'Star Trek' Producer Offers Update on Picard Series
Star Trek: Discovery is coming close to the end of its second season, but there’s no rest of [...]
Star Trek: Discovery is coming close to the end of its second season, but there's no rest of Star Trek producer Alex Kurtzman. He's hard at work developing several new Star Trek shows that are in the works at CBS All Access. The next is the still untitled Star Trek series that will see Sir Patrick Stewart return to his role as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Kurtzman today attended the Star Trek: Discovery panel at PaleyFest along with several members of the Star Trek: Discovery cast. For the most part, the discussion was limited to Discovery's current second season and upcoming third season, but Kurtzman did offer a small update on the Picard show.
Kurtzman said that yesterday he visited Stewart at his home to read through the script for the first episode of the series. "Yesterday, I sat in Patrick Stewart's kitchen and listened to him read the first episode," Kurtzman said. "He's so excited about this..the cast is coming together."
Kurtzman also said that Picard is changed from who he was in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that the person he was is still within him. Finding that person again is part of the show is about. "We all know what Picard means...and represented," Kurtzman says. "In some ways, he has to go through a gauntlet to find that again…We'll get to see a new side of him. Things have changed for him, but he's still deeply and fundamentally Picard."
Kurtzman told ComicBook.com at the TCA 2019 Winter Press Tour about how the new show differs from Star Trek: The Next Generation, saying "Everybody in that room loves Jean-Luc Picard very deeply, and obviously, the benefit that we have is that Jean-Luc Picard is in the room with us," Kurtzman said. "And so, as we're breaking story, we're asking ourselves, 'How do we live to the spirit, and to the character, and for the tone that Next Gen set, but also make it something very, very different in other ways?' And Patrick was really clear with us from the beginning. He did not want to repeat what he had already done. And by the way, it's been 20 plus years, so he couldn't possibly be that same person anymore.
"And so, the question becomes, 'What has happened to him in that period of time? Have there been occurrences that forced him to reckon with choices that he's made in his life? How do you hold on to being the person everybody loved when the circumstances around you may have changed so radically?' And those are the big questions that we're asking."
According to Stewart, the show will have a different storytelling style than The Next Generation.
"We're hoping for more than one season," Stewart said. "And with this first series, and this is one of the things that's so interesting about the writers' room, they are writing a 10-hour movie. In The Next Generation, it was a story, a different story, a different story, all with the same characters as many series are. But this time it is one story, from beginning to end. I hope that will lead people to...binge-watching, that it might lead to something like that because the idea of it being an unfolding narrative is really terrific."
Are you excited to see the new Picard series? Let us know in the comments.
The Picard series begins filming in California in April and will premiere in late 2019 on CBS All Access.
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