Showrunner Lower Decks opowiada o kręceniu serialu Star Trek na swoich warunkach

Years ago, comedy author Mike McMahan got the chance of a life — an interview to join the writing staff of a fresh Star Trek series, the first in over a decade. McMahan was a massive Trekkie and had late made a splash with a parody Twitter account called “TNG period 8,” in which he summarized goofy, imaginary episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’d even sold the thought to Simon & Schuster and written an full episode guide for the bogus season. Now, he was getting a chance to work on the real thing… and he turned it down.

McMahan had been working on a fresh animated series that had not yet premiered, but that he loved working on and didn’t want to walk distant from. To hear McMahan tell it, the folks at Secret Hideout, Alex Kurtzman’s production company in charge of the fresh Trek spinoff, thought he was crazy.

The show McMahan was working on was Rick and Morty, which went on to be a massive pop culture sensation. More assured than always in McMahan’s instincts, Secret Hideout reached out again in 2018, this time to ask him what he wanted to do. McMahan answered with a pitch for an animated sitcom based in the Star Trek universe, a truly chaotic swing for the typically reverent and cerebral sci-fi franchise.

This gamble paid off, too, as his series Star Trek: Lower Decks has become an overwhelming fan favourite with an appeal that has reached beyond the Starfleet faithful. As the series comes to a close after 5 seasons, Polygon caught up with McMahan about how his wacky passion task made its mark on 1 of American pop culture’s most cherished legacies.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Polygon: I just saw on Bluesky individual surfaced the preface to your collection of Star Trek period 8 posts where you said, “I’m never going to compose for Star Trek.”

Mike McMahan: But even worse than that, I wrote those TNG period 8 posts, and then I sold the thought to Simon & Schuster and wrote a fake guide to a fake period of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And in the intro to that book, I talked about never having a Star Trek show, so this book is going to be it. And people bring it up and I’m just like, Man, 10-years-ago Mike, what were you doing?

No, I mean, it all worked out for you! It’s very aspirational, I’m sure, for quite a few fans thinking, This is something that can and has happened. Right?

Yeah. It was cool due to the fact that erstwhile I was becoming a author in tv and writing my own stuff all the time, I was watching Star Trek with my wife, being like, “Man, I want Star Trek was inactive around,” due to the fact that it was in the in-between phase. And I remember being like, “I’m just gonna compose Star Trek whether individual pays me to or not.” And, yet people saw me doing that — especially Aaron Baiers, who became the head of Alex Kurtzman’s company. He and I were assistants back in the day, and he saw me doing that on my own volition. And then erstwhile I worked on Rick and Morty, it became like a natural kind of thing. So, if you’re a large fan of stuff, what I would say is: Keep loving that stuff, but besides work on all sorts of another stuff you love, and then it might converge. That was the fortunate part, was the convergence of it.

Sure. I mean, luck is usually something that only works in your favour if you’ve done quite a few hard work first, right?

Did you always compose a Trek spec script, just like a appropriate a TNG script for fun?

I never did due to the fact that I always wanted it to be funny. And like, TNG is funny, but I wanted it to be Lower Decks funny. So, I had written things that were kind of like, not truly TNG, but were fundamentally like The Orville kind of versions.

A thing that I appreciate about this full fresh era of Star Trek is that each fresh series has pushed the boundaries of what Star Trek is, but in a different direction. In the early days, Discovery seemed to be aiming to be a Game of Thrones-y thing. And your task is almost in the exact other direction of that.

So what I’d like to research with you present is fundamentally the rules of the Lower Decks writers room, and how they evolved over 5 seasons. How did you come to specify what this was both within and without the bounds of Star Trek?

So, period 1, I went into it day 1 having actually like a bible written up for the show’s kind guide for the artists and the writers. I knew that the show had to feel like it took place 7 years after Star Trek: Nemesis, that we had to fit into the timeline both technologically and with plan and with all of the character attributes that that would come with. So that we admit this as kind of like the last of the TNG-era shows. erstwhile it comes to the narratives that we’re telling, all episode right off the bat had to have a large Star Trek communicative happening to the ship and the bridge crew that was affecting our Lower Deckers, but that their main storyline was a social, emotional, comedic communicative pulled from experiences people had at work or dating or in life in their 20s and 30s. So we always had 2 stories happening at the same time — the large sci-fi communicative and the “getting to know who you are in life” story.

On top of that, the first period was all, Oh, I can’t believe I get to make a Star Trek. I’m going to play, I’m going to do the hits. We’re going to see a Klingon in the second episode. We’re going to have a trial episode. We’re going to have a large bad that has a metaphorical political social commentary at the end of the season. The first period it felt like we were Doing a Star Trek. And then the second season, we understood the characters better. We had spent a lot more time with the actors and uncovering stories with the characters. And that’s erstwhile we became “We’re doing a Lower Decks.”

