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Movies Sci-Fi Television Entertainment

Star Trek Discovery Gets Delayed Again As Spock's Father Is Cast (hollywoodreporter.com) 164

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hollywood Reporter: CBS All Access' Star Trek: Discovery has been delayed again as the series continues casting. The revival for the streaming platform has cast James Frain as Spock's father, producer CBS Television Studios announced Wednesday, as sources confirm that the show's planned May debut has been pushed. "Production on Star Trek: Discovery begins next week. We love the cast, the scripts and are excited about the world the producers have created," reps for CBS All Access said in a statement. "This is an ambitious project; we will be flexible on a launch date if it's best for the show. We've said from the beginning it's more important to do this right than to do it fast. There is also added flexibility presenting on CBS All Access, which isn't beholden to seasonal premieres or launch windows." Frain will play Sarek, the famed father of Spock who was first introduced in the original Star Trek and who has made several appearances throughout the franchise's many incarnations over the past five decades. The CBS All Access show features the franchise's Enterprise, now known as the U.S.S. Discovery. The drama will introduce new characters seeking new worlds and civilizations while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966. Star Trek: Discovery was originally scheduled to debut in January and was pushed back to May, with The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight now set to be the first scripted offering on CBS All Access, the network's VOD platform. This marks the second delay for the series, which saw former showrunner Bryan Fuller step down to focus on his Starz drama American Gods.
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Star Trek Discovery Gets Delayed Again As Spock's Father Is Cast

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  • Now known as... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jelle De Loecker ( 4844793 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @05:34AM (#53702137)
    > The CBS All Access show features the franchise's Enterprise, now known as the U.S.S. Discovery How can you call yourself the "Hollywood reporter" and get something so trivial wrong?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BlueStrat ( 756137 )

      The CBS All Access show features the franchise's Enterprise, now known as the U.S.S. Discovery

      How can you call yourself the "Hollywood reporter" and get something so trivial wrong?

      Better check, the reportage itself might be accurate. I don't care enough to check, but it may well be that they are "breaking lore", so to speak, and making major storyline changes regarding early ST 'history' regarding early ST-universe starships bearing the "Enterprise" moniker. Because they can. And because they're great. Just ask them. Just look at the DC/Marvel franchise adherence to established lore and sto

      • With medical degrees, in fashion,from France... Oops, this is the wrong forum. Could someone point out where the Portal humor forum is?
    • "During San Diego Comic-Con, another teaser for the series was released — this one featuring the “test flight” of the U.S.S. Discovery, the space-traveling base of operations for the cast.

      http://www.startrek.com/articl... [startrek.com]
      http://www.digitaltrends.com/m... [digitaltrends.com]

  • by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @05:36AM (#53702143)
    Pretty please.
    • Because of eternal copyright, Axanar will probably never happen.

      Axanar is a great idea for a story but until anybody can create a cartoon mouse and call it mickey, Axanar might only become real in an unpublished book.

  • Just how many 5-to-10 dollar-a-month streaming services do these content providers think the average demographic slice (in this case, I'm thinking 18-34 year-old males) is going to sign up for? In the first place, these guys aren't "content providers" any more than the ultra-rich are "job creators" -- CBS All Access and their ilk are simply middle men bundling/packaging content, no different than music publishers. The music industry is starting to show that people are no longer willing to pay for a full a
  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @06:47AM (#53702291)

    I loved Star Trek. TOS, TNG, you name it. Big time fan.

    It all ended when they decided to "reboot" the show and give it the boot, literally so. Of course you can't really continue a show with actors that are either ancient, dead or both, and you cannot do the TNG-dance every other decade because, well, how far can technology advance before humans become fully redundant because technology literally has the ability from "poof - you're dead" to "poof - you're alive". Face it, watching a bunch of Qs meddling with time and space isn't really funny, nobody wants to watch a show consisting entirely of Mary Sues.

    One Wesley was already more than anyone could stomach.

    Maybe I'm also not the target audience, being old and no longer the target focus for movies. I haven't seen the last few and I most likely also won't see this one. Sorry for the nostalgic shit, but Kirk, Spock, Bones and Scotty are four old guys that are dead now. Ok, one is technically still alive, but you get the idea. If they want to rewind time and put the setting back into the 2200s, why not show the adventures of another crew? It could have been woven into the old stories of the Enterprise to make old fans happy, if only for the "oh I see what you did there!" effect, while effectively not really bothering any new fans who probably know nothing about the original show (and let's be honest here, the 60s TV show is cheesy as fuck by today's standards). That could have rebooted the franchise for sure.

