Star Trek: Picard boss Michael Chabon discusses its popularity, its divisiveness and his original "no starships, no phasers" vision of the show

Variety

The Pulitzer-winning novelist, who is stepping down as showrunner after Season 1, says he's learned that past Trek shows have also divided fans. "I actually went back and looked on Google Groups, which acquired Usenet, so you can look through the old Usenet groups and watch what people said about Deep Space Nine and then about Voyager," he says. "They f*cking hated it. They lacerated it. I mean, plenty of people liked it and loved it. But the criticisms that are being leveled against Deep Space Nine, and then against Janeway, female Captain, black Vulcan (Tim Russ’s Tuvok) — all of the things that were problematic for certain contingent of so called Star Trek fans back then, the way that they attack each other and the way they attack the show — it’s identical to now. They could just turn them into 140 characters or whatever it is now on Twitter and you could make tweets out of them and it would still work just as well for Discovery or Picard." Chabon says of Season 2: "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. I think we’ve been emboldened in many ways by the popularity of the show." As for his original vision of the show, Chabon says: "You know, personally speaking, my own tastes and inclination, I always said when we were in the earliest versions of the room for this show, if we could have just done a whole show about Picard and the dog on the vineyard in France, with no starships, no phasers, the only Romulans would be those two Romulans who work for him on the vineyard, and no politics — just, like, there’s a funfair down in the village and they all go, and maybe Picard solves a very low stakes mystery in the village, like, someone has stolen the antique bell out of the bell tower, or something like that? I would have loved to write that show. Um. I don’t think the world’s quite ready for a Star Trek show like that, and there’s probably maybe not that big of an audience for a Star Trek show like that."