That’s erstwhile we were like, We want to incrementally decision these characters forward. erstwhile they learn stuff, we don’t want to have them unlearn it the next episode, like a classical sitcom. And the main goal the full time was that the large surprise of this show should be that it’s funny, but it’s besides thoughtful Star Trek and that there’s different ways to do that.

Like, I love the first animated series. I think it’s fascinating and I grew up watching it too, but I didn’t want Lower Decks to become that. I didn’t want Lower Decks to be an “asterisk” show, a show that, like, people most likely had never heard of or didn’t care about. Our goal was, if you’re talking about your favourite Trek shows, you should at least admit that Lower Decks is 1 of the Trek shows. And I feel like we possibly overshot that a small bit, due to the fact that quite a few people love Lower Decks.

I think that of the crop of fresh shows, Lower Decks is the predominant favorite.

Which is crazy! We must have lucked into that, due to the fact that I think they did any amazing stuff on those another shows. And we’ve just been doing, you know, virtually what we set out to do from day one. It feels very fortunate that we got to do it, and that people respond to it feels lucky, too, due to the fact that sometimes I feel like I’m making the show for me, whether or not another people are going to like it. So erstwhile they do, it’s a very good surprise.

I’m curious, erstwhile you were working on that first season, what kind of conversations you were having with your fellow storytellers about the accessibility of the show versus We’re a bunch of fans and we want to see these things.

We weren’t worried about the accessibility due to the fact that the only people who think Lower Decks isn’t accessible to outside viewers are people who know quite a few Star Trek. And people who don’t know quite a few Star Trek are just gathering aliens that are not besides complex to figure out for the episode. Like, erstwhile you meet a Klingon, you know who they are in the first 30 seconds. In Lower Decks, you don’t request to know who Kahless is. If a Klingon is talking about Kahless on Lower Decks, the lines are designed for you to realize the meaning it has to them, even if you don’t know all the apocrypha, just like you can watch any episode of Star Trek and not gotta have seen them all.

In Rick and Morty, we were creating pastiches of another sci-fi characters all the time that felt like it was world-building, but you didn’t gotta know the backstory of the aliens they were meeting. That was the same way we were treating legacy species in Lower Decks. But luckily, with, say, the Cardassians, there are many episodes that specify them for us. We just get to kind of give a somewhat broader take on them. So for me, the stuff that quite a few people were railing on and worried about was not going to be a problem for me due to the fact that all of the small legacy stuff, all of the plan choices, the knowing that Mariner has seen the holologs of the things that we call episodes, that all of that stuff is to turn Star Trek into a planet so that we can have comedy take place within it. It’s kind of like erstwhile I worked at Second City in Chicago, there were quite a few sketches where you kind of gotta live in the city to get what they’re making fun of here, but they were doing it in a way that even if you’re in it from out of town, you’re inactive laughing in the scene. It just has a different kind of resonance for you. That is what the deep-cut stuff in Lower Decks usually plays as. Now, sometimes, just to be small stinkers, we’ll put in, like, an highly deep cut that makes no fucking sense to you unless you’re way in.

Yeah, the Spock helmet, or Mariner referencing Xon. That’s a character who never even ended up on screen. Those moments are for deep, deep fans. But in a way, I always talked about Lower Decks being kind of like a translator for all another Trek. Like, if you watch Lower Decks, you could go pop into any another Trek and you kind of get the gist due to the fact that the Lower Deckers either encountered individual or talked about it or we did an episode that kind of honored it. You know, you could pop into Voyager, you could pop into Enterprise or TOS. I mean, our characters virtually popped into Strange fresh Worlds. Like, they should feel kind of like an “Every-Trek,” in a way.

And I think that as a fan, you always worry — especially as a Star Trek fan — that individual utilizing the things you liked from before are gonna ruin them, or they’re gonna be the incorrect version of them, or they’re gonna lessen the thing you liked about it. But we always talk about Star Trek as being like going to a national park. Like, erstwhile we’re writing and designing stuff, you gotta enjoy it, to enjoy being there, but don’t change it so that the next individual can’t enjoy what you liked about it.

Right. You always want to be additive to what you’re working on.

Yeah, additive and celebrating it. And originally, there wasn’t even a large drive to have legacy actors reprise their roles on the show. But, I had met Jonathan Frakes erstwhile I was shooting a Short Trek that I wrote, and he was directing an episode of Discovery. And I showed him the pitch that we were about to take out for Lower Decks, and he was cracking up and he made me promise him that we would have Riker show up in it. And that’s why Riker shows up at the finale of the first season, due to the fact that I was like, Oh man, I promised Frakes we would do this, and we better get Marina [Sirtis] in there. And then, you know, we had Q show up for a fast bit. But that created the feeling of, like, Oh, I guess part of this show is having these characters come back. How are we going to do that? We’ve got to keep them funny. We’ve got to honor what they set up before. And everything on Lower Decks is truly hard to compose due to the fact that it’s got to be funny, but besides profoundly thoughtful.

