Frakes: Forget About Trek On TV
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If you’re waiting for a Star Trek series to air on television, don’t hold your breath.
Jonathan Frakes said it won’t be happening anytime soon.
Frakes, speaking at Fan Expos Regina 2015 last weekend, was asked about the possibility of a new televised Trek series.
The actor told the crowd that he had pitched a concept to CBS but that they weren’t interested in a new Trek show, not even one pitched by him.
Frakes went on to explain that CBS feels that it diluted the Star Trek brand during the 1990s and early 2000s, with Star Trek: Nemesis being the first Trek film to fail to make a profit.
So when the rebooted Trek movies did well, CBS decided to concentrate on them, and not branch out and make the same mistake as they did back then.
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Hmm. Netflix.
Kang agrees with this.
TMP has always been my favorite Trek movie for that very reason. It’s the one movie that’s most like TOS.
Indeed.
Go watch Power Rangers.
New movies are a retarded version of Star Trek. That’s probably one of the reasons why they were so popular with the mass audiences. The contemporary audience would probably be bored to death if they had think. “Just gimme some shaky cam, flashy, hypnotic stuff, dumb jokes, cheesy soap opera moments, and a lot of senseless action.” That was practically the recipe for the nu trek films. DS9 was not like that, though it’s not really representative of trek. Trek has always been about a positive, utopian future, not a dystopian one. That’s one of the hallmarks of Star Trek.
Short term thinking…Maybe a cheap reality show will make money today but nobody is going to be digging it out 10 years from now. Something like Star Trek is expensive in the short term, but it pays off over the decades.
what? My universal translator seems to be malfunctioning…
This kind of story has already been told often that no new Star Trek series in the short or long term was to be expected. There is more often by actors producers and studio denies that a series or movie would come. It would also not surprise me if this strategy at a media hears that no one is counting on a new series and that from nothing made an announcement that there is somewhere a new television series is in the pen. In short, I believe nothing about it, time will show what is truth or not?
I love Frakes, but the guy really has to let this go. I’ll bet he’s still bitter after CBS didn’t want to do a USS Titan show with him and Sirtis. There will be no new Trek on TV, and I suspect “ever” needs to be added to that. The only thing CBS will have garnered from the terrible sales of TNG on Blu-ray is that there’s no public enthusiasm for Star Trek.
DS9 is more realistic then TNG . In real life, we can’t always solve problems with a neat little bow on top. We face the same problem day after day. The other side won’t always give in, no matter how diplomatic you are. When that happens, what are you going to do? DS9 addressed this, while the other series didn’t. You should be able to deal with a story that doesn’t have a Disney-like happy ending.
A little something is better than a lot of nothing. George Lucas did the fan films right. Still waiting to see how the Mouse will squash that. I’d certainly chip in some money to help. A few thousand an episode and a percent of the gross income would probably work, and would also cut out all but the top 3 (which look to be Star Trek Phase 2, Star Trek Continues and maybe Starship Farragut). Expensive but not impossible. On the other hand, official sanction also means official rules, and rulebooks always get bigger and more expensive. My suggestion wouldn’t mean the end of any other other productions, it’s just a way for productions to make enough money to keep going.
That’s why DS9 is more realistic. In real life, we can’t always solve problems with a neat little bow on top. We face the same problem day after day. The other side won’t always give in, no matter how diplomatic you are. When that happens, what are you going to do? DS9 addressed this, while the other series didn’t. You should be able to deal with a story that doesn’t have a Disney-like happy ending, and that is what TNG had a Disney like happy ending to the stories they had, TNG was so sterile for example when there was a problem Picard solved it with Diplomacy he wanted to go in there and Talk and talk and be a Diplomat whereas Sisko if you messed with him he would destroy you. Remember the time when Gul Macet fired on the Enterprise D Picard being the Diplomatic idiot he was just punched a hole through his shields hailed the Ship and asked Gul Macet why he was firing on them, that was a Pathetic move Sisko would of Destroyed him look how many enemies Sisko Destroyed in DS9 and compare it to how many Picard destroyed in TNG my point is Sisko is a more realistic and relatable person then Picard and So DS9 was more realistic and relatable series.
DS9 is a fine series, and I see you like it, but if I were to choose between TNG or DS9 I wouldn’t hesitate a millisecond in choosing TNG over DS9. All that talk about Disney-like happy ending, supposed sterilty and lack of realism [of TNG] is nothing but bs. It’s rather one’s lack of perception in seeing how versatile TNG was that creates such misperception about one of the greatest space-oriented adventure sci-fi shows with one of the greatest characters ever created. I’m wondering if people seeing Picard as a “diplomatic idiot” are maybe themselves idiots. And by the way, it’s not “would of”, it’s “would have”.
