Executive Producers Talk Future For Trek and Selves

Star Trek: Enterprise executive producer Manny Coto has an idea for a new Star Trek series, which he declined to reveal at the wrap party but which writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens praised.

An article at The Ventura County Star quoted Coto as saying that he plans to wait a while before pitching his idea to Paramount Pictures, while in the meantime he joins the staff of FOX's 24 as a co-executive producer. The Reeves-Stevenses praised Coto's vision, saying that each Star Trek series has reflected its time, and the next Trek will be no exception. "There was a '60s mentality to the original series, With The Next Generation, they were doing the '80s. Deep Space Nine was about the cocooning of the '90s," said Garfield Reeves-Stevens, while Judith Reeves-Stevens added that Voyager was about the desire to return home while Enterprise focused on family and the origins of Star Trek.

Rick Berman, who has co-helmed the Star Trek franchise for nearly two decades, said that work was beginning on a new Star Trek feature film but it was too soon to discuss details. StarTrek.com quoted him as saying that the idea for the potential movie was initiated by another producer, Jordan Kerner. Like Coto, he will work on other projects for the time being, including television shows for Paramount "where people wear sneakers and drive cars."

Berman told The IESB in a video interview that he expected the Star Trek franchise to take a four to five year break from television, "maybe three years, but I think it will definitely be back as a TV series." Coto also told The IESB that the break would be two to three years, and said that he thought it would be wise to move into the generation after that of Picard, Sisko and Janeway, and that he would love to work on it if and when it happens.

But Brannon Braga, Berman's co-creator of Enterprise who noted that he had spent nearly a third of his life working on Star Trek, said that he suspected that the show might be gone for five to ten years. Asked by The IESB what sort of a future series he would envision, Braga said, "I would say that it would have to be - if it was five years from now - very different. If it was ten years from now, then maybe something that recaptured what made it popular in the first place. I don't have any specific ideas; otherwise I might be trying to set up a meeting with the Paramount executives. There is absolutely no discussion about doing Star Trek at all as far as I know...I think they're going to give it a rest for a few years."

John Billingsley, who plays Dr. Phlox, told The Ventura County Star that he hoped Star Trek would return only if a new series resulted from an imaginative idea, not just because Paramount wanted to make more money from the franchise. Many of the actors and crew reflected the expectation that it would be several years before Star Trek would return...but they all seemed certain that return it will.

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