The first season of Star Trek: Picard wraps up tomorrow, and it has been an undeniable success for CBS All Access, becoming the streamer’s most popular show by a long shot. However, the series’s dark tone, plot twists, and story have left fans pretty divided. Fans have argued over the fact that Starfleet has lost its way in the series, gripped by fear, and that cherished characters aren’t handled in the way they should be.
Variety sat down with Picard showrunner Michael Chabon and discovered that, while the showrunner has been paying attention to fan reactions, (He’s reading Reddit and Twitter.) those opinions will have no weight on the next season of the show. When asked if the fan reaction, especially to the darker tone and non-episodic nature of the series, affected the development of season 2, Chabon was very clear:
“No, not at all. We’re true to what my dear friend and collaborator and partner Akiva Goldsman calls the object. The object is “Star Trek: Picard.” It is a show with a nearly 80-year-old actor playing a 94-year-old man who is if not in the final stages of his career, in the latter stages of his career, who has a period of great dismay and disillusionment in his immediate rear view, who has allowed himself to let ties that were formerly very important to him slip or fade away, and who has now re-engaged with the greatly changed world in which he finds himself. That is the story we’re telling. … It was not ever going to be “The Next Generation Part Two” in any way.”
Throughout the surprisingly candid article, the showrunner is refreshingly blunt about what the show is and how he feels about the reactions of fans. Chabon even dove briefly into what the second season will entail, mostly saying it’ll go in directions not seen in season 1.
He goes on to relate the second season of Star Trek: Picard to the second season of The Next Generation, which is universally accepted as the season where the show really took off. We won’t know if Picard ascends into universal greatness in season 2 for a long while. The second season may have been released next January if it were following the same release schedule as the first season, but given the current shutdown of all production in Hollywood, that could be delayed.