So it sounds like you didn’t gotta have anybody in the writers area who was just like a casual Star Trek fan who could be your test audience, like you could kind of just trust that it was going to work.

You know, it was a mix. In the first season, it was me, Ben Rodgers, Brad Winters, David Wright, M. Willis. Like, the writers area was a mix of comedy writers, animation writers, and deep, deep Star Trek fans, but not individual who had worked on Star Trek before. Brad Winters, my producer, has a brain that is so deep in Trek. Like, we can have a conversation erstwhile we have an episode written where he’ll be like, “You have the characters doing this here, but there’s an episode in the mediate of Voyager that says this can’t happen. So let’s talk about why you wanted to do it and how we can fit it in.”

So everything is always, erstwhile it comes to the Trek lore, guiding us to what we wanted to do, and then sometimes we just gotta adjust. We besides have Dr. Erin [Macdonald], who is our discipline advisor, and she’ll get all script, due to the fact that part of what feels right about Star Trek is that the discipline actually makes sense, even if we’re doing something silly. She does a pass on all script to make certain that I’m not making stuff up that’s crazy. And then we have the Star Trek franchise team, like John Van Citters and Marian Cordry and Dayton Ward. Not only have they worked on so many episodes of Trek, but besides on all of the side stuff, the comics and the books and everything. I’ll have them look at everything and make certain that it passes the sniff test with them too. So, like, we would have quite a few Star Trek fans, you know, watching the stuff and like, the reviews we always got were, “Oh, yeah, a fresh Lower Decks episode just came in!” You know what I mean? It felt like we were doing something right.

Like in almost any show, but especially in comedy, there’s usually a period early on where the writers and the actors are all kind of figuring out the characters together. Like how it takes a period and a half for TNG to truly find Will Riker as he gradually becomes more like Frakes. And I’m curious how the animation workflow affects something like this, going back and distant between writer, actor, and animator. It truly does feel erstwhile you see interviews with Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid and Noël Wells and Eugene Cordero, that there’s so much of them in these characters.

Do you feel like you can pinpoint a minute where you all found your stride, and how did it come about?

It kind of came about naturally. It was, you know, I had done quite a few direct, like, voice directing on Rick and Morty and on Solar Opposites. So, erstwhile we started recording Lower Decks, I just kind of put them through hell at first. Like, I would have Tawny do, like, 25 takes of each line, and then we found those characters together. And, over time, Brad, my producer, besides was able to start voice directing the show primarily due to the fact that over time, we all started to realize the characters together. Not only from watching the show together and performing the show together, but Tawny and Eugene were going to conventions and having truly interesting conversations with fans of the show and with actors on another Star Trek shows.

Like, at first there were no incorrect answers. And then over time, as you start to learn the characters, it’s like, “Oh, Rutherford wouldn’t say that. What’s a Rutherford way to say that?” And you don’t have that at first due to the fact that you don’t know Rutherford. But I think it just speaks to the patience and the talent of the cast. We truly lucked out in any respects in casting, that we made any right choices right off the bat. Jack Quaid didn’t know anything about Star Trek coming in, but he’s an amazing actor and he’s super funny. And he wanted to know about Star Trek. He wanted to know what it means to be in love with Starfleet. all actor had that desire. There wasn’t truly any 1 miracle moment. It was just truly loving to work with this cast, truly believing in the scripts and the cast reasoning they’re comic too. Nobody was at odds with each another and there was tons of communication. Anybody on the cast could call and ask questions beforehand or erstwhile we’re there, and we were never trying to force them into something. We were trying to find the best version all together from the very first episode.

Well, now you’ve got kind of a legacy being built out of that experience. Tawny’s in the writers area for 1 Star Trek show and seemingly developing another one, which I’m certain you can’t tell me anything about.

I can’t, but Tawny’s a genius and everybody she’s working with seems amazing. Like, everybody on the show feels like a mega star I got before the remainder of everybody else found out. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I would think Tawny can do virtually anything that she wants to do in this world.

And on top of that, just wrapping up here, can you tell me anything about Starbase 80?

Starbase 80 smells truly weird; its systems are very old. It’s like a mix of Enterprise, TOS, lots of stuff.

Are we going to be going there again?

I would love to go there again. There are no plans to go there again. I pitched a Starbase 80 spinoff to CBS like, 3 years ago, which is where quite a few this came from. I would love to go back to Starbase 80, but right now there are no plans to do it.