CBS is “utterly committed” to making another season of Star Trek: Picard

The coronavirus has been making things difficult for people in the film industry. Sure, some productions are getting back to work after months on hiatus, but other shows are being killed in the cradle, with networks deciding it’s just not a good time to spend money on something new right now.

That has some fans worrying. What about newer shows that are working up to their second seasons? Might the mass shutdowns force them to end it at one?

Well, one show they won’t have to worry about is Star Trek: Picard, which marks Patrick Stewart’s return to the character he debuted on Star Trek: The Next Generation over 30 years ago. “I had some encouraging news only yesterday about when we might be starting again,” he recently said on the official Star Trek web series The Ready Room, hosted by TNG vet Wil Wheaton. “All these predictions are based on the best possible circumstances. I can tell you that CBS is utterly committed to another season of our show utterly committed. It’s going to happen. Other than that, I’m not being provocative, but I actually I don’t have much to tell you.”

And that’s the least of what he’s been saying. As part of CBS’ campaign to get some Emmy gold for Picard, Stewart is talking all over town, including on the NPR podcast Fresh Air, where he talked about his trepidation when he was first offered the role of Jean-Luc Picard way back when. “It was terrifying to me, because what it meant was that I was going to have to shut down my career, which actually — and I don’t know whether there is any connection here — actually had started to take off in a way that I was very pleased with.”

"And the idea that I would have to shut that down for six years was horrifying. But … that was when my agent was the very first person — and many others followed him — to say to me, “Look, don’t worry about six years. That’s in all these contracts. I’ve got to tell you, this show will be lucky to make it through the first season. You cannot revive an iconic series like those three seasons of the original Star Trek. You just can’t. So you’re not going to be here for six years. Forget about that!” So I happily and delightedly signed a contract which committed me to six years. And we ended up doing seven."

Whoops.

Of course, by the end of the show, not to mention the movies, the situation was quite different. “Star Trek had taken over my life,” Stewart remembered. “I got to a point … when I felt that I had said everything that I wanted to say about Jean-Luc Picard and his life on the Enterprise.”

In fact, when CBS approached him about returning to his TNG role for Star Trek: Picard, he planned to say no, but a meeting with the producers changed his mind. “A little tingle started in my spine with regard to some of the ideas and concepts that they were putting forward,” he said. And the rest is streamable on CBS All Access.

Picard is a different type of Star Trek show. It’s less utopian than what came before, dealing more frankly with issues like prejudice and xenophobia. As originally envisioned by Gene Roddenberry, those things weren’t supposed to exist this far into the future, but Stewart thinks it’s just part of the franchise’s natural evolution:

"[Gene Roddenberry] made it perfectly clear to me that although he didn’t mind referencing the present day a little, he was not going to get the [Star Trek: The Next Generation] caught up in contemporary politics or contemporary society and so forth. And I respected that. When Rick Berman took over, that changed a little. And Rick was more interested, which stimulated me in talking, making connections. Well, it became perfectly clear that Alex [Kurtzman] and the team on Picard felt a responsibility to do that. And that impressed me a lot. You know, I’ve been an activist all my life, certainly politically. And we were living in a society two years ago when all this began in which there were profound concerns about not only whether U.K. or the USA but where the world was going. And so I was affected by that."

We’re definitely living in an age where being “apolitical” doesn’t seem to be much of an option anymore, or even physically possible, which I’m okay with. Series gotta grow somewhere.

At the same time, Stewart doesn’t think Picard has abandoned the optimism that’s always been at the core of Star Trek, even if it’s buried a little deeper now. “I think that Star Trek: Picard is still fundamentally optimistic, although it has taken Jean-Luc a whole season to bring himself around to that belief,” he said. “When we first meet him, he is a rather severely depressed, anxious, guilt-ridden, bored old man. Well, some of those elements vanish during the course of the first season, I’m happy to say, although it was very interesting to have to perform them, to act them and make them real. And I am sure that whenever we get to start shooting Season 2, which we will shoot, that will continue in the same way.”

We don’t know when exactly season 2 will come along, but let’s take a page out of Star Trek’s book and hope for the best.

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h/t TrekMovie