I believe that there was mention of some Legacy locations and species to visit too.

Sigh…

I’m perhaps at the extreme of negativity about the Legacy premise, but what Matalas seemed to be pitching was almost an anthology of legacy characters being visited by the Titanprise with the bridge full of offspring.

So, yes, Sirtis would not be wrong to think the focus of the pitch was the older cast with the younger characters and the visiting Titanprise as more or less the framing.

I have a theory that someone in senior management of the streamer under the old ownership had a strong belief that ‘children of legacy characters’ were a necessary bridge between old and new audiences. There seems to have been no awareness at all of his antithetical nepotism would be to the meritocratic principles of Starfleet.

We have La’an Noonien-Singh for no particular reason in SNW - she’s not even the bridge officer with augmented abilities.

Also, the more I hear about the pitch for Unity the more it sounds like a family saga with all the great things Archer’s offspring are up to as young adults (since the creators were told that they could have them at the Academy as they’d originally pitched).

It sounds like you might prefer to wait until the season is over and binge it.

The teasers and featurettes are the way Apple tries to create social media buzz rather than relying on the YouTubers to manufacture their own trailers.

That’s happening anyway, and there’s a it of AI slop. For those who want that stuff, my preference is to post the official ones.

Our youngest just did a TNG rewatch a couple of months ago so I think I’ll go for Voyager instead.

The recumbent stationery exercise bike in our family room is the reason I watch as much television as I do.

It’s not intense exercise but it really adds up.

One of our kids recently suggested doing a TNG or Voyager rewatch again with me. It may be time.

Season two is interesting.

Among other things, the two youngest Randas are in very contrasting places psychologically since Kentaro has had two years between seasons while Cate is dealing with the reality that others have had time to move on psychologically and she has not. (I really like season two Kentaro.)

I’m watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (M:LOM) which is in the midst of its second season on AppleTV.

And…my partner finally conceded to give the show a try. So, I’m rewatching season one with them. They say, based on being in the middle of season one that it’s the thing they’re enjoying most on tv just now.

While M:LOM does have creatures and kaiju battles, like the best Star Trek, the show’s emphasis is on its diverse characters and their stories.

The show has all the high quality we’ve come to expect of both AppleTV and Legendary Entertainment (Dune) science fiction productions.

M:LOM is designed as an entry point for those unfamiliar with the Monsterverse continuity or the 70+ year Godzilla franchise more generally. The action shifts back and forth between telling the stories of two generations: one in the mid 2010s and the other in the 1950s. It works well as it comes together at the end of season one.

If the show works for you, please check out our newest community https://startrek.website/c/monsterverse.

Given that they regularly eat the fuzz off of deer antlers* after they are shed, I am open to any odd dietary choices from porcupines.

*this odd porcupine factoid was of great amusement to one of our kids when they were of kindergarten age and liked to play the “guess what animal I am game.”

Glad the Fansets SFA combadges are coming out right away with both pins and magnets.

I still have vivid memories of trawling through the vendors at a 2019 local Comic Con, with our youngest and 45 k other attendees, looking for a Disco S2 combadge with magnet that didn’t actually exist.

There was really only one piece of merch that youngest wanted and naturally it was not to be found.

This era of Star Trek has quite a few A-listers actually.

Starfleet Academy is helmed by Oscar winner for best actress Holly Hunter (in The Piano), has two time nominee Paul Giamatti (one each nominations for best and best supporting actor) as well as Tig Notaro who is nominated this year for her documentary and has also been nominated twice for Emmys.

Akiva Goldsman, co-showrunner of Strange New Worlds has an Oscar for best screenwriter for an adaptation from another medium (for A Beautiful Mind).

We will never see 26 episode seasons again.

It currently takes more than one week to shoot a 42 minute episode.

Also, actors are not willing to lock into shows that leave them unavailable for movies or other television shows.

Star Trek and other streaming series are able to cast A-listers not just because they are willing to pay high pay rates and list them as executive producers but also because the A-listers are able to lock in multi season contracts with Star Trek while still being available to do other things.

But 10 episodes is not the maximum possible. Large ensembles like Starfleet Academy have enough main cast members that not everyone has to be on set every day.

