Star Trek was a cult-classic TV show in the 60s that lasted only a couple seasons but developed such a rabidly enthusiastic fanbase (including Martin Luther King, who loved egalitarian future the show envisioned and convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on as Uhura because she was a positive role model for both people of color and all women) that it became one of the biggest science fiction franchises in the history of the genre.
Revived in a series of feature films in the 80s (well, the first was in the 70s,) mixing well with the new Star Wars series, Star Trek returned to television in 1987 with The Next Generation. TNG, to be frank, sucked in the first couple seasons, but by its end (thanks in large part to a great cast led by Patrick Stewart) you could argue that it surpassed the original series (given that I was born in '86, Next Gen was Star Trek to me.) The success of Next Generation spawned two other series that overlapped, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. After the end of Voyager, there was the prequel series Enterprise, which I actually think was not terrible (though its opening credits music, which traded symphonic classical arrangements established by the earlier shows for a maudlin soft-rock piece of garbage absolutely was,) but Enterprise didn't catch on, and actually the Star Trek television armada fell apart just as the Golden Age of Television was getting started.
It's actually this factor more than anything that makes me extremely curious about the new Star Trek show.
Obviously, Paramount is capitalizing on the success of the new JJ Abrams movie series. But while there's fun to be had in those movies, they really don't have the kind of puzzle-like sci-fi storytelling or deep-nerd world-building that works so effectively in a TV format. I also think that the fact that it's an alternate-universe retelling of Kirk, Spock, and company really demonstrates that they're going more for brand recognition than showing us something new (Into Darkness was particularly guilty in this sense.)
But Star Trek works better as a TV show than movies (consider the Next Gen movies, of which maybe First Contact is good, and Nemesis almost made Tom Hardy quit acting. Yes, did you know he was the bad guy in that movie?) And given that it's Bryan Fuller who is running the show (previous works include Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and the insane work of gruesome genius, Hannibal,) there's reason to be excited.
TV audiences these days are far more into long-term storytelling, something that Star Trek flirted with in the past, but rarely committed to. The closest we saw was Deep Space Nine, which had an arc about the Dominion for over half of its time on the air, but still mostly stuck with episodic plots for individual episodes.
I'd still expect some individual space adventures - not every show has to be novelistic as the Wire or Game of Thrones - but given that audiences are far more comfortable (and in the age of Hulu, capable) of keeping up with an ongoing story, we could see some deep plotting with a new Star Trek show.
There's also the opportunity to explore issues that are more public today than they were even fifteen years ago. On Enterprise, Dominic Keating, who played Malcolm Reed, said that he wanted to play his character as a gay man, but that the producers insisted that he be straight. In a fairly short amount of time, the cultural tide has shifted massively, and the idea that Star Trek's utopian egalitarian future wouldn't have openly gay people serving in Starfleet is laughable. Hell, the Secretary of the Army in the United States right now is gay, and unless we undergo some horrible backslide into medieval fanaticism, it seems like we'd have way more gay people on Starships in the 22nd, 23rd, or 24th Century.
Given that Bryan Fuller is himself gay, I can't imagine they aren't going to address this.
The other really big question for this series is when. Well, that coupled with "which timeline?"
The movies exist in an alternate timeline - making it technically not a reboot of the series and not wiping out everything that Trekkies have loved since the 60s. (I guess Enterprise would still be canon in both, given that the event that splits the timeline happens after that.) I wonder, then, if Paramount is going to try to push more of that, allowing them to tie the show with the movies in a kind of shared cinematic universe (something they of course did already with the 90s-Trek.)
But I know that the big Trek fans (myself included) would prefer to see more of the familiar timeline. We don't want to go through all the same stuff we saw before. In fact, I think a more radical departure - perhaps jumping ahead to the 25th Century, much as TNG jumped a century beyond the original series - would give the writers plenty of wiggle room while still being able to use stuff that came from earlier shows. We could get little updates about what's going on with the defeated Dominion, or what the state of the Borg are after what Janeway did to them. And of course, even though Star Trek '09 is mostly in an alternate timeline, in the original one, Romulus was destroyed. Holy crap would it be cool to have a Romulan crew member who has to overcome the distrust of his or her crewmates after the Romulan survivors were spread to the winds.
This could be a really cool, modern update to the Star Trek universe, and hopefully one that is truer to the spirit of the series than the recent movies have been.
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