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During a wide-ranging one-hour conversation at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, famous actor William Shatner said that the creator of the Star Trek universe would be very upset about the new Trek shows coming out on Paramount+.
Gene Roddenberry, a writer and producer, came up with the idea for Star Trek for NBC in 1964, when he started filming the first pilot for the show. The show wasn't picked up after that pilot, but NBC gave Gene another chance and asked him to make a few changes and make another pilot.
The second pilot, which starred William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk, sold the series in 1966. This was the start of one of the most successful Hollywood properties ever, which is still going strong today, as a lot of new shows have been added to Paramount's streaming services in the last few years. The Star Trek universe has been a lot of different kinds of fun. Star Trek has been in TV shows, movies, games, books, magazines, and just about anything else you can think of.
The Hollywood Reporter said that Shatner, who is 91 years old, doesn't think Gene Roddenberry would be too excited about all these new Trek shows.
During the hour-long chat, which went from "fun" to "serious" topics and included a lot of bad language from both Bill and his host, Clerks director Kevin Smith, Shatner was asked if he thinks any of the new Trek shows are as good as the three seasons he did from 1966 to 1968.
Shatner gave a straight answer. "None of them," he said in a short way.
But it wasn't just an ego-driven answer. Shatner also said that he believes Roddenberry would agree.
“I got to know [creator] Gene Roddenberry in three years fairly well,” Bill said, “he’d be turning in his grave at some of this stuff.”
IIn fact, everyone in the Star Trek community knew that the modern producers of shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) couldn't wait for Roddenberry to leave. Roddenberry was very clear about what he wanted Star Trek to be, and his fellow producers felt like he made it hard for them to come up with new ideas because he had very specific ideas about what the future would be like on his show.
Roddenberry died in 1991, and that gave the producers of shows like Deep Space Nine (1993–1995), Voyager (1995–2001), and Enterprise (2001-21005) the chance to take Star Trek into places that Gene would never have let them go when he was alive and in charge of the Star Trek universe.
Even in the new shows of today, the episodes are going in directions that Gene would never have approved of. Jonathan Frakes, who plays Spock on Star Trek and also directs TV, recently said this about one of the episodes of Picard he had directed.
Frakes said that an episode that showed a fight between two people who worked on the show would never have happened when Gene was alive.
“We never could have done [a scene like] this on our show,” Frakes told the Hollywood Reporter in 2020. “Why?” the Reporter explained. “Gene Roddenberry. The creator of Star Trek believed that, in Star Trek the Next Generation‘s 24th Century, there would be no conflict among ‘the family, the crew of the Enterprise.'”
In fact, this year's season of Picard was set in the United States in 2024, and it showed U.S. immigration officials as heartless, evil, and authoritarian people who would help turn the world into a fascist dictatorship that terrorizes all the aliens in the galaxy.
William Shatner is right in every way. Gene Roddenberry, who made Trek, would not like all the new Star Trek shows.
During the Comic-Con interview, Shatner also made a funny dig at Star Wars, which is a rival science fiction universe. When asked about the science fiction series by George Lucas, Bill joked, "Fuck Star Wars. But not Mark Hamill."
Smith also asked Bill about what it was like to be in space.
In 2021, Shatner went on a flight with Jeff Bezos's company Blue Origin. The flight took him just past the edge of the upper atmosphere, putting William Shatner for a short time in space.
“I went, and I vowed that every moment that I spent in space, would not be playing around in weightlessness, but looking out the window and trying to get an impression,” the TJ Hooker star said.
