Earlier today, Entertainment Weekly posted the image to the left on their website, and Trek fans saw their first official photo from the new STAR TREK: DISCOVERY television series. But that was only the beginning!
A few hours later, CBS showed off a series of trailers for its upcoming fall line-up—including Discovery—trying to excite advertisers to purchase commercial space for these fresh new shows. It’s called the Upfronts, and the event takes place each year in New York City (the main hub of the advertising industry).
All of the major networks show off their fall line-ups, and each has a time-slot reserved for their presentation at a different location. For anyone curious, here is a schedule for this year’s Upfront presentations in New York City:
Monday, May. 15
- NBCUniversal Upfront Presentation — Radio City Music Hall, 10:30 a.m.
- Fox Upfront Presentation — The Beacon Theatre, 4 p.m.
Tuesday, May. 16
- ESPN Upfront — Minskoff Theatre, 9:15 a.m.
- Univision Upfront Presentation — The Lyric Theatre, 11.a.m.
- ABC Upfront Presentation — Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, 4 p.m.
Wednesday, May. 17
- Turner Upfront Presentation — The Theater at Madison Square Garden, 10:15 a.m.
- National CineMedia Upfront Event — AMC Lowes Lincoln Square Theater, noon
- CBS Upfront Presentation — Carnegie Hall, 4 p.m.
Thursday, May. 18
- The CW Upfront — New York City Center, 11 a.m.
Some fans were suspicious that the timing of CBS’s reveal of the new trailer for Star Trek: Discovery was somehow tied to the enthusiastic fan reception for another new sci-fi show debuting on Fox, The Orville, produced by and starring SETH MacFARLANE (Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, Ted, and a bunch of other funny stuff) and directed by John Favreau (Iron Man, The Jungle Book). An obvious spoof of Star Trek, the production values, costumes, sets, make-up, lightning, and VFX all looked top-notch…and fans were talking about this new series almost non-stop on social media Monday and Tuesday. The Orville trailer has already been viewed on Youtube more than 1.3 million times in less than 48 hours!
Many were thinking that Orville looked better than Discovery, and some fans were musing that the strongly positive reaction to Orville scared CBS into rushing out a trailer for Discovery. But as you can see from the schedule I included above, there was no such panic involved. FOX went first on Monday, and CBS was simply waiting its turn today.
And now that turn has come. Int addition to the trailer, CBS announced an extension of the first season of Discovery from 13 to 15 hour-long episodes and the addition of a weekly “Talking Trek” discussion show following the general concept of similar shows like “Talking Dead” on AMC.
Watch the trailer for Discovery here (or view a lower resolution version below if you can’t see it on the CBS site) and tell me what you think in the comments section…
They SERIOUSLY should have set this show in the future, if they were going to go with such a futuristic look. Really really STUPID move on CBS’s part. I’ll give it a chance, but I am really not all that optimistic about this series, sorry but I’m just not… *smdh* / :/
Um…it is set in the future.
TOS is a 1960s vision of the future from the tech standpoint. So retconning it is fine. Look. We all love the TOS sets but they are antiquated and severely dated..even by 1990’s technology in the real world.
Trek is about the characters…what is family? How great can a crew be together?
True…although there might be such a thing as snazzing things up too much. At the risk of bringing up the “A” word, Axanar designed starships that looked like the original Enterprise’s predecessor(s) while still being “cool.” Disco’s production designer has a set of rules, and one of them is “No cylindrical nacelles.” Why? Because he doesn’t like them. They look too much like 1960s rocket engines. Perhaps…but is that going a step too far? Axanar managed to pull off cylindrical nacelles, so it IS possible.
Even Axanar was influenced by the JJ Movies.
“Influenced” is a misleading word, Brady. Alec Peters and Tobias Richter acknowledged in numerous interviews that the USS Kelvin scenes in the opening of Trek 2009 had to be considered Prime Universe canon…as the USS Kelvin existed B.N. (Before Nero). And so, with that design “locked in” to the Prime Universe, Alec and Tobias designed a series of contemporary Starfleet craft that would use similar elements and ultimately, through the USS Ares, lead to a design evolution to the Prime design of the NCC-1701.
Thank you, Jonathan – That’s exactly the point I was trying to make – I know Discovery is in the future, but I was talking about further into the future, beyond TNG, DS9, and Voyager *sigh* Anyway, we’ll see what happens with this show I suppose… P
can you refrain from referring to Discovery as Disco Jonathan? Doing that already shows your bias.
What bias? I’m actually looking forward to the show. Unlike many on Small Access, I am NOT planning a boycott..and I have my designated subscriber picked out.
I just really like calling it “Disco.” I even made this fun image…
Any idea how to watch the trailer from out of the US? I just get “The video you have requested is not available for your geographic region.”
