Star Trek: Discovery Producer Reveals Bryan Fuller’s Influence

Even though Bryan Fuller is no longer shepherding the series, his footprints will still be noticeable.

Late last year, it was announced that Fuller stepped down as the showrunner of Star Trek: Discovery, which he co-created Alex Kurtzman. The reason? Fuller is also the showrunner of Starz’s television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, so he wanted to put all of his focus on it.

Star Trek: Discovery is in good hands. Executive producers Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts took over as showrunners. And since Fuller left on good terms, he left behind all of the material he came up with for Star Trek: Discovery. Plus, he wrote the first two episodes.

While promoting his directorial debut The Mummy, Kurtzman confirmed that Fuller’s footprints are very much left on Star Trek: Discovery. “Someone once described Bryan to me as a unicorn and that’s just the truth. He’s a one of a kind writer,” he told Collider. “He’s just unbelievably brilliant and I really, really loved working with him and I loved seeing the way that his mind worked. Bryan was very involved in American Gods and I think that the scope and scale of what Trek has become made it so that Bryan elected to say, ‘I don’t wanna short-change either of these two things,’ they’re both sort of beloved to him, so we sat down and we figured out how are we going to take what we can have of you and continue that through not only this season of Trek but hopefully set up things that are coming next season. So much of what’s there in terms of story and certainly in terms of set-up, character, big ideas, the big movement of the season, that’s all stuff that Bryan and I talked about.”

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Star Trek: Discovery takes place roughly a decade prior to the five-year mission of Star Trek: The Original Series. In breaking with franchise tradition, the show’s main protagonist will not be a captain. Instead, it will be First Officer Michael Burnham, played by The Walking Dead alum Sonequa Martin-Green.

Star Trek: Discovery‘s cast also includes Jason Isaacs as Captain Lorca, Rainn Wilson as Star Trek: The Original Series character Harry Mudd, James Frain as Sarek, Spock’s father, and Michelle Yeoh as Captain Georgiou, the captain of another Starfleet ship, the Shenzhou, which will be important to the plot of Star Trek: Discovery. Doug Jones and Anthony Rapp both play science officers. Mary Wiseman will play a final year Starfleet Academy cadet.

The first season of Star Trek: Discovery, which consists of 15-episodes, will have a two-part premiere on CBS this fall and then move to the network’s streaming service, All Access.