    What do we get instead? Well, basically what we got is that all we "knew", what has been established as canon and the stories that happened before, all that is simply tossed into the garbage can and you're expected to start over. And that's simply not working as well as it could. First, Star Trek is anything but unique today. It was in the 1960s, there was very little competition in the SciFi arena and it could easily gain a foothold, even with stories that were even for the time often sub par. If you want to succeed in the SciFi genre today, you have to pump a LOT of money to get noticed. That is of course easier if you can boast a known name, but if that name has been hollowed out as it has been here, you're basically trashing it. What they did was to throw away an existing fan base instead of building upon it. Because now you have to win us over again, there isn't anything in this Star Trek that I'd recognize anymore. But ok, fine, give me a story that I can relate to and believable characters.

    And that's where it fails. Again, with new characters this could have worked. But if you reuse characters, people have expectations. You expect Kirk to be brave, cynical, able to make one of two faces and suck in his belly for at least 200 episodes. You expect a cold, logical Spock devoid of emotions. And if that expectations are not met, your reaction is that it's "wrong". Which is kinda sad because the characters aren't that bad at all. They just don't fit the boots they have been put into.

    • My understanding is that this will be based on the Pre-reboot reality. We will certainly be seeing (mostly) new characters so it should feel a little more "Star Trek" than the movies.

      It is going to be set shortly after the TOS era though, and this does still have its problems. There's a lot of established continuity that we're tied into; and Star Trek fans will remember every single throwaway line about Sarek, when we are meant to have encountered each race and so on.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @07:46AM (#53702455) Homepage Journal

      Have you seen Star Trek Continues? You can watch it for free on YouTube. It has the original characters, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Checkov, but played by new actors. They filmed it in the original style, 4:3 with the same lighting, music, even 60s style direction and camera angles. And it's brilliant. Better than the original series in many ways.

      I guess they thought something like that would be too niche, or were not brave enough to have new actors do what amount to impressions of the old ones. The guy who plays Kirk in Continues has it down to perfection, every mannerism, speech pattern, facial expression...

      But no, they went with the crappy reboot, which is basically an action movie in space, barely related to Trek at all. Generic, forgettable bad guys... Khan was nearly good, but ultimately under-used and overshadowed by the enemy-within storyline.

      This new show, going back to the prime timeline, has the potential to be good. It's an interesting time in Trek's fictional history. Women apparently can't be starship captains, the Federation is fairly new and not as solid as it is by the Next Generation era. The galaxy is a more dangerous place, and people are still struggling to get to the level of social justice and post-everything society that we see a century later. It's just that there will be inevitable demands to make it action oriented and dumbed down, so it needs strong advocates for real Trek values and ideas.

      • Women are also rarely used as adversary, even though the female adversaries in any Star Trek movie or show were far, far more interesting, dangerous and cunning than their male counterparts. From the Borg Queen to Sela to that female founder, the female adversaries of the Star Trek universe were usually more memorable and a far better match to their Federation counterparts.

        I mean, let's be honest, Tomalak was a pushover for Piccard, and so was Gowron.

      • by Stavr0 ( 35032 )

        Have you seen Star Trek Continues? [...] The guy who plays Kirk in Continues has it down to perfection, every mannerism, speech pattern, facial expression. [...]

        He also does a hilarious Zapp Brannigan cameo, in a recent Futurama live-action fan film.

    • In my Opinion Star Trek started jumping the shark, where Sisco started to get super Profit powers, then it started to go down from there.
      I Voyager technobabble plot points. I had strong hopes for Enterprise, until I realized their influence from the future guys right from the pilot episode. I was hoping for a story about real discovery, running into aliens that we may have known before, but struggling to accept their methods and ways. Running into problems where sometimes the episode will mean they can

      • In my Opinion Star Trek started jumping the shark, where Sisco started to get super Profit powers,

        Quark was the one with the profit powers, Sisco/Cisco/Sisqó/Sisko only had prophet ones. ;-)

        • by WallyL ( 4154209 )

          Profit powers? The way he complains about all he has is the little bar, you'd think he doesn't make very good profits.

          • Considering how often it was "redecorated" by passing Klingons, Jem'Hadar and other minor and major catastrophes, and considering that it was always back in business an episode later, he couldn't be that bad a businessman...

      • Sisko never had super powers. Did we watch the same series?
    • I want to know what happens after the Dominion war. Stop going back in time.

    • Q was a mistake.
      Wesley was a mistake.
      The Borg children were a mistake (Voyager).
      Captain(less) Picard was a mistake. "We need to make a decision... quick, everyone to my ready room for a vote. Counselor tell us if our feelings are true on the matter!"

