The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series is starting production soon, with Holly Hunter attached as the lead. The Paramount+ show will take place in the same timeframe as Star Trek: Discovery’s third through fifth season, in the 32nd century. This is some 900 years after the time of Picard, Seven of Nine, and other familiar characters from the franchise’s glory days. So why set Starfleet Academy in this time period, instead of one more familiar, and frankly, more popular? Here’s what Star Trek TV’s head honcho Alex Kurtzman had to say to Variety when asked about why this timeframe:
There’s a specific reason for that. As the father of a 17-year-old boy, I see what my son is feeling as he looks at the world and to his future. I see the uncertainty; I see all the things we took for granted as given are not certainties for him. I see him recognizing he’s inheriting an enormous mess to clean up and it’s going to be on his generation to figure out how to do that, and that’s a lot to ask of a kid.
My thinking was, if we set Starfleet Academy in the halcyon days of the Federation where everything was fine, it’s not going to speak to what kids are going through right now. It’ll be a nice fantasy, but it’s not really going to be authentic. What’ll be authentic is to set it in the timeline where this is the first class back after over 100 years, and they are coming into a world that is only beginning to recover from a cataclysm — which was the Burn, as established on Discovery, where the Federation was greatly diminished. So they’re the first who’ll inherit, who’ll re-inherit, the task of exploration as a primary goal.
In Discovery, “The Burn” occurred in the 31st century, when warp capability was neutralized for a century for unknown reasons. The crew of Discovery solved the mystery, allowing the Federation and Starfleet to return to their glory days. Discovery established that Tilly (Mary Wiseman) was an instructor for this new Academy. So we imagine she’ll appear in the series at some point. Kurtzman also confirmed that the show would take place on Earth (in San Francisco) as well as in space. (Yes, this means the show is going to focus on space cadets). Kurtzman also confirmed that the primary set “is the biggest we’ve ever built.” Will the Academy grounds look very different from the days of Wesley Crusher on TNG? Hey, Cambridge University has some buildings built in 1290, so you never know.