While few details have yet to emerge on next summer’s new live-action Star Trek TV spin-off Discovery, the news that writer and producer Bryan Fuller was at the helm was well received by fans of good TV. As the creator of cult hits like Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal, Fuller has cultivated legions of fans across a number of sadly short-lived projects. But now the news has emerged that is to step down from the bridge of the Starship Discovery before it even takes off.
“We are extremely happy with the creative direction of Star Trek: Discovery and the strong foundation that Bryan Fuller has helped us create for the series,” said producers at CBS Television Studios, the TV network hoping to relaunch a TV franchise that ended 11 years ago with the demise of Star Trek: Enterprise. “Due to Bryan’s other projects, he is no longer able to oversee the day-to-day of Star Trek, but he remains an executive producer and will continue to map out the story arc for the entire seasons.”
Alex Kurtzman, the writer behind 2009’s Star Trek feature film, as well as its Into Darkness sequel and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, will now take over from Fuller, backed up by the latter’s long-time collaborators Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts.
Star Trek: Discovery, which will be distributed around the world on Netflix digital platforms, will differ from all of the preceding TV iterations of Gene Roddenberry’s 50-year-old science fiction creation. The show will feature a female first officer as its protagonist, working under a male Klingon captain, and focus on a series-long arc rather than the traditional episodic form of the Star Trek TV canon. While casting details have yet to emerge, Fuller had previously confirmed that the show will feature an openly gay actor as one of the male leads, as well as a female admiral, a male admiral, a male adviser and a British male doctor.
The new of Fuller’s departure comes as he is putting the finishing touches on a big-budget adaptation of fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and is set to relaunch the anthology series Amazing Stories on NBC.
Star Trek: Discovery is set for worldwide release in May 2017.
