How Michael Chabon Steered Star Trek Back to the Future
Partway through our conversation, Michael Chabon gets called away from the phone. He’s on the set of Star Trek: Picard, and a problem needs solving. It’s something the Pulitzer-winning novelist turned first-time showrunner admits he’s still getting used to—even now, with his eagerly anticipated series already on the air. “People constantly asking me to choose between different options is a whole new experience for me,” he explains upon his return. “When I’m writing a book, I ask myself those questions.”
Beginner or not, all evidence suggests that Chabon is a natural in his new role. The morning we speak, Picard’s pilot has dropped on CBS All-Access, and the early reviews pouring in from big-time outlets and hardcore Trekkies alike have been predominantly positive. “We’re all kind of walking around sharing little bits of things we’ve seen with each other, and it’s been fun,” Chabon says. “So far, so good. Knock on wood.” (And honestly, when you’re boldly taking a vaunted sci-fi property somewhere it hasn’t gone before, “so far, so good” is the best you can possibly hope for—just ask Rian Johnson’s Twitter mentions.)
Make no mistake: Picard confidently steers the Star Trek franchise in wholly new directions. Sure, it’s built around Sir Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, maybe the most beloved and iconic Trek figure this side of Spock. But the series injects the dusty, six-decade-old franchise with all the hallmarks of Peak TV: a single, serialized story; a more naturalistic tone; budgets the likes of which this shaky-cam stalwart has never seen. It helps that Chabon has more or less been training for this job his entire career: He’s a lifelong Trekkie who’s spent decades alchemizing his obsessions with comic books, science fiction, and pulpy horror into highbrow literature.
After years of Chabon feeling like he’d been churned through the Hollywood meat grinder—with countless failed pitches and shelved screenplays to his name (we’d still love to see the aborted live-action, kung-fu-ified Snow White adaptation he once penned for Disney)—Picard’s early success feels extremely well-earned. The show has already been renewed for a second season, though Chabon won’t be around to helm it. Instead, he’s heading off to develop a long-gestating dream project for Showtime: a limited series based on his most celebrated novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which follows a pair of plucky comic-book creators navigating World War II–era New York. Before that, though, GQ asked him to take a moment to reflect on his first time in the captain’s chair.
GQ: Sci-fi fans can be finicky and possessive. Did the potential for backlash give you pause at all before accepting the position?
Chabon: Not at all. That would be a terrible reason not to do something. I love Star Trek. I was confident in the love that I have for the show and that I understood the show. I’m not saying my interpretation is the right one, or the only one. But I truly felt that, for myself as a writer, I understood the franchise as a whole, The Next Generation as a series, and the character of Jean-Luc Picard. And I just felt that I had enough of a grasp of those things for me to be able to get the writing done. And that, ultimately, is what it all boils down to as a writer on the show and as the show runner.
Early on, Patrick Stewart mentioned that he only wanted to come back to this character to tell stories that reflect our time. How difficult was it to thread that needle between nostalgia and invention?
It was very hard. And it was only one of a few needles we were trying to thread all at once. It was so tempting, as fans, to just put everything in. Even beyond TNG, we had the whole Star Trek canon to draw on. We tried to budget ourselves, in a sense. We tried to make sure we always turned to canon when there was some kind of storytelling problem, whether that was about a character’s emotional situation, or a plot problem that required technobabble, or a particular kind of technology. That was always the benchmark. We didn’t turn to canon just for the sake of turning to canon.
There’s a version of an ill-advised Jean-Luc Picard TV show where any time we meet a character along the way, it’s someone from TNG or DS9 or Voyager or some other iteration of the show. You could do it that way, but this show is meant to be naturalistic, to feel as real as we could possibly make it. Part of that reality was looking at a man, 20 years on in life from the last time we saw him, and the cast of characters around him has changed in the way that it would naturally. And as he goes on into the world again, he’s running into people you’ve never met before, because they’re people he’s never met before either. We did fight to strike that balance. Just as we fought, always, to strike a balance between making a show for people who already loved TNG in particular, and for people who had never watched any Star Trek at all.
Was there ever a version of this story without any existing characters at all, Picard obviously excluded?
If the best way to tell the story meant that no other characters from any other Star Trek ever appeared, that’s the way we would’ve done it. But we kept having moments where certain kinds of characters were called for, and that kind of character would be logical, or at least interesting, if it were Seven of Nine, or Riker, or Troi, or Data. When they do make those appearances, it’s because that was the best choice for the story.
As much as Patrick had exhorted us to make something new, we also wanted it to feel connected to what had come before. The last remaining points of connection to Picard, when we looked back at the previous work, were the 2009 film and Star Trek: Nemesis. The very beginning of the 2009 film was the last known appearance, chronologically speaking, of the “Prime” timeline, in which we see a supernova destroy the Romulan homeworld. And before that, the last time we saw Picard was in Nemesis, in which Data sacrifices himself to save Picard. Those two things were where we could plug in to start telling our story. It led us to all these thematic things that were possible with Data and with the aftermath of the Romulan supernova. It helped connect our story to pre-existing storytelling in Star Trek.
Was there a conscious effort to include the sense of old-school optimism that’s so integral to Star Trek?
The effort was to make sure that what we did felt like Star Trek. Part of something being Star Trek is not simply that it reflects the time in which it’s being made. Every TV show reflects the time in which it’s being made. But Star Trek is unique in that it deliberately reflected what was happening when it was being made—it wasn’t just unconscious or automatic. And so, we tried to consciously reflect a coherent vision of our time.
I think that optimism is an easily misunderstood term. There’s this misconception that Star Trek was always sunshine and roses. But its optimism was hard-won. It was always fairly clear-eyed about the darkness in the human soul. The potential for violence, for greed, for criminