Star Trek: Picard Is Not a Sequel to The Next Generation Says Producer

Patrick Stewart reprises his role as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Jean-Luc Picard in the upcoming series Star Trek: Picard. The CBS All Access streaming show will see Picard on a new adventure but also brings back some other familiar faces from The Next Generation. But executive producer Akiva Goldsman says Picard isn’t a sequel to The Next Generation. Instead, it’s something new. “Well we pointedly wanted to not make a sequel to Next Gen,” Goldsman tells Hollywood Outbreak. “I think that tonally, it’s a little bit of a hybrid. Obviously it’s – you will see, I hope – slower, more gentle, more lyrical. It is certainly more character-based.

“It also takes on the same thing that The Original Series took on, that Next Gen took on, that Discovery takes on, which is a hope for a future that is in many ways better than the world we live in today. Star Trek remains aspirational and what we get to do that DS9 got to do a little bit and Discovery got to do is to tell serialized stories, and in serialized storytelling, the characters can evolve in a way that makes it unique. So we think it’s a new kind of Star Trek show, made by a lot of people who love all the old kinds of Star Trek.”

Series creator Alex Kurtzman has said before that this series is a different experience from The Next Generation. “You know, we feel a tremendous responsibility to the fans who have loved [the Picard character], and Patrick himself, who took a massive leap of faith with us in choosing to come back and play Picard [after] he said he was done forever,” Kurtzman said. “He also said, ‘I want to make sure if I come back, if you loved TNG, you’ll feel we’re honoring it, but this is a very different experience.’ This is really a very different experience. It looks incredibly different, the kind of storytelling is different, but if you’re someone who’s never watched it at all, it’s been built for you to come into it and get to be dropped into this very emotional story about this captain who’s in the late stage of his life and is dealing with the sum total of all his choices.

“It also has an incredible new crew — incredible, to a person, they’re all so wonderful. And we have now started showing it to the studio, and they’re thrilled with it, so that gave us a lot more confidence that we’ve hit the mark. We’ve now watched five episodes with Patrick and he’s thrilled with it too. Because he was so happy with it, it makes us feel like it honored what we promised.”

Star Trek: Picard debuts January 23rd on CBS All Access.

(h/t Digital Spy)