett appeared on B5 as a protest to the shoddy way that MS has been treated. It's a pity that he didn't do something different after the story arc has run its course. The boss from Office Space (I forget his name) didn't make it work for me.

Well, TNT fucked him over with Crusade (he released the memos from the execs after several stupid "suggestions" they made), but I thought Gary Cole was awesome as the captain. I had just seen him on "American Gothic" where he played an absolutely evil devil-sheriff, so that might have helped.

JMS then went on to get fucked while writing Jeremiah for Showtime, which is still a great post-apoc show for about 1.5 seasons. He had to cram the next 3 seasons or so into about a dozen shows in the end. :(