Okay, I’ve just posted a lower-resolution version here on this web page for anyone who can’t access it through the CBS website.
Discovery trailer looks like they watched the Orville trailer and said, yeah.. we’ll do that.
Even the alien make up looks the same.
I know, I know.. impossible the accidentally got the same SpecialFX company.. and impossible they got the same number of crew.. and the alien alien appear like a shrunken brown prune in both trailers.. but.. geeezz.. really guys.. after all this time?
I think CBS is just messing with us now.
.. oh.. the ship.. the Orville? better lines than the Discovery.. it may look like a bottle cap opener from 1989.. but it doesn’t look.. ahem.. like Discovery.
That’s not the Discovery in the trailer, that’s the Shenzhou.
Overall, it’s got a beat and you can dance to it……
Seriously, though, I give this a “not bad at all”! There are a couple of clunky lines “Computer, enable ignitors.”, but overall it looks good enough to have piqued my curiosity. I’m in for the premiere at the very least.
If you think Oroville captures the spirit of Trek then I guess you think Trek should have more poop jokes.
The spirit of Star Trek includes a bit of campiness mixed in with a perhaps-naive-but-nonetheless-hopeful-and-optimistic view of the future. Bright lights. Bright colors. Sleek ships. High moral values. Heroes doing the right thing because, well, they’re heroes. That’s what made “In the Pale Moonlight” such a powerful episode. Had Trek not established the paragons of virtue that were the captains, Sisko’s “Jack Bauer” moment wouldn’t be as salient as it was and still is.
Star Trek has gotten progressively darker over the last couple of decades. Yes, it started with DS9, accelerated with the third season of Enterprise, and hit a crescendo with the three JJ movies (especially the aptly-titled Star Trek Into Darkness (spelled properly with no colon…which makes my point for me). Will Disco be equally dark…or will it pull back a little? We shall see. But going back to that core spirit of exploration and optimism in a future that looked so bright that Geordi had to wear shades…that’s what Orville seems to have.
It’ll be an interesting fall season!
Looks like another alternate universe has been heard from.
I actually have to say, that the look of the Klingons pisses me that much off, that it ruins the show for me entirely. Disney would never change the look of Chewbacca
Well, Chewie did look a little gray in episode 7. 🙂
Not THAT gray, Jonathan lol… P 😉
No, they really wouldn’t would they? I MIGHT forgive the look of the Klingons, if CBS’ll just admit this show takes place in an alternate universe – If they insist however in saying that the show’s set in the Prime Universe, then, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to say “No” to that… :/
Hmm, I seriously don’t know what to make of it. Is it as “bad” as I feared it would be? No. Is it as “good” as I hoped it would be? No way.
Yes, you cannot make a prequel to TOS looking even more dated than TOS, but, as Jonathan pointed out, the folks at Axanar for example did a pretty convincing job at that. You simply cannot state it is a genuine prequel set in the same timeline as TOS, and then change the look, design aesthetics, etc. of almost everything. You just cannot.
Why reimaging Klingons? Go with the two established ways that Klingons look, for christ’s sake. Why change round nacelles to rectangular ones when there is no need, nor has there ever been any indication that those were used before TOS?
Ok, the uniforms and the overall look is somewhat an evolution of the look of Enterprise, which is fine with me. But still, it looks too futuristic and too out of place on first sight. Enterprise, while also looking more modern than TOS, did a *way* better job on that task IMHO!
Would I sign up to CBS All Access to watch something like Discovery? Only if the pilot hooked me up big time. Which I seriously doubt it will. So I’m happy to be living outside of the US and having a Netflix account, which means I won’t have to pay (explicitly) for that “crap” 🙂
You know the big problem with saying things like the Klingons have to be an “established” look? You are telling artists that they can’t be creative in the least bit.
Well….there’s a difference between art and continuing a story in an established universe. If the new artist on Batman suddenly draws the Dark Knight wearing orange and green plaid, that’s not just artistic license. That’s Bat heresy!
Granted, though I submit that the Klingon look is not nearly that drastic a change as it’s been made out to be. A lot of it comes from the fact that these Klingons have no hair….look what happens when you make them hirsute.
