1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

Star Trek: Discovery is getting a third season on CBS All Access in 2020

By

Star Trek: Discovery has been granted a third season at CBS All Access. The next season of the sci-fi drama will debut on the streaming service in 2020. Michelle Paradise, a former executive producer on The CW’s The Vampire Diaries spin-off, The Originals, will join current Discovery head Alex Kurtzman as showrunner when the show returns.

“Michelle joined us midway through season 2 and energized the room with her ferocious knowledge of Trek,” Kurtzman said in a press release. “Her grasp of character and story detail, her drive and her focus have already become essential in ensuring the Trek legacy.”

Recommended Videos

Paradise will be Star Trek: Discovery‘s fifth showrunner over the course of three seasons. The latest installment in television’s premiere science fiction franchise was developed by Hannibal and Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, who ultimately left the series in order to work on Starz’s American Gods. Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts oversaw Star Trek: Discovery season 1, while Kurtzman, who co-wrote J.J. Abrams’ two big-screen Star Trek adventures and helped create Fox’s paranormal drama Fringe, took over for season 2.

Paradise’s promotion doesn’t mean that Kurtzman is leaving the final frontier behind. In addition to Discovery, the veteran writer and producer is currently overseeing a number of Star Trek projects for CBS All Access. Those include a Discovery spinoff starring recurring Discovery cast member Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians), an animated comedy called Lower Decks, and a Star Trek: The Next Generation sequel that will see Patrick Stewart return as the former Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Star Trek: Discovery, which is currently in the middle of its second season, stars The Walking Dead‘s Sonequa Martin-Green as Commander Michael Burnham, a science officer onboard the titular starship. The show takes place about 10 years before the first Star Trek series, which was created by Gene Roddenberry and aired from 1966 to 1969.

Despite the earlier timeline, Discovery is full of nods to classic Trek. Discovery‘s first season had an extended storyline centered on Star Trek‘s fan-favorite “Mirror Universe,” while season 2 features Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, who captained the USS Enterprise before James T. Kirk. In addition, Discovery‘s second season added Ethan Peck as Spock, the Vulcan science officer originally portrayed by Leonard Nimoy.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Chris Gates
Contributor
Christopher Gates lives in Los Angeles, CA and writes about movies, TV, video games, and other pop culture curiosities. In…
The 10 best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, ranked

For decades, Deep Space Nine was “that other Star Trek show.” It debuted in 1992, during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first Trek series to achieve mainstream popularity. DS9 overlapped in first-run syndication with TNG until 1994, and then with Voyager — which ran on primetime network television — from 1995 to 2001. Throughout its seven-year run, Deep Space Nine was never a top priority for studio Paramount or franchise executive producer Rick Berman. While this was a source of frustration for the cast and crew, the studio’s neglect also allowed them to take greater creative risks.
Under showrunner Ira Steven Behr, DS9 gleefully subverted the Star Trek formula, pulling open the cracks in the franchise’s futuristic utopia and refusing to be bound by the episodic nature of weekly television. DS9’s serialized stories and long character arcs may have made it harder to keep up with when it first aired, but it’s perfect for the modern binge-streaming model, which has introduced it to a whole new generation of fans. Thirty years after its debut, Deep Space Nine is finally receiving the respect it always deserved.
Selecting just ten episodes of DS9 to showcase is a challenge, as many of its most compelling stories are spread out across multiple episodes. Some of the episodes below are totally standalone stories, some are standout chapters in multi-part arcs that can be appreciated on their own, and some are two-parters that we simply couldn’t separate and had to list as a single entry. We hope you don’t mind us bending the rules just a bit — after all, that’s part of what made DS9 great to begin with.

10. In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light (season 5, episodes 14 and 15)

Read more
At SDCC, Strange New Worlds goes full musical and more Star Trek trailers

How do you celebrate Star Trek at Comic-Con when all of the actors stayed home? The actors and writers strike has greatly diminished the star power of San Diego Comic-Con, but Paramount+ had a novel solution. The streamer put its cards on the table early by promoting the remaining episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, including a video preview for the upcoming musical episode.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | "Subspace Rhapsody" Trailer (SDCC 2023) | Paramount+

Read more
How do I get into Star Trek? A guide to how to watch the beloved sci-fi franchise

Few science fiction franchises have made as enormous a cultural impact as Star Trek. Trek’s language and visual iconography, from “warp speed” to your phone’s built-in “live long and prosper” emoji, are ubiquitous even to people who have never seen the show. It’s the original organized “geek culture” fandom, and the birthplace of fan fiction and cosplay as we know it. The stigma of Trekkies as unwashed, socially awkward outcasts has dissipated as sci-fi and comics culture has gone mainstream, but Star Trek itself can still be intimidating to outsiders due to its massive scale and dense mythology of more than 800 episodes and films.
Though it’s possible to explore the Star Trek universe on your own, it is best navigated with the aid of a guide. And, if you don’t happen to have a Trekkie in your life to chart your course with you (which they absolutely love to do), we’re here to offer three options as to how to get started, depending on how you like to digest stories.

Course No. 1: The sampler platter

Read more