Bryan Fuller is off Star Trek: Discovery. According to Variety, Fuller has been too busy with his other shows, the upcoming American Gods adaptation and his in-development reboot of Amazing Stories (ugh, for real? Over Trek , Bryan?). But there’s probably something else going on here. Apparently “there had been some strain” between Fuller and CBS Television Studios over the show’s progress, especially since they have yet to cast Star Trek: Discovery’s lead, a female lieutenant commander loosely modeled after Number One, a character who appeared in the original, unaired Star Trek pilot. But to fix this problem, CBS Television Studios brought in a real wrecking ball: the definitional studio hack: the original garbage crafter: the villain who requires a number of colons to describe even if it doesn’t make grammatical sense: the writer of everything bad in the world... Akiva Goldsman.
Q Continuum save us all from this hell.
While Variety reports that executive producers Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts, who worked with Fuller on Pushing Daisies, would continue on as Star Trek: Discovery’s showrunners, they report Goldsman will join in a “top creative role.”
Let’s look at some other stuff with Goldsman in a top creative role. He assembled the Transformers writers room, currently busy inventing ways to transform mere movies into war crimes. As a screenwriter Goldsman gave us The 5th Wave, Winter’s Tale, Angels & Demons, I Am Legend, I, Robot, Lost in Space, Batman & Robin and Batman Forever. Yes, he won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, but it’s hard to find someone with a worse sci-fi track record (and A Beautiful Mind sucks). His adaptation of The Dark Tower sounds like absolute garbage, which means that Star Trek is not the only venerated series he’ll have the opportunity to stomp into the mud next year.
It’s hard to overstate how swift a turn Star Trek: Discovery just took, from the most exciting possible new Star Trek scenario into a dark galaxy of sadness and stupidity. And while CBS will insist that Berg and Harberts are still working on Fuller’s vision, there’s something about their rationale that doesn’t make sense. Goldsman currently has nearly a dozen projects in development, according to his IMDb page. Fuller is too busy, so they brought in the busiest man in Hollywood? There’s a more likely answer here: CBS Television Studios went with the big studio moneymaker over the guy who would actually make a good Star Trek show.
