NewsT. Rick JonesStar Trek: Lower Decks

Star Trek: Lower Decks creator McMahan on creating comedic friction without dumbing down Starfleet

NewsT. Rick JonesStar Trek: Lower Decks
Star Trek: Lower Decks creator McMahan on creating comedic friction without dumbing down Starfleet
The crew of Star Trek: Lower Decks

The crew of Star Trek: Lower Decks

Now that Star Trek: Picard has finished, Star Trek fans are waiting for that next big “tentpole” project from CBS. While stay-at-home orders have hampered production on Star Trek: Discovery, we know that production is continuing on Star Trek: Lower Decks, although the premiere date still remains a mystery.

In the meantime, however, series showrunner Mike McMahan has been busy promoting another of his projects, Hulu’s Solar Opposites, and answering a few Lower Decks-related questions along the way.

In a new interview with /Film last week, McMahan addressed the question on many fans’ minds: how do you make a comedy Star Trek series like Lower Decks, without simply poking fun at the franchise?

McMahan explained to /Film that he’s a Trek fan himself and simply isn’t interested in making fun. “I was interested in writing a Star Trek that could be canon, that follows the rules of other Star Trek shows that I loved,” he said. “But I’m a comedy writer. I’m never gonna write a serious Star Trek.” He went on to explain that the shows writers handle that by keeping the focus off the bridge, where the real Star Trek episode is happening. “So if you’re watching Lower Decks,” he said, “you’re getting a full Star Trek episode from the perspective of people who are having their own social and emotional stories and their own sci-fi stories, but they just aren’t on the bridge. They don’t have the information the bridge is getting, and they don’t have the responsibility.”

They do, however, still fit into the Starfleet mold. “A big thing that was important to me,” McMahan said, “was figuring out how do we comedically access these characters. How can these characters be funny and not break Star Trek? [...] You can’t just have a stupid person in Starfleet, otherwise it breaks the aspirational paradigm of what humanity is like in Starfleet. So our leads are foils for each other, but they’re very much ingrained in Star Trek.”

McMahan went on to explain more about the main characters from the show. Ensign Mariner, voiced by Tawny Newsome, he says, “is sort of like our Tom Cruise/Maverick. [...] She’s kind of like Captain Kirk if Kirk wasn’t a captain and didn’t have the power.” Then there’s Ensign Boimler, voiced by Jack Quaid. An amazing Starfleet crew member, McMahan says he’s “so by-the-book and so burdened by following the rules that he can’t follow his gut.” The comedic friction, McMahan explains, is that both characters are good at what they do, but approach things completely differently.

Finally, McMahan pointed out that Star Trek has always had its share of comedy. “Every series of Star Trek has funny characters, funny episodes,” he said, “and those always live in the B-stories for the most part. [...] So it’s really taking that aspect of it and letting that shine.”

If you’d like to catch up on previous Star Trek comedy work by McMahan, then I highly recommend checking out the TNG Season 8 Twitter account, or McMahan’s book, Star Trek: The Next Generation Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never-Aired 8th Season, available on Amazon or wherever you get your books.