CBS has revealed that it had given a series order to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a new show that will take place on the starship Enterprise in the years prior to James T. Kirk coming aboard as captain. The new show is set, like other recent Star Trek spinoffs, to stream on CBS All Access. But it will, according to co-creator and executive producer Akiva Goldsman, hew more closely to the original Kirk-era Star Trek in structure and tone than those other recent additions to the franchise have.

"We're going to try to harken back to some classical 'Trek' values, to be optimistic, and to be more episodic," Goldsman tell Variety. "Obviously, we will take advantage of the serialised nature of character and story building. But I think our plots will be more closed-ended than you've seen in either 'Discovery' or 'Picard.'"

Discovery, the first of the All Access series, broke with past Star Trek iterations by being the first to tell a highly serialised story. Picard, which premiered this year, followed suit, and presented a more sceptical view of the future than its humanist predecessors did.

The original Star Trek, in keeping with TV conventions of the late '60s, told stories so self-contained that events that seemed to traumatise characters in one episode would never be mentioned again in subsequent ones. By the '90s and early 2000s, a new wave of shows including The Next Generation, Voyager and especially Deep Space Nine introduced elements of serialised storytelling to a structure that was still essentially episodic.

"I imagine it to be closer to the original series than even DS9," Goldsman says of Strange New Worlds. "We can really tell closed-ended stories. We can find ourselves in episodes that are tonally of a piece." Of the type of episode that Strange New Worlds might attempt that Discovery or Picard might not, Goldsman says, "It's hard to do a shore-leave episode in the middle of a long, serialised arc."

Australian Associated Press