As well, it’s possible that 4 or 6 episode limited series might be the perfect vehicle to bring back a Legacy character or explore something like the Department of Temporal Investigations. Under the old management those weren’t negotiable.

Why Paramount had such a bizarrely rigid policy after the ViacomCBS merger has never been adequately explained.

Sound like a decision was made on high that the 60th anniversary would not take place without a Star Trek show under weekly release.

I’m going to say that I saw some of the problems to come in BSG season three, but I still bought the physical media up to that point.

I don’t think you can blame it all on the writers strike, any more than you can blame Picard season two or Discovery season four’s weaknesses on the pandemic.

Other shows managed better. It’s the test of a good senior production executive to manage through those situations.

I was deeply disappointed in where For All Mankind took its women characters. I was hoping that having Naren Shankar join after he finished with The Expanse would redeem it, but it just kept getting worse in its treatment of women.

• !a driven engineer who becomes the head in Houston only to fall into a honey-trap and feed the Soviets information!<

• !an astronaut who played up her physical beauty and whose top-gun husband became a despondent alcoholic when she leaves him responsible for the kids!<

• !an astronaut who hides her sexual preference through a fake marriage!<

• !the neglected wife of an astronaut who is stalked and manipulated into a one time sexual encounter with a young man she once looked after as a child, then carries the burden of responsibility for the impact of his obsession.!<

We’re going to need to differ on Ronald D. Moore.

I wish Trek fans would stop calling for him to helm the franchise when we have not seen adequate evidence that he can carry through to make the kind of Trek that represents IDIC for future.

What I am seeing from him is a pattern of starting great new shows but not having as great ideas about following through long multi season arcs.

The Battlestar Galactica reboot was riveting for the first two seasons and then spiralled to a disappointing conclusion.

For All Mankind spun out in seasons two and three with an Oedipal storyline about a kid who becomes obsessed with his foster mother and wreaks havoc. Not to mention that all the heroic women characters in from season one had to be shown to deeply flawed by season three in a very male-perspective way.

For All Mankind isn’t as bad in terms of having a cisgender-male viewpoint writing women leads as say the Sheridan show Lioness, but it’s not succeeding as a show women see themselves in.

Thanks! I’ll add that to the original post.

I’m not sure I can agree on the camera work. This show has come a long way from the JJ Abrams directorial tricks embraced by Discovery and other shows of this production era.

I actually thought that Producing Director Osunsamni was restraining himself noticeably in his use of whipping cameras as compared to his directing style in previous shows.

Kurtzman set a directorial mandate for the show in the opening episodes with longer pans and more close ups on the characters. He even commissioned special amorphic lenses that enable close ups within the large sets. Jonathan Frakes mentioned that the directional norms for SFA are quite different and that he enjoyed the opportunity on his episode to rely more on shots where he closed in on the characters.

For this episode, the choice of using a shifting drone view for a remote news audience made sense in the context of an otherwise static scene of Nus’ theatrical show trial.

I always thought that the insistence on every Paramount+ show having 10 episode seasons — which was mandated by the executives in charge of streaming when the ViacomCBS merger happened — was weird.

Other streamers are not that rigid and vary season structures depending on what the show is. While 12 episode seasons are rare, I can’t see the streamer that merges HBO Max and Paramount+ being quite so rigid.

The newly merged conglomerate has a myriad of practical decisions to make in merging Paramount and WBDiscovery. It will take time for all of the parameters of their streaming model to be fully established and implemented but we can expect some significant rethinking.

One of the things that stands out - pun intended - about Starfleet Academy, is that the directors and production crew aren’t trying to hide the differences in height.

Holly Hunter isn’t afraid to let it be seen that she doesn’t even come up to Sandro’s shoulder.

Unlike Patrick Stewart who seemed to want more orange boxes deployed to minimize his height difference in Picard than has even been necessary in the constraints of old standard definition in TNG, the actors are comfortable being different in height and the directing style is working with it.

I’m hoping we’ll get more later.

The Imzadi bond between Tarima and Caleb is an order of magnitude stronger than Troi and Riker’s. Likely more.

I’m willing to go with a head cannon for now that Caleb has to have some native psychic abilities, if latent, that sparked the attraction and connection even with Tarima’s inhibitor in place.