Justin Lin the guy who made the Fast and the Furious movies is doingthe next Star Trek movie so don’t expect an
Intricate Star Trek Story and if you did not like Abrams films you probably won’t like this one cause he does over the Top action movies and thank god.
It always makes me giggle when I see all of you die-hards think that a TV series set in the new universe would have the EXACT same levels of action, explosions, Star Wars-ness, etc. etc. that the last two films did. You do realize that 2-hour summer blockbuster films have a MUCH different mission to accomplish than a 13-episode, or 26-episode-a-season TV series does, right? You can totally have a new series exist in the new universe that J.J. Abrams helped create AND have the science, exploration, emotion and slower-moving story lines that we came to love from 1987-2005. You guys are just too busy spewing vomit all over your computer monitors to realize it.
By, “doing the” do you mean Directing?? Because yes, he (Justin Lin) IS Directing! Writing the story however, is another team of people according to IMDB; Doug Jung and Simon Pegg. Don’t get those two roles confused, they are completely two different animals.
I’m not sure about this. I’ve read on more than one occasion that CBS plans to do another TV show after the next movie.
Nemesis had some weak patches, but was overall quite good. The problem was that people were busy still throwing up from Insurrection. Also, yeah, that brand dilution thing – Picard being the face of Trek for 15 years, multiple series running for years with progressively lower ratings as hundreds of episodes piled up in repeats, and every return to the well seeming weaker than the one before – people had just had enough. If/when Trek returns to TV, hopefully they will follow Marvel’s playbook rather than DC’s.
Showtime is trying to compete with HBO and AMC for big budget event television. Penny Dreadful is certainly b-movie Hammer Horror with extra sex and gore, but it’s glossy expensive drama. Showtime would pay a lot for Trek, but tonally i wonder what would be the expectations if it landed on premium cable?
I don’t think a Trek series will ever be on Showtime. Not only is it probably too small an outlet for a Trek series, I don’t think CBS really has the need for another Trek series that the now defunct Paramount Television once had.
I liked Nemesis, at the time it was the only post Voyager movie we had and still is, I am still waiting for that new Star Trek TV series they are talking about doing but we will have to wait till 2017.
“A little something is better than a lot of nothing.” boy a lot of JJ Abrams Trek haters would disagree with you. They would rather have no JJ Trek then the two movies he delivered.
If a Fan made production of Star Trek was to happen it wouldn’t just be CBS looking for fees, the Actors would need to be paid, the Writers would need to be paid. It would be very expensive.
The novels completely remove the need for any kind of tying up, quite frankly.
I don’t believe for a second CBS isn’t interested in creating a new series, there are just legitimate issues of budget, compatibility and synergy with Paramount that get in the way. They are happily making money off the legacy shows, of course they’d want new product to merchandise. Maybe not Showtime, but I also don’t agree it’s too small. They can spend more on a series than a non premium cable channel could and even if a new Trek series could only muster Enterprise’s ratings, that would ensure survival on a net like the CW and Showtime these days.
CBS doesn’t need any synergy with Paramount to create a new Trek series. CBS owns the property, so they could do one with or without Paramount (and given that it was bad blood between CBS and Paramount’s owner Viacom that caused Trek’s TV and movie divisions to go their separate ways, it’s more likely without Paramount). As far as the rest, CBS can continue to do what they’re currently doing, licensing Trek out for various products and making millions without having to invest a single dime in Trek themselves. People tend to forget that CBS is already sitting on five Trek shows (six, if you count TAS), that they can sell to any cable network or local station that wants them.
What might convince Trek to really pursue a new Trek series is if the new movies should start bombing at the box office and no one is interested in licensing Trek anymore. And even then, CBS has to decide whether to invest in an expensive show that caters to a niche audience rather than ones that are a lot cheaper than any Trek series would ever be and bring in much higher ratings than a Trek series would ever get.
I liked big chunks of it, and some other big chunks made me cringe. About on a par with Generations in that respect. I do think it was a substantial improvement over Insurrection.
JJ Trek isn’t on TV. There’s a lot of nothing right now. And I’d rather have the resources that were spent on JJ Trek going into several new series.
Yes, a licensed, profit-making fan Trek would be more expensive. However, as non-union productions, the professionals would need to be paid, at least scale, and that would definitely cause costs to go up. Probably only Star Trek Phase II could be licensed, as Star Trek Continues has too many professional actors to afford even scale. It wouldn’t bother the non-profit shows at all. I’d like to see something like what Starship Farragut is doing- their set is being used by at least four productions. It would be nice if they could rent their sets to fan productions. Although the folks in charge of Starship Farragut are based in DC, they had to go to southern Georgia to find a place large enough and affordable enough to build standing sets.
