Alex Kurtzman on Star Trek’s Future — and Paramount’s New Regime
With his overall deal set to expire, the ‘Starfleet Academy’ showrunner on what’s next and why Gene Roddenberry’s ‘optimism’ matters more than ever
Recently, I laid out the stakes for 20 buzzy new series premiering this year, interviewed the Bell Media execs who bet on breakout hit Heated Rivalry and analyzed 5 burning questions about Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Email me at lesley.goldberg@theankler.com
Welcome back to reality, Series Business readers. Re-entry isn’t easy, but I’m rested and feeling cautiously optimistic about our industry.
Before we get into this week’s column — an interview with Star Trek creative captain Alex Kurtzman — I hope you’ll enjoy the second installment in my new Showrunner Sessions series for The Ankler. Showrunner Sessions, to jog your post-holiday memory, is my video series of conversations with top writer/executive producers about how they shape stories, manage teams and bring your favorite hits to life.
My latest discussion is with the brains behind the Netflix romantic comedy Nobody Wants This, creator Erin Foster and co-showrunner Jenni Konner. Starring Kristen Bell as the goyishe Joanne who falls for hot rabbi Noah (Adam Brody), the Disney-produced comedy recently wrapped its second season, with Foster and Konner now in the writers room crafting the third.
We talked about the show’s Jewishness and how many of the themes are intentionally universal. “The surprising thing is that the more specific you are, the more general it is for people and the more relatable it is to more people,” Foster said. “The amount of people watching the show definitely do not connect with the idea of meeting a guy who’s a rabbi and falling in love with him and asking if you’re going to convert.”
Konner, the Girls alum who joined the show in season two alongside Bruce Eric Kaplan as co-showrunner, told me she responded to the real-life obstacle in Foster’s concept. “In rom-coms the obstacles are so often fake,” she said. “And it was so nice to watch one where it was actually real stakes. And that to me opened endless storytelling.”
The duo also open up about the season two joys of highlighting supporting characters Sasha (Timothy Simons), his wife Esther (Jackie Tohn) and Joanne’s sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe). “It was really interesting to show this parallel of two people falling more in love and show next to them two people growing further apart and what that looked like. Because you really don’t need to see like five couples falling in love,” Konner said of Sasha and Esther’s marriage. Added Foster: “We thought it’d be very interesting if a wife were to see that their husband was having sort of gray-area texts with someone. It could make her angry and hate him and leave him. Or it could make her curious: ‘Oh, I’m not being my best self anymore and he’s not being his best self. Maybe we need to try to look inward.’ And that’s what Esther does.”
As for season three, the writers are describing it as the “champagne season” that will be a playful one as Foster shares her hopes for a five-season journey.
Catch our full conversation, presented in partnership with Netflix, below — and look for more Showrunner Sessions coming soon.
Now on to today’s update …
Star Trek has had many “new beginnings” in its 60-year history: 1987’s The Next Generation, 2001’s Enterprise, the 2009 feature film and 2017’s Discovery, to name just a few. But count Starfleet Academy as another one, because that’s what it represents to current franchise captain Alex Kurtzman.
The veteran showrunner, 52, who’s spent more than a decade expanding the Star Trek Universe, will launch his seventh Trek series for Paramount+ on Jan. 15 with the Holly Hunter-led Starfleet Academy. The school-set drama, which follows cadets and teachers (including a few familiar characters), arrives mere weeks after Kurtzman said farewell to Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Spock (Ethan Peck) and Number One (Rebecca Romijn) when production wrapped on the fifth and final season of his sixth Trek show for the streamer, Strange New Worlds.
“If Star Trek is going to grow into the next place and the next place and the next place — as it certainly will as it has now lasted 60 years — every generation is going to have to inherit their own version of it,” Kurtzman tells me Tuesday before heading off to the show’s New York premiere (attended by Ankler social media whiz Abby Barr and The Wakeup’s Sean McNulty). “The through line of Trek is that essential vision of optimism, but you ask any Trekkie of any generation, everybody has a different story. And that’s what’s beautiful about Star Trek. It’s incredibly rare.”
At the same time, Kurtzman is now making Trek shows for a completely new regime after Skydance completed its $8 billion merger with Paramount and CEO David Ellison recruited former Netflix head of originals Cindy Holland to oversee Paramount+. Holland, in turn, corralled her former Netflix colleague Jane Wiseman to head originals for the platform that has been home to Trek since Kurtzman launched Discovery a decade ago. While Wiseman is new to all things Trek, she and Holland brought in renowned genre guy Chris Parnell (Pluribus, For All Mankind, Outlander, The Boys) — hiring him away from Apple TV to Paramount as EVP of originals — to work with Kurtzman on the all-important franchise that kicked off its 60th anniversary year with a soggy float in L.A.’s iconic Rose Parade.
With his longtime Paramount overall deal poised to expire at year’s end, Kurtzman isn’t completely ready to boldly talk beyond Starfleet Academy, though he knows it won’t be his last Trek show. Post-premiere festivities, Kurtzman will head back to work next week to direct the season two finale of Starfleet Academy, then plans to meet with the new Paramount regime to map out what’s next, including conversations about a new overall deal (more on that below!).
In my interview, edited and condensed for clarity, Kurtzman explains:
Where his overall deal stands as it nears expiration and Star Trek’s future is plotted: “Conversations have been had”
Why Starfleet Academy finally moved forward after nearly a decade in limbo — and what changed at Paramount
The one question he asks before committing to any new Star Trek series
How being a parent reshaped the show’s tone, themes and sense of “wild optimism”
His take on Holland and her leadership team, especially Parnell, after first meeting him during his Apple tenure
How Starfleet Academy and Roddenberry’s “beautiful” vision of the future connect uniquely to today’s Gen Z and Alpha audiences