Star Trek is coming back to television—real television—this fall. The network announced that it’ll be airing Star Trek: Discovery on its main network starting in September as the network deals with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic impacting its traditional filming season.
Star Trek: Discovery debuted as a lead title for CBS’s streaming service CBS All Access back in 2017 (its pilot also aired on CBS), but has otherwise remained exclusive to All Access. The network will air the entire first season of Discovery starting on September 24th.
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The first season will come just before the show’s third season debuts on All Access on October 15th. Undoubtedly, the move is aimed at raising awareness of the series for CBS’s larger viewing audience, but recycling the show does help the network with a more pressing problem—going into the fall TV season without a lot of shows.
CBS Entertainment president Kelly Kahl explained that the move has a simple reason: COVID-19, which interrupted the typical annual filming schedule. “This is hardly a traditional fall season, but we are prepared with a strong slate of original content while our regular scripted series begin production.”
While productions are starting to resume around the world, many networks would have been well into the production of their regular programming, but Hollywood’s been shut down. All Access’s pool of original content comes in handy here—it has a smaller viewership than its regular network cousin, and thus a larger pool of potential viewers, who’ll now have something to watch this fall.
But will the profanity be bleeped and the gore edited out, and the Klingon boobies be blurred to meet broadcast network standards? :op
And when it is, does that mean that will be the new “official” way that things happened. similar to how the TOS remaster worked?
StarTrek Discovery should start with the first season on broadcast or second season on broadcast as starting with the third season will cause too much confusion. They should also air it twice a week, they have enough episodes to show two a week, run it after NCIS on Tuesday and at 9pm Thursday. This would work.
@3/George McGuire: Maybe you misunderstood the article but it is in fact the first season of Discovery that is airing on CBS, the broadcast network. Season three is still debuting exclusively on CBS All Access, the streaming platform, in October. In effect, not only is season one plugging a hole in the network’s fall schedule, but it serves to entice viewers to pay for the streaming platform to see the following seasons.
Well, the first season has already been shown on “real television” in the UK (E4 to be precise), so in a sense this feels like old news. What we really want to know is when Season 3 will be shown!
So is this worth watching? As I recall it got kind of mixed reviews initially.
@6/neaden:
It has its moments, and some of the characters are interesting (most everybody likes Saru, played by very tall prosthetic veteran Doug Jones). IMHO, the most fundamental problems relate to the writing quality of the season-long arc — there are a lot of promises that get dropped, changes of direction, and twists that aren’t really surprising. Basically, the individual parts suffer because they’re subordinated to the large-scale plot and character arc; there’s not much in the way of standalone eps or B-plots to give them attention, as in previous shows.
There are many other secondary complaints that you may or may not feel strongly about — a cast structure which is “main character” rather than “ensemble” as with all prior shows, production design (“this era looks wrong”, “the Klingons and uniforms were obviously changed for the sake of change”), and photography (lens flares, space scenes that are awfully dark). Opinions vary re: main character Michael Burnham — whether Sonequa Martin-Green’s performance is convincingly “human raised by Vulcans, in an awkward position, with fluctuating emotions” or simply “inconsistent”.