It's sad that the CBS executives have any respect for JJ Trek. Those films were hoaxes. JJ Abrams sold us a ST "reboot" and we got some kind of sick self parody. It does not produce a fan base. It will not produce a revenue stream. Producing more along these lines will produce diminishing returns, and the executives know it. They simply think the old farts, like us, are played out. This means that there will be no new ST, until a highly motivated trekkie with a really good idea shows the right executive a really good time. After this next idiotic ST movie, there will be no new ST. There will be no new television production.
The main reason is that the revenue stream will be uncertain. Television is in crisis, because it is an outdated technology. It's important, because the corporations that run this country have been depending on it to distract and misinform the American public since the middle of the 20th Century. Unfortunately quality programing winds up on the internet and is distributed for very little cost or even free. The audience for this show is even less likely to watch it on commercial television than any other audience. Science Fiction is expensive to shoot, so distributing premium product without anybody actually paying for it doesn't make sense.
The only way that a studio is sure to make money on this is to tie it into computer games. Television executives do not know how to do this. Disney works along these lines, but I don't know if their model would work in this case. By now, the formula for successful computer games should be well established, but you never can underestimate the idiocy of the people who have real power in this country.
For all the CBS executives, here is how you make money from Star Trek:
Step 1.) Get a handful of geeks to put together a new, consistent ST universe. That is, they pick and choose not simply what they think is cool, but what they think fits comfortably together, and pare the story world down to its core elements. The political back story and technology has to be laid out so that everybody creating content will know what is consistent. At this point, the pay off is still far away.
Step 2.) Research successful computer games, and game companies. Research old ST games. Prepare to form separate partnerships with several companies making very different games. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. Allow the game makers to make suggestions for the story world. Keep quality at the top of priorities. On line games should be affordable, and the gamers should understand that the production of the new series is dependent on the success of the games. That way, people may buy more than the they really use.
Step 3.) Find good writers, and make them study Stargate SG-1. The technobabble in this series always made perfect sense, despite involving up to date theories on quantum physics and cosmology. ST, even at its best only sounded like BS. Only now, can you be ready for production.
Step 4.) Only build sets if the price of CG remains high. GM and Toyota are not going to foot the bill when your audience isn't watching the commercials, so you just won't have the budget of TNG, DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. Promote the games as a the revenue stream for the series.
Unless my pronouncement of the death of commercial television is premature, this is the only way I can see a new ST series paying for itself. It is radically different from anything done with television before, and depends on the success of a number of elements CBS has no control over. In short, a producing new ST series is just too complicated. It takes too much imagination, too great an understanding of the audience, and too great an understanding of an unrelated industry. Studio executives just want to do the same thing they've done for the last 60 or 70 years, even though that business model is dying.
Topic: Star Trek Axanar (Read 32436 times)