Star Trek: Lower Decks wrapped up last week, but even though she doesn’t have any more work voicing Mariner, Tawny Newsome is still part of the family. She is a writer for the new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series currently in production, and she is developing a live-action Star Trek comedy with Justin Simien. She is now talking a bit more about that latter project as well as her hopes for more Lower Decks.
Comedy show is evolving… but won’t mess with Trek
The surprise announcement of the live-action Star Trek comedy was made during the Star Trek Universe panel in July at San Diego Comic-Con. We have only had a few tidbits since, including Newsome and Simien saying the show (which has yet to get a greenlight) was in part inspired by one-off comedy episodes of Deep Space Nine. The show has yet to get a greenlight, but last month Newsome said she had been told to “keep writing,” and in a new interview with Variety, she said she was on her way to another writing session with Simien, noting “we’re changing so much as we go.” Newsome also gave an update on how the show is being developed and evolving:
“Having so much support with Secret Hideout and the studio just being like, ‘We love Trek, let’s take it in this new direction’ has been as good as development can go. But finding a way to do Trek in a workplace comedy-type tone — it’s new. Lower Decks proved that we can do it in half hour. We can do it very big and fun and funny and still make it feel like Trek. But animation just gives you some tonal permissions that we’re figuring out for live action. Justin and I are die-hard Trekkies. We are not trying to mess with the Trek of it all, but we’re also hardcore comedy people. The sanctity of the workplace comedy is really important to me too, so making sure both of those things can really live together is my primary concern. That means that the premise that everyone heard at Comic-Con may be shifting a little bit.”
Justin Simien and Tawny Newsome (Sarah Coulter/Paramount+)
A resort… but not Risa
After the Comic-Con panel, CBS Studios confirmed a show was in development for Paramount+ and even provided the following official logline: “Federation outsiders serving a gleaming resort planet find out their day-to-day exploits are being broadcast to the entire quadrant.” It has been speculated the “resort planet” setting was Risa, featured (or referenced) in many episodes of the franchise, including Lower Decks. However, Newsome confirmed this isn’t the case, telling Variety:
“It was never Risa, but it is still an outside-of-the-Federation world that we’re dealing with. I think it’s going to answer some questions about what non-Federation [worlds] look like. That’s an area of canon we haven’t explored a ton. But it’s clay being currently molded.”
As the show will focus on “Federation outsiders,” it also seems a good bet that if Newsome herself plays a regular character, it won’t be her Lower Decks role of Starfleet officer Becket Mariner, which she played in live-action in the second season crossover episode of Strange New Worlds, “Those Old Scientists.” We will have to wait to see if the show ever gets a greenlight to find out for sure.
Tawny Newsome as Mariner and Jack Quaid as Boimler appearing in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, streaming on Paramount+, 2023. Photo Cr: Michael Gibson/Paramount+
Ready for more… including more Lower Decks
In her Variety interview, Newsome talked about her life with Star Trek over the last five years and how that has helped her move from just being a fan to acting in Trek to writing for the franchise:
“It’s just deepened my fandom. In 2019, when I booked Lower Decks, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m a pretty big Star Trek fan.’ I knew some random deep cuts, but I had not seen every single episode of everything, and a lot of things I’d only seen once. Getting that job and wanting to understand every single reference pointed me towards re-watching and deep diving. It just rounded out my fandom in a way that I think only comes if you have an extreme, hyper-fixation quality to your personality, which I do, and/or you’re being paid for it, which I am. That combination of elements has made it so that I’ve built a pretty exhaustive understanding of the world. There’s still stuff that I don’t know super, super well, but I know who to text within the franchise to immediately get an answer. That means I can make, I can just like, keep making more in this world.”
And Newsome made it clear she and others who worked on the show, are ready for more Lower Decks:
“As far as the people creating [Lower Decks], we all would love to do that. I don’t know who writes the check for that, so I don’t know if they think it’s possible. But Mike has stories upon stories in him for these characters. He could do 10 more seasons. He is not done. None of us are done. Me, Jack, Eugene and Noël and not to mention the rest of our bridge crew and our recurring characters. Everybody’s like, “Yep, sign me up. We’ll be the next Futurama. We’ll come back in 10 years, whatever you want.” So we’re all game. I would love a movie. I’d love a live-action movie, because we need to see Noël and Jerry and Eugene in human form — human-ish form.”
This idea of Lower Decks living on in the future is certainly something that has potential. There is precedent for shows coming back, including, as noted by Newsome, the animated sci-fi comedy Futurama. In his new TrekMovie interview, Lower Decks creator and showrunner Mike McMahan said after taking some time to “regroup” and after the dust settles a bit with Paramount, he plans “to make a hard push to get to do whatever we can get—more episodes, a movie, a live-action spinoff? Who knows?”
L to R Jerry O’Connell as Jack Ransom, Fred Tatasciore as Lieutenant Shaxs, Dawnn Lewis as Captain Carol Freeman, Jack Quaid as Brad Boimler and Tawny Newsome as Beckett Mariner in the series finale (Paramount+)
Keep up with news about the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com.
source: trekmovie.com