Star Trek: Lower Deck on CBS All Access

Eggs Mayonnaise

All In With The Nuts
Animated. From people who write Rick & Morty. We'll see.

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'Star Trek' Animated Comedy a Go With 2-Season Order at CBS All Access

October 25, 2018 8:45am PT by Lesley Goldberg

Star Trek is boldly going where it has gone before.

CBS All Access has handed out a two-season, straight-to-series order for Star Trek: Lower Deck, a half-hour animated comedy from Mike McMahan (Rick and Morty) and franchise captain Alex Kurtzman. An episode count and premiere date have not yet been determined for the series, which marks CBS All Access' first animated offering. With the series, producer CBS Television Studios will launch an animated arm (CBS Eye Animation Productions), which will oversee the series alongside Kurtzman's Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment. Katie Krentz, who signed an overall deal with CBS TV Studios earlier this year, will oversee CBS Eye Animation.

Lower Deck, which will focus on the support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships, marks the Star Trek franchise's second animated series. Star Trek: The Animated Series — featuring the voice cast of the original series — ran for two seasons and 22 episodes from 1973-74. (Watch a clip, below.)

All told, Lower Deck — which was taken out to market before landing at CBS All Access — becomes the third series on the platform's rapidly growing Star Trek franchise. It joins Star Trek: Discovery (returning for season two in January) and the Patrick Stewart-led Picard show. Additionally, CBS' subscription video-on-demand platform is in the midst of rolling out a four-episode shortform spinoff called Short Treks, which serves as a bridge to the new season of Discovery. Additional series are expected to join the Trek universe.

Kurtzman, who was tapped in June to oversee the Star Trek franchise as part of his $25 million overall deal with CBS TV Studios, will exec produce Lower Deck alongside Secret Hideout's Heather Kadin, Roddenberry Entertainment's Rod Roddenberry, Trevor Roth, Katie Krentz and McMahan. Aaron Baiers, who brought McMahan to the project, will serve as a co-executive producer.

"We couldn't have imagined a better creative team to work with on CBS All Access' first original animated series than Mike McMahan, Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment," said Julie McNamara, exec vp originals at CBS All Access. Star Trek: Lower Deck is a fantastic complement to our growing lineup of original series and our ongoing expansion of the Star Trek universe on CBS All Access."

For his part, McMahan is a lifelong Trekkie. In 2011, he started a Twitter account in which he posted episode plots for a fake season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That led to an offer from publishers Simon & Schuster to pen a readers guide to the fictitious eighth season of the show, Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never-Aired 8th Season. On the TV side, he recently served as head writer on Adult Swim's Emmy-winning animated hit Rick and Morty. Lower Deck is his second animated series pickup this year. He also co-created Solar Opposites alongside Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland. That series, which landed with a two-season, 16-episode order, will premiere in 2020.

"Mike won our hearts with his first sentence: 'I want to do a show about the people who put the yellow cartridge in the food replicator so a banana can come out the other end.' His cat's name is Riker. His son's name is Sagan. The man is committed," Kurtzman said. "He's brilliantly funny and knows every inch of every Trek episode, and that's his secret sauce: He writes with the pure, joyful heart of a true fan. As we broaden the world of Trek to fans of all ages, we're so excited to include Mike's extraordinary voice."

Krentz, meanwhile, joined CBS TV Studios this year to help build the studio's animation pipeline. She previously spent five years as senior director of development at Cartoon Network, having worked on Steven Universe and countless others. Before that, she spent six years at 20th Century Fox TV, where she worked on animated hits such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, King of the Hill, Futurama and Bob's Burgers.

Lower Deck is CBS TV Studios' second animated series, joining Showtime's Our Cartoon President. For CBS All Access, meanwhile, Lower Deck joins a slate of originals that also includes The Good Fight, Strange Angel, One Dollar, No Activity and the upcoming Tell Me a Story.

McMahan is repped by ICM Partners. Kurtzman, who will serve as showrunner on season two of Discovery, is with CAA and Gendler Kelly.

Animation continues to be in high demand as multiple streamers have made big investments in the space in recent months. Netflix recently picked up Disenchantment for two seasons (through 2021); Adult Swim renewed Rick and Morty for a whopping 70 episodes; Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard earned a two-season order for Central Park at Apple; and BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg is adding to his Netflix slate with Tuca and Bertie, starring Tiffany Haddish, and Amazon's Undone, among others.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
But will it be cannnnnnnon!?!?!
 

Eggs Mayonnaise

All In With The Nuts
There is no Star Trek Cannnnnnon anymore. Now there is only the Star Trek Boomerang.
 

Fuddlemiff

Is this real life?
It sounds like it could be pretty good, but generally it’s all going the way of Star Wars.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Well Star Wars keeps cancelling its spin-off movies (sorry, Boba Fett fans!) so I won't believe this is happening until it starts filming (or voice recording.)
 

Fuddlemiff

Is this real life?
Even more possible show titles uncovered.

https://www.cnet.com/news/new-star-...uncovered-cbs-all-access/#ftag=CAD-09-10aai5b

I can’t see Destiny being used because it’s too similar to Discovery. And the obsession with Khan is annoying. Yes, The Wrath of Khan is one of Trek’s highlights. But it was because of the people who made it and the time they made it in. You can’t replicate it, but even if you could there wouldn’t be any point!
 

The Question

Eternal
Great. We have Discovery to ape NuBSG, now they'll have a cartoon to Xerox Rick & Morty with.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
And would Khan be a Hispanic guy in brownface playing an Indian or a white Cumberbatch playing a white English guy naemd Khan? Or would he be white on one side and brownface on the other?
 

The Question

Eternal
It'll be a white Cumberbatch playing an Hispanic guy playing an Indian guy who puts Viking gods in blackface.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter


Certainly is an animated Star Trek comedy.
 

Eggs Mayonnaise

All In With The Nuts
When they said it was going to be animated, I didn't think it was going to be... a cartoon.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Why must all modern Star Trek starships look fucking terrible?













(John Eaves is the answer)

Maybe there will be a joke about the ship looking ugly, then the main character looks directly into the camera and winks but the it pulls back to show Q holding the camera and he says "don't mind me, just filming a doc-Q-mentary!" then winks into the REAL camera and oh God I should be writing this show.
 

The Tomtrek

Love Wookiee
The first episode was.... eehhhh??? I didn't think it was terrible but I didn't, like, think it was good. Or funny.

Part of it is stuff they can probably fix, a lot of the characters were annoying because they just wouldn't stop talking and it seemed to be edited in a way where there were no breaks between sentences so everything was just paced too fast and I get that seems like a good way to make characters seem 'quirky' but really its annoying because there's no way for any jokes to breathe and I just want them to shut the fuck up.

But part of me is thinking that the premise of the show is to show what the people in the background of a normal TNG episode would be doing. Except in order to do that, you need to actually have a normal TNG episode somewhere in there. The problem here is that all of the crew seem to be exaggerated comedy characters so we don't get that at all. Like if this show was just about a crazy starship of zany people that would be one thing, but that doesn't seem to be what the show is about.

I dunno.
 

CaptainWacky

I want to smell dark matter
Oh am I supposed to watch this.
 
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