‘Marvel-ize’ Star Trek? That's What Bryan Fuller Proposed

Co-showrunner Aaron Harberts discusses the original pitch to tell stories set in multiple Trek time periods.

By Scott Collura

I visited the set of CBS’ Star Trek: Discovery recently, where I sat down with executive producer and co-showrunner Aaron Harberts. (You can read excerpts from our chat about religion, war, and continuity in Star Trek: Discovery here.) And while I had him, I had to ask about reports that Discovery co-creator Bryan Fuller had originally pitched the network on the idea of the show as a seasonal anthology along the lines of American Horror Story.

AHS, for example, resets its premise and cast of characters each year. According to an August story in EW, Discovery would’ve started a “journey through the eras of Captain James T. Kirk and Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and then go beyond to a time in Trek that’s never been seen before.” Fuller eventually left the Discovery showrunner gig and Harberts and Gretchen Berg took over for him, but I wondered what remained of that original pitch for the show’s subsequent seasons.

“People have different ways of defining anthology,” said Harberts. “What Bryan’s hope was was to try to find -- to try to Marvel-ize the Star Trek universe, in success. Have a writer on Star Trek: Discovery do a three-episode arc on a sliver of Next Gen that maybe you haven’t seen before. Or a little runner about what happened to [Discovery’s main character] Michael Burnham in her teenage years on Vulcan. Just trying to find opportunities to fill out the universe as it were, bring in writers who might not be on staff at the show, and just start kind of plotting different storylines.”

According to that same EW story, CBS responded to Fuller with the suggestion that he create “a single serialized show and then [see] how it performed.” And Harberts says that’s essentially where Star Trek: Discovery stands right now.

“For Discovery, that’s our ship, that’s our cast, that’s our crew, and we’re sticking with telling storylines through that lens,” he told me.

Harberts added that such ideas could’ve been spin-offs or possibly even a two-hour movie. “Things that could have also been done while everyone’s waiting for Discovery to come back,” he said. But he also thinks that it’s too early to tell where any of this will lead, and he’s just focused on making Discovery as good as he can right now.

“I think it could happen -- I think a lot of it depends on how Discovery does,” he said. “And one thing that I’ve learned is, and truly, I’ve said this up and down the halls. People will be like, you can’t shut up about that: Star Trek is really bigger than all of us. And so there may be a plan for it at CBS that I’m not aware of. They may have a plan. They certainly had a plan about rolling this out. All I can really speak to is my involvement on Discovery, and that’s got all of our attention.”

Stay tuned to IGN for more from the set of Star Trek: Discovery as we lead up to the series premiere on September 24.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura.

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