New Star Trek series named Discovery

A fan (centre) dressed as the alien Forengi from Star Trek stands with two other fans at the Comic-Con International 2016 in San Diego. (Photo: AFP)

US television network CBS celebrated the 50th anniversary of Star Trek at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, revealing that the keenly-awaited new series is to be called Star Trek Discovery.

The name was revealed at the end of a 76-second teaser trailer shown at the sci-fi and fantasy festival which showed a starship pulling out of its mooring inside an asteroid. Bryan Fuller, a Star Trek veteran who started out in the 1990s writing for Deep Space Nine and Voyager, is to return as co-creator and executive producer of the new show. “We’re telling stories in a new way. We’re not so much episodic. We’re going to be telling stories like a novel,” he told the Comic-Con audience.

He didn’t elaborate, but “non-episodic” series typically have story arcs which run across a whole season or even longer, unlike the previous five Star Trek shows, which were mainly made up of self-contained episodes.

The new series, which begins filming in Toronto in September ahead of a premiere planned for January next year, will be the franchise’s first new outing in more than a decade. The premiere will be broadcast on CBS main channel, with the rest showing on subscription service CBS All Access in North America and Netflix — with a delay of 24 hours — in the rest of the world. The original Star Trek told the story of the flight crew aboard the USS Enterprise spaceship, which ventured around the galaxy exploring new worlds.