You CAN do both, ya dumb bastard.
Enjoyed 2009? I’d be interested to read your comments on the “Star Trek by the Minute” blog posts @ StructuredDream
Kang: I agree 100%!
I just can’t wait for the next trek movie Star Trek Beyond, there is a rumor out there that in the next one the new Enterprise will either go to the original universe or restore the universe and stay in the restored universe but when you think about it the original universe still exists they just need to find some way to get there after that we may get a new Star Trek series set in the original universe with a new Enterprise and I have been hearing awesome things about the story for the new series some of the things I have been heearing is that there could be a possible Multi universe War with some new massive threat that sounds awesome and some may say that’s not Star Trek but hey it’s new Star Trek.
Assuming a series goes into development, synergy with Paramount is preferable – why wouldn’t CBS want J.J. Abrams involved even if just for nominal marquee value? Capitalizing on the popularity of the new films is the obvious course of action – setting a Trek show in a time period or re-rebooted universe unrelated to that is even riskier than bringing the show back at all.
Making money off of legacy library material can only go so far. If CBS wasn’t interested in milking the franchise for more than licensing and syndication fees it would not have invested so heavily in HD transfers of TOS and especially TNG. The returns will only diminish without new product – Trek is already on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, StarTrek.com, home video and cable. There are no new outlets to make deals with. TOS and TNG are still the primary moneymakers to this day, the other spinoffs had much shorter shelf lives in rerun syndication.
Star Trek hit its last peak between 1994 and 1996 as TNG went out on a high, Generations made waves in the media, Voyager premiered and the 30th Anniversary celebrations were in full swing. Any highs since then were for much diminished returns, the last being Enterprise’s big debut before a rapid fall from grace. Space sci-fi didn’t catch on and Trek was alone in maintaining that niche, but in the end the market was just oversaturated with product, and the audiences fell away with short attention spans. That said, the big audiences for Voyager’s season premieres, sweeps stunts and finale as well as Enterprise’s series premiere did prove there’s a big audience out there for exciting, quality storytelling. Star Trek is affectionate Americana and there’s a big curiosity factor to this day.
I’m not sure I understand the logic of Trek only becoming an interesting prospect if the movie franchise falters. Surely the opposite is true. Hollywood mentality is simple – popular product begets more popular product until it goes out of fashion and needs to be rested. This has already happened as Trek was as omnipresent as Law & Order and pioneered universe-building crossovers before the Marvel Phases were even a gleam in Kevin Fiege’s eye. Paramount successfully spent its way into rebooting Trek into a film franchise that could compete with the big boys for the first time since the first 4 movies. Hollywood capitalizes on this sort of success, it doesn’t decide not to poke the bear if it’s sitting on a pile of untapped money. It doesn’t matter than space-based sci-fi has never found success outside of Star Trek. Star Trek is a huge brand and made its own market singlehandedly. In a network environment it needs compatible programming and support. The former it never got properly on UPN, the latter it had falteringly but with the full disclosure that UPN was forever trying to appeal to demographics that did not always dovetail with the potential audience for Star Trek. Identity crisis does not begin to describe UPN.
Showtime is determined to be a big player like HBO and is seeking to make more lavish product to compete. Even Starz has shows like Black Sails which are obviously expensive and pay for themselves with loyal subscriptions that are worth more than 2 million viewers would get anyone on an ad-supported network. That’s why I still beat that drum – just 2-3 million Trek fans guaranteed to be subscribed to and watching Showtime for 13 weeks is worth an expensive budget and marketing campaign. Add in the merchandising windfall and it’s a no-brainer. The show would not survive on CBS, but on the CW it might, and IMO Showtime is a viable option, as is Amazon Prime or Netflix.
It’s bad blood and uncertainty that’s holding back a new series, not economics. Nostalgia is reviving series from the 80s and 90s left and right and networks don’t sit on valuable properties indefinitely, they exploit them by making new product.
Maybe they weren’t interested in a live-action Titan series. (I’d watch it *shrug*)
Firstly, it’s a mistake to think that CBS needs any synergy with Paramount or any involvement from J.J. Abrams with a new series. They’ve always been in the driver’s seat in regards to that, so any new series will be done solely at their discretion and the way they want it. And there is no risk with setting a Trek series unrelated to the Abrams movies as the Abrams movies themselves have demonstrated that audiences will accept a different setting and just go with it (hardcore Trekkies are the only ones who get bent out of shape about that, and no Trek series can survive solely on them anyway).
