Star Trek: Picard co-creator Akiva Goldsman offered an update on what the coronavirus pandemic means for the show’s second season (of many?). Speaking to Collider, Goldsman says the second season planned to begin shooting in June. Those plans have changed. “We were not shooting,” he says. “We were to start shooting in June, which I guarantee you we will not unless the world opens tomorrow. We had broken the season, we were about halfway through the writing of it. You know, we will start as soon as we can once the world opens, you know? Prep will have to resume, and then we’ll start. We know what it is, and it’s cool. And we’re excited by it, and I feel like we learned a lot from season one. It’s… of the things I have in my life it is the one that is most imminent when the world opens. It’s the one that feels like that’s the thing, at least in my life, that’s going to come back fastest.
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Goldsman is also looking for the silver lining in the situation. When it comes to the writers, who can continue to work from home, he says the delay “is fundamentally a gift to be able to do all of them [the episodes] if you can. Because unlike previous iterations of television, this serialized ten-hour narrative has setups and payoffs that require a thoughtful view of the object once it is completed. It’s very funny, in the first season of Picard, there were all these reviews of the beginning, ‘Oh it’s so dark, it’s so dark, it’s so dark.’ And I kept saying, ‘They’re reviewing the first act of a movie.’ The first act of a movie is always dark. If you stopped It’s a Wonderful Life at the bridge, it’s a really dark movie! Because fundamentally in a longform narrative, it’s a redemption story, it’s a healing story, it has to be bad at the beginning so it gets good at the end, otherwise there’s nothing to fix. So we’re in this weird world now where we create one narrative object but we dole it out bit by bit, which is fascinating. And can be kind of fun. But what you really want is to be able to refine your setups once you’ve written your payoffs… if in fact you could have the time to write 10 hours first, that would be amazing. And maybe we will.”
Star Patrick Stewart has also said that work is continuing on the series despite the coronavirus pandemic. “It is, yeah,” he said. “Because of how we are living currently, there is no writers’ room, of course. But everybody is writing and they are keeping me in touch with what is going on. We have video conferences.
“Frankly, perhaps the thing I am missing the most right now, other than going out to dinner, is I am not working with this group of people I admire and grown to like and respect so much as well. I can’t wait to be back on the set in a workspace with these people, and explore what we are going to do with season two.”
Fans can still look forward to the third season of Star Trek: Discovery later this year. The adult animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks also plans to debut in 2020, and those are but two of the Star Trek projects in the works. The first season of Star Trek: Picard is streaming on CBS All Access.
