There's still a lot that we don't know about CBS's upcoming Star Trek series for its All Access streaming service. Early information and rumor was that the show would be run by Bryan Fuller (who formerly worked on the Deep Space Nine writing staff), that he had hired Nicholas Meyer (former director of The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country) to be the show's principle writer, and that the show might be a seasonal anthology series that would take place between the events of The Undiscovered Country and The Next Generation At least some of this information may be incorrect.
Earlier this year, the first teaser trailer was released. It also was not very forthcoming with specific information, but there were a few details that could be inferred.
The first teaser showed little detail, but seemed to imply a confirmation of a seasonal anthology.
The trailer begins in space over earth, but then warps away to exotic locations across space before revealing the show's logo and the tagline "New crews. New villains. New heroes. New worlds.". My interpretation of this teaser (assuming that there's an interpretation to be had) is that it is intended to show us that this new series will be shifting its attention away from Earth and out into deep space. That is promising.
The tagline definitely seems to support the idea of a seasonal anthology, since everything is plural. Granted, it could be a single storyline that just focuses on multiple ships' crews in parallel, but I hope that this is intended to verify that the show is a seasonal anthology in which each new season will be a completely independent, self-contained storyline separate from the previous season(s). However, Bryan Fuller himself has gone on the record as saying that the show is not an anthology series. Instead, he says that the show will "tell a Star Trek story in a modern way". By this, he means that each episode in a season will be a chapter of a larger story. This isn't entirely new to Star Trek, since both Deep Space Nine and Enterprise already had season-long arcs. But even then, those shows were still heavily episodic, with most episodes telling self-contained stories that can be enjoyed on their own without relying on having seen the previous episodes. Not so in this new series. Much like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, and so forth, this new Star Trek series will likely require that its audience see every episode, in proper order, to be able to understand what's happening.
A few weeks ago, at Comic Con, we got something a little more concrete...
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Tags:Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, CBS, all access, Bryan Fuller, Nicholas Meyer, anthology, seasonal anthology, science fiction, U.S.S. Discovery, Ralph McQuarrie, Star Trek: the Motion Picture, prequel, Star Trek: Phase II