It’s still a case that CBS just simply doesn’t feel the urgent need for a new Trek series and probably won’t as long as the current movies are even remotely successful (they’re making money from everything related to them without having to sink millions and millions themselves into a new series). Profit with zero investment. Trekkies can go at length with reasons why CBS should do a new Trek series anyway, but CBS is apparently adhering to the long-held and time-proven idea that spaceship shows are too expensive and too niche audience (in comparison, TNG was a fluke and even its ratings were starting to dip towards the end as audiences began to eventually gravitate towards other things–despite having strong premieres, DS9, VOY, and ENT all failed to stop the sharp audience erosion). And if Showtime was considered a viable outlet for a new Trek series, then there already would have been one there years ago.
Well neither of us is an executive working at CBS so it’s all academic guesswork. Only one way to know who’s right, and that’s to wait and see.
I’ll check them out…thanks for letting me know about them. And yes, I enjoyed the 2009 movie, but it certainly is not above ridicule…the Rifftrax for it crack me right up.
I should have included the link: http://structureddream.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-take-on-star-trek-2009-001.html
I really don’t care if DS9 was representative of Star Trek. It was damn good television. People who dismiss it because it doesn’t measure up to some kind of idealistic Star Trek checklist are missing out on a show with the most fascinating and compelling characters ever to grace a Star Trek series. I’m not hating on any other Star Trek show (this isn’t a competition after all) but I take issue when people dismiss DS9 only because it wasn’t polyanish enough.
Absolutely not dismissing DS9. I guess it’s easy to misinterpret someone’s comments. I meant to say DS9 is not classic trek show with a starship depicting a positive future. It’s not representative in the sense that it deviates somewhat from the classic trek elements, but nevertheless it’s a good, even great series.
The CBS execs have got a great point, one that makes business sense, and which was true about the recent Star Trek TV shows to boot. Three TV shows in so many years (even though I did enjoy watching many of them) DID cause the brand to become diluted. And I`m sorry to bust your bubble, but Star Trek is space opera, and the last movies were just like many episodes of the original series. As well, the expense of making a sci-fi show like Star Trek that might get canceled in today`s TV market would be enough to make anybody wary of producing another one on CBS, Showtime, and the CW.
As it is, everybody`s got 700+ hours of Star Trek to enjoy episode-wise (and movie-wise) on DVD and streaming media, so you won`t die because you can`t see a new Star Trek show on TV.
Roddenberry`s `vision`was dollar signs, and whatever was cobbled up in his head on the convention circuit; it is NOT a religion to worship. This is a media franchise, and it had to be revived in a different and new way that worked for the early 21st century, not just for established fans that are in the minority globally (when compared with the average moviegoer and TV watcher.)
As for the new movies not having any of what you said in the last paragraph, I guessed that you missed this speech from the recent movie made by Captain Kirk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5q6WgDpVys
Not everybody that watches Star Trek has to be inspired to be anything, sir. Obviously, the message of the speech that Kirk said at the end of Into Darkness was lost on you, but what else is new?
A mistake? Can someone explain to me how having a franchise run non stop for 17 years and 4 tv shows done can be considered a mistake? There are probably many tv show executives who would love to do mistakes like this.
That’s a cynical view, and it’s not true. Of course Roddenberry also wanted to make money, but he also had an idea, a vision of sorts, that he wanted to convey with Star Trek, as well as certain ideals. It wasn’t solely motivated by money, whereas the current people who have the (un)creative control of the franchise are motivated by money only, obviously.
“As it is, everybody`s got 700+ hours of Star Trek to enjoy episode-wise (and movie-wise) on DVD and streaming media”
Well, that’s true.
But it can’t harm anyone if the show is an inspiration, can it? On the contrary, it’s a positive thing that should be aspired to when attempting to make a work of art. Every good (and great) work of art is inspiring.
Correction: it’s not what Kirk said, it’s what his alternate universe timeline version said.
And let’s not forget that Nemesis had to compete with Lord of the Rings.
Alot of the Directors ideas go in the Script and I am sure the cerebral element you people are so fond of will be a tiny sliver in the movie and there will be a Klingon War movie after this movie I am sure, Admiral Marcus did say war with the Klingons was inevitable and on top of that Star Wars episode 7 will make shit loads of money now I know your asking yourself what does this have to do with Star Trek well you know how Guardians of the Galaxy was successful and now they want to make Star Trek more like that well the same thing with Star Wars if Star Wars is successful and it will make 1.5 or 2 billion at the Box office they will want to make Star Trek 4 or a new series more like Star Wars cause it was so successful why can’t you old trek fanboys just Admit defeat as Gul Dukat said to Sisko I won you lost.
This Kirk is Jim Kirk, even if you don’t like the movie. Stop being so silly and accept reality.