https://scontent.fsnc1-3.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/18527934_10108213550276338_8537954316469419017_n.jpg?oh=22c1c5311992d9f472e1db56d5e45508&oe=59BE068F
Hmmm..seems there is a real “gotta get away from real Trek” movement in both Paramount and CBS. Lets see, they had Enterprise last, and yep, there WAS a Klingon on Earth, got hauled home, and Archer meets up with them, in their TOS relevant ships, etc. Now, jump forward 20-30 years after, and oopss, we just stumbled in to Klingon land?, and oh, they have to look ickier than the other Klingons… Well, I guess a Klingon isn’t a Klingon, and they can always throw the Movie Klingons at us as not being like the TOS Klingons (although that seemed explained away that the TOS ones were some sort of freaky offshoot no one ever liked anyways). While the production values do appear very high (as already said, Axanar managed to make it all work too, and if you compared budgets, you would see which one was a better deal for the makers), this constant “reinvention” will do nothing but muddy the water to where there is no continuity and people will lose interest, unless watching it just because of the production values. Story? Not sure if it will have one, since it seems to want to be all things to all people, and of course, very politically correct. It was weird, but I almost thought it was an ad for ST4, after they fired all the main cast because they are too expensive…
>> Now, jump forward 20-30 years after,
DISCO is nearly a century after Archer and the NX-01, Brian. And remember that these are Klingons found in a deep sleep after centuries–perhaps millennia–in space. Of course, the implication that Klingons have had space travel for that long is what really bugs me…not what they look like.
Based on that trailer alone I’m confused. Yes, there’s lots of danger, but I don’t understand what it is in relationship to anything. Is it personal danger? High stakes political danger? They ‘discovered’ something on the edge of the universe (much like contemporary evil-scientists/engineers-discover-alien-technology-and-unleash-it-on-the-world–and frankly that’s getting old).
But minor consolation, there’s an alien species whose ‘genetic determination’ is to be the same as the robot in ‘Lost In Space’ (“Danger!” “Danger, Wil Robinson!” “Death is nigh!”)
Oy.
I’m going to wait for it to come out on Netflix so I can binge watch if and only if others think it’s OK. i”m not going to rush out to buy a separate streaming subscription for it based on that trailer . . . .
I wanted to like it for about 3 seconds but I just hated everything about it. To much lense flare, to much reinventing the wheel. Why do they insist on fixing something that isn’t broken. So here’s my predictions.
Orville is going to murder Discovery. And how do I go about shorting stocks on discovery I’d make a killing. Etc.
That being said CBS continues to have no clue what people actually want. It’s like they fill their audience panels exclusively with dimwitted tweens who don’t know how to wear a hat or even a pair of pants right.
And then theirs good old Seth taking a tried and true formulae for both comedy and scifi and turning it into something I feel an audience will really be able to get behind. I am afraid however that fox may murder it prematurely as they have the few good scifi shows they’ve gotten their hands on but here’s hoping they’ve learned their lessen unlike CBS.
It kinda reminds me of “into the badlands” how looking back it seems like a simple idea to take the formulae for great martial arts and mix in some hunger games style post Apocalypse thats so popular now a days and bam you’ve got yourself an amazing show. No need to reinvent anything just mix two things that are great and you got yourself a drink, I mean a show.
I guess I’m in the minority here who thought the trailer was great. It seems that in the comments I read here the consensus is mostly that it sucks because of Axanar, something to do with hating CBS and comparison to the Orville trailer (which I also loved). Referring to Discovery as Disco already shows the bias here so I guess an honest, not angry opinion or hyper-critical opinion is not welcome. I already know the responses I am going to get here but I couldn’t resist posting a positive opinion.
I liked the trailer personally. I’ve got some issues here and there, but for the most part, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. If it sucks, it sucks. TNG was pretty bad in season one…so was Voyager (IMO). Even DS9 had trouble finding its space legs until the last two episodes of its first season. And Enterprise took three and a half seasons to not consistently suck.
So yeah, I’m willing to give Disco a chance. Maybe I’ll even stop calling it “Disco”…but probably not. 😉
I’m doing a re-run of “The Original Series”, and while watching “The Cage”, I noticed that the Christopher Pike’s away team uses some type of “field jacket” which remembered me the jacket used in “Star Trek Beyond”.
“The Cage” field jacket: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ef/61/1a/ef611af0f5f63cc199668a52eb6b5290.jpg
“Star Trek Beyond” field jacket: http://trekcore.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/pine-stb-header.jpg
Now, seeing the uniforms of the Shenzhou, I wonder if the design got inspired by the “dress uniforms” used in some episodes of “TOS”, specially those of science crewmen:
“TOS” dress uniforms: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/600×315/63/3b/57/633b5748624061e343d0501ffdacb04d.jpg
“Discovery” uniform: https://fanfilmfactor.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Discovery-bridge.jpg
Having seen some of the original uniform sketches from one of the artists tapped to design them, they started out looking much closer to the uniforms in “The Cage” (just a little more snazzy). The tunics had a flap that closed over the chest like the monster maroons or the Pike-era field jackets…but it was part of the tunic itself. Had they gone in that direction, fans might have accepted this as a minor variation of the Pike-era uniforms. Unfortunately, more changes were made by the production design department, and now we have what we have.