Rather than getting a new “Star Trek” TV series at the start of 2017, as CBS originally promised, “Trek” fans have instead been treated to a steady stream of casting updates for the show, which will now debut in May.
The latest: Sonequa Martin-Green, known as Sasha on “The Walking Dead,” will play the lead, a lieutenant commander aboard the titular starship on “Star Trek: Discovery.”
The move by creator Bryan Fuller breaks ground in several ways: Martin-Green becomes the first African-American female lead of a “Star Trek” series. Excellent! The franchise has also never had a non-commanding officer act as the main character. Bold! Perhaps most promising of all, they’ve cast an actress people have actually heard of. Wait, what?
In the previous five live-action series, the ships and space stations were helmed by well-regarded stage actors who were, until they reached the final frontier, total no-names in Hollywood.
You’d likely never heard of Patrick Stewart before he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on “The Next Generation” in 1987 because he was busy playing King John with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the time, a skeptical Gene Roddenberry had zero desire to put him on the show.
William Shatner, himself a classical actor, had a list of TV credits, including a couple episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” and appeared in the mystifying 1966 movie “Incubus,” in which all the dialogue was in the wacky made-up language Esperanto. But your Aunt Esther couldn’t have pointed him out in a police line of hunky blond Canadians.
Avery Brooks, who played Commander Sisko on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” previously starred as civil-rights activist Paul Robeson on Broadway and performed in Greek and Shakespeare plays at major theaters nationwide. And in 1995, unless you had watched “Ryan’s Hope” or “Mrs. Columbo,” you wouldn’t have known “Star Trek: Voyager” star Kate Mulgrew from Kate Moss.
And Scott Bakula — well, let’s just skip Scott Bakula.
Now, however, comes an actress from one of TV’s most popular shows into a series that has become a niche basement pastime. The first six episodes of Season 7 of “The Walking Dead” averaged more than 11 million viewers in the 18-49 age bracket, while the series finale of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” the last “Trek” series on TV, scored 3.8 million viewers. Total.
Martin-Green even boasts a Twitter following of 517,000. A colleague who’d sooner moisturize with Go-Gurt than watch an episode of “Star Trek” actually broke the casting news to me with some excitement.
We “Star Trek” fans are often guilty of reveling in our own obscurity, but the only way to survive — for underperforming TV shows, in particular — is to welcome new fans who will keep coming back for more. Fuller is a smart guy with a stellar résumé who can bring in more admirers without shunning the old.
For the future of “Star Trek,” the success of “Discovery” is paramount.
Trapped for too long in the high-school science-fiction club, “Star Trek” fans need to allow ourselves to be assimilated for once. Resistance is futile.