Strange New Worlds has been my favorite Trek since Next Generation, and if the quality continues, could easily be my favorite Trek ever. But with the e.p. wishing for more episodes per season, there’s a danger of diluting the show by adding weak episodes that would have never made it in a 10 episode season.
One of the things I’ve long admired with BBC shows is their normally low-episode seasons, which kept out a lot of filler that normally made it in to the broadcast shows from the states. But streaming (and before that, cable) changed things. Finally US based shows were able to create much lower episode seasons, allowing the creators to tell more of the story they wanted to tell, without stretching things out (too much), or being forced to add stories they weren’t thrilled with in order to fill the season. (Though, even with shorter runs, shows are still doing this. Picard season 2, for example, could have used some trimming. So, yeah, show runners are still being forced to fill seasons where X number of episodes were ordered before the story was fleshed out. Maybe it just seems more evident in serialized shows.)
I can’t help but think a longer season of SNW would be a “more is less” scenario. I’d much rather see Paramount create another Trek show that’s mainly episodic, that’s been shown the same attention to quality that SNW has received.
Longer seasons would allow them to throw in a few SciFi oriented episodes that don’t necessarily advance character arcs. Where would SNW be if TOS didn’t have the “Arena” (Gorn) episode that was based on a completely unrelated SciFi short story?
Mirror, Mirror was a SciFi episode that not only gave us the foundation for Discovery, but cemented the evil-twin-goatee trope into pupular culture.
Space Seed (Botany Bay/Khan) was also a one-off SciFi episode. Where would the entire franchise be without it?
I really hope SNW makes room for exploring the sort of SciFi ideas that Star Trek was originally based on.
Part of the reason why TNG was good beyond the first couple seasons was because of the open script submission policy that’s no longer in existence. According to ex-Trek producer Ronald D. Moore, they were reading something like 3000 scripts a year. It allowed them to be choosy (though there were still some stinkers). Now that the characters are established, if the seasons were longer, it might be cool to see the open script submissions come back (though, as I’m typing this, maybe implementing this during or shortly after a writers strike would be a poor choice, even though there were limits to how many scripts one could submit before going through “official” channels). Anyway, one could argue that a huge amount of ideas need to be generated for a show as great as TNG to exist, more than a small group of writers could produce. If outside script admissions were allowed, I’m sure we’d see some great sci-fi episodes from writers who weren’t even thinking “Star Trek” as they wrote them.
I’m not against filler, and my post may have come off as being that way. Not every story has to advance character or advance some storyline. I’m just against bad filler.
Just a fun note: Ron Moore got his start through that open submissions policy when submitted a script for what became “The Bonding.” He had no writing credits before that.
Several of the Relaunch novelverse TrekLit authors tried out with spec scripts before being picked up to write tie-in fiction.
David Mack, a film school grad, got script credits for 2 DS9 episodes, Starship Down and Only a Paper Moon before being contracted for some Starfleet Core of Engineers stories.
Kirsten Beyer, a theatre grad, never got into one of the shows with a spec script, but was picked up to write Voyager books, then came full circle to be in the writers rooms on all the new live-action shows.
Wow thanks, that really explains well why the modern shows respect (at least some of) “beta canon” more than what I would expect. A natural consequence when some of the authors sit in the writer’s room :)
David Mack was more recently a consultant for the development and first seasons of both Lower Decks and Prodigy as well. I believe we can thank him for bringing Peter David’s Brikar aliens (from the YA Starfleet Academy and the New Frontier books) into onscreen canon with the character of Rok Tahk in Prodigy.
A new challenge with open submissions would be low effort AI spam. Scifi magazines are buckling under the tidal wave of crud right now https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/25/23613752/ai-generated-short-stories-literary-magazines-clarkesworld-science-fiction