Star Trek: Picard showrunner Michael Chabon admits to testing boundaries with fans
"Michael Chabon" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Star Trek: Picard showrunner Michael Chabon has had a steep learning curve this year, in his interactions with fans. In a lengthy interview with Variety, Chabon discussed his experience as a first-time showrunner, and how his personal Star Trek fandom affects how he approaches fans.
All this season of Picard, Chabon has used Instagram stories to hold informal question and answer sessions with fans, with questions ranging from the simple to the absurd. He’s seen first-hand fans’ reactions to his show, both the good and bad. Chabon acknowledged that Star Trek fandom has a history of reacting poorly to new iterations of Trek, and admitted to Variety that there were elements of Picard that would test boundaries for some fans. “Sometimes,” he said, “you’re motivated to have things simply because it’s possibly going to piss off or provoke people who seem to have missed the memo about just what exactly Star Trek is and always has been all about.”
One reaction Chabon wasn’t prepared for, however, was how personally some fans would take the show’s tragedies. He explained: “I don’t think I quite understood that there were going to be people who would be upset about a character’s death regardless of how that character died. That simply the fact of a character dying - that was not okay with them. Even if I had known that I would have ultimately dismissed it because [...] I just don’t understand television in that way.”
Chabon later went on to talk about episodic versus serialized television and acknowledged that sometimes even he subconsciously wishes for the “old way” of doing things. He said, “if I can give myself enough distance as I’m watching the episodes as they’re dropping, I can feel this deep wiring in my brain that wants Star Trek to be episodic.” Discussing Deep Space Nine, which he says was “ahead of its time” in its serialized nature, he likewise said, “It felt appropriate, I respected it, and I understood it — and it made me uncomfortable as a Star Trek fan.”
Finally, Chabon gave Variety a taste of what's to come in season two of Star Trek: Picard, even without him at the helm. Chabon, while departing as showrunner due to other commitments, will remain an executive producer and is writing two of the episodes. He didn’t reveal any plot details, but he did say, “It’s going to be different in some ways. It’s definitely going to go in directions that we didn’t see in Season 1. [...] Going forward, we’re only going to be doing more of what we did, with greater confidence and with a greater sense of what this show feels like when it’s firing on all engines.”
There’s also a great discussion on LGBTQ representation in the show, which I highly recommend reading. Which, of course, you can do at Variety.com.
You can also watch the finale of Star Trek: Picard, out today on CBS All Access in the U.S. and Crave in Canada, and tomorrow on Amazon Prime Video, in other locations around the globe.
