Fresh from the release of the excellent Project Hail Mary – which will rank alongside the best sci-fis of the decade when it ends – author Andy Weir has just revealed incredibly frustrating news. He spoke on a podcast alongside the movie’s release and revealed that he had pitched a Star Trek show to Kurtzman and Paramount, and had been rejected:
“I pitched a Star Trek show to Paramount, and I was in Zoom with the showrunners with all the shows and spent a lot of time talking to [executive producer Alex Kurtzman]. I don’t like a lot of the new Trek. He, as a person, is a really nice guy. But at the same time, those shows are sh*t. He is a nice guy. But they didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, f*ck ’em.”
Naturally, a fairly significant number of Star Trek fans are not taking the news well. On Reddit, one fan notes it’s “hilarious how dedicated Paramount is to keeping people who love Star Trek away from making Star Trek” while another says the studio “should get down on their knees and thank the heavens that Andy Weir wants to make Star Trek” at all. A lot of the sentiment reads quite simply:
Weir does seem to hold something of a grudge, as the quote above reveals, and a lot of the fandom conversation around his comments echo that sentiment. And that’s particularly interesting to consider when you realize his “those shows are sh*t” comments don’t align with his own praise of several Kurtzman-era Star Trek shows:
“I’ll give you my opinion and I’m just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think it’s pretty good. I didn’t hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go.”
So… just Discovery and Prodigy then? Weird is a fan, clearly, and his approach to making science accessible is absolutely something that could shepherd in a new era of Star Trek. He has a great knack for writing humanist propaganda into his sci-fi, and Star Trek has always done the same of its heroes (even the non-human ones). There are, of course, voices of dissent: one Redditor says “Unless he can delegate writing a human woman to another writer, pass.” And another actually questions whether his style would suit Star Trek:
Both comments reflect wider discussions – a lot of which is focused on the perceived failure of Artemis to hit the heights of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. And it’s important to consider these voices in the discussion, but I can’t help but worry that Star Trek failed its fans by not at least advancing the pitch to a pilot. Perhaps the new regime at Paramount might revisit?
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