Star Trek: Lower Decks

[Q99]

A half hour cartoon show, comedy, is going to focus on the support crew of a Starfleet Ship


It's by one of the animators of Rick and Morty (Note, not the showrunner, so that doesn't tell us too much), and he's known for making the TNG season 8 twitter account

[Elheru Aran]

...meh?

I don't follow Rick and Morty, mind you. So I'm starting from pretty much nothing here. The TNG S8 account is vaguely amusing, but mostly looks like someone hodgepodged together some kind of random TNG episode generator. Can't say I'm hugely impressed. But if it comes out on a format I can access readily at the time, I might give the first couple episodes a go.

[bilateralrope]

Could work. My biggest worry is that a lot of the comedy is going to come from characters being incompetent at their jobs.

[Q99]

It strikes me as being more direct competition to the Orville.

And the samplings of his humor are, well, tweets, inherently short and limited so hard to judge too much by.

[bilateralrope]

Thing is, Orville tries to get as close to the Trek formula as it can while adding humor. That means a show focusing on the command staff/bridge crew for the most part.

Meanwhile CBS seems to be trying to avoid the command staff. Lets look at three of the main Discovery characters:
- Burnham. Stripped of her rank for most of season 1 and only kept on in a specialist science role.
- Tilly. Final year cadet.
- Culber. One of the medical staff. Not the Chief Medical Officer.
Though the first two get a lot of time working on the bridge and the third has all the decision making of the ships CMO. So I'd say they failed at writing characters who weren't command staff.

Can they manage to write stories for lower ranked characters on their second attempt ?

[Master Six]

They should have just made a sitcom in the '90s based on "The Lower Decks", with all the actors. Use whatever sets from the shows are available, stock footage, dubbing. Go cheap and cheesy as shit, just write good jokes and know what Trek is.

[Elheru Aran]

They should have just made a sitcom in the '90s based on "The Lower Decks", with all the actors. Use whatever sets from the shows are available, stock footage, dubbing. Go cheap and cheesy as shit, just write good jokes and know what Trek is.

Wouldn't that have been nice. I suspect they trashed most of the TNG sets during Generations, though, and promptly re-jiggered them to accommodate DS9 and VOY.