Straczynski Claims Trek May Return In 1-2 Years

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, aka JMS, asked fans to lobby Paramount to have himself and Bryce Zabel made executive producers of a new Star Trek series, then said that since no new Star Trek series was likely to be produced for at least a year and he had an offer to oversee a new series for 2006, he was no longer interested.

In an entry at The J. Michael Straczynski Message Archive, which collects posts by the writer-producer from rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated and other newsgroups and forums, Stracynski said that he and Zabel, the creator of Dark Skies, had "out of a sheer love of Trek as it was and should be" written a series bible for what he labeled "a return to the roots of Trek...to re-boot the Trek universe." However, when they brought the proposal to Paramount, the studio rejected it "because of 'political considerations,' which was explained to us as not wishing to offend the powers that be."

Straczynski said that he and Zabel were both passionate fans of the original series who felt that none of the spinoffs (with the exception of The Next Generation, "because Gene [Roddenberry] was still around to shepherd its creation and execution") had lived up to the promise of the original. "That's why I had Majel appear on B5, to send a message: that I believe in what Gene created," he added. "When Enterprise went down, those involved shrugged and wrote it off to 'franchise fatigue,' their phrase, not mine...there's a tremendous hunger for Trek out there. It just has to be Trek done *right*."

After citing his own track record and implying that Paramount would not risk offending Rick Berman by bringing in outsiders, Straczynski asked for the large number of fans who had "called for a jms take on Trek" in a poll at SciFi.com to "let the folks at Paramount know" because if they did, "there'd be a new series in the works tomorrow."

However, Straczynski later posted that he had heard from a trusted source that Paramount would give the Trek TV franchise a rest "for maybe one to two years", and said that he has received an offer to run a new TV series for fall of 2006, "and since there's no way anything Trek can happen in the interim, I've said yes."

Straczynski's original posts can be read here and here.

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