      TOS, always the best Star Trek.
      • And maybe TOS was best because its three leads were archetypes; you had the brave and adventurous Horatio Hornblower figure in Kirk, you have the cold intellectual in the form of Spock, and you have the emotional and moralistic McCoy. Though the casting was never quite that intentional, it's pretty clear that by the first few first season scripts were being produced that Roddenberry and his writers understood the good fortune they had in the chemistry between Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley, and fleshed out those

      • Q was a nice plot device, and he was well used. An omnipotent being has no need for power games for he has any power he wants. What I especially liked was that they didn't try to make him a "god", i.e. someone craving worship, because anyone who had total power has no need for petty crap like that. He was quite believable. What would ultimate power eventually lead to? Boredom. That's exactly what happened with Q, and the Continuum. They were essentially incredibly bored. Bored enough that the exploits of an

  • by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @07:49AM (#53702463)

    If this is the same kind of horrid drek as the "reboot" universe (AKA, the Teen angst IN SPAAAACE universe), then again, hollywood DOES NOT UNDERSTAND.

    Startrek was a huge success, because it preached a message of a non-militaristic, peaceful, and progressive future.

    Look at the reboot movies-- Rigid militarism, politicians lying their fucking asses off and scheming to perform illegal acts, horrible writing to justify explosions-- horrid horrid drek.

    The "Need" to "reboot" the series comes from some idiots in a board room feeling that the original message of the series was stilted, and not in line with modern audiences.

    Guess what, the ORIGINAL series was considered "Unsuited for modern audiences" back in the 60s too! FOR THE SAME REASONS.

    No, idiots in the board room-- it DOES NOT need more boobie time, more teen angst, bad drama, or more explosions. What it needs, is that original formula of "A better future than one ruled by horrible corporations, big money, and authoritarian government *IS* possible, and this is how it can happen".

    If you fail to deliver that, you are not delivering star trek.

    • Startrek was a huge success, because it preached a message of a non-militaristic, peaceful, and progressive future... No, idiots in the board room-- it DOES NOT need more boobie time, more teen angst, bad drama, or more explosions. What it needs, is that original formula of "A better future than one ruled by horrible corporations, big money, and authoritarian government *IS* possible, and this is how it can happen".

      You hear this sentiment very frequently these days, but it's only half true. Even if we limit ourselves for the moment to just TOS and TNG, and it's clear that not every episode had such hopeful social themes. I don't even think the majority of them did. What were the hopeful themes of "The Trouble with Tribbles" or "The Doomsday Machine" or "The Best of Both Worlds" or "All Good Things" or "Goddamnit, the Holodeck Is On the Fritz Again"? And sure, the Federation tried to be peaceful if possible but there

      • This is true, however, it seems to me that the direction CBS and Paramount want to take the series is "GI-Joe in space, with boobies and lasers!-- Oh, and throw in some really crooked corporations and government officials too! Everyone relates to those!"

        They seem to REALLY want to paint a very dystopian view of where humanity will end up, making any upbeat message of the series into a hollow sounding cliche that not even a koolaid drinker could swallow.

        That, and not even a token effort at rigorous scifi. (

    • Meh. Most of the Star Trek movies were pretty bad. So that isn't really a fair comparison. The last "reboot" was Enterprise. and while yes it was pretty bad also, I have to admit that it wasn't all bad. They had some parts that were pretty good. Most notably for me was the episode where trip got drunk which really just comprised of two actors talking like in a play, then once they stopped taking themselves so seriously they had the episode where the did the time travel thing to the original universe with th

      • Enterprise could have been incredible, and there were brief glimpses here and there, and particularly in the fourth season, when it became clear that it wasn't going to be renewed. If Enterprise had been about the founding of the Federation, if it had paid more attention to the cold war between the Andorians and the Vulcans, if it had spent some time on the human supremacist movement on Earth, instead of squandering so much screen time on that idiotic "Temporal Cold War" crap in the first three seasons, and

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Jar-Jar Abrams cured me.

    I dont have any interest it watching "GI-Joe in space"

    • by godrik ( 1287354 )

      Jar-Jar Abrams cured me.

      What are you talking about, Abrams never worked on Star Trek.

      *rocks back and forth* Abrams never worked on Star Trek. Abrams never worked on Star Trek.

  • by sproketboy ( 608031 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:01AM (#53702517)

    I'll catch the 1st episode but I don't have high hopes.

  • by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:38AM (#53702681)
    Does this mean they will have a non-binary android as a cast member?
    • Oh, like one that has actual antimatter particles whirling around inside it, and possibly leaking deadly gamma rays wasn't edgy enough? ;)

  • Nobody gives a damn about star dreck any more.
  • Since CBS took a gigantic steaming civil-lawsuit dump all over Axanar [axanarproductions.com], I really couldn't give a damn about any of their imitation Star Trek-flavored crap, especially since I'd have to pay to see it in the first place -- and it's not even going to be worth pirating so far as I'm concerned. Likewise JJA's Star Trek-flavored 'movies'.
  • canon: (noun)

    What some writer decides today what happened in a fictitious past. This is primarily caused by s/he wanting a personal thumbprint on a character set combined with an inability to imagine extensions to current story lines. In most cases this leads to conflict in story lines that produce confusion in the readership and at times actual outrage at the bastardization and extreme vandalism of admired characters (see Green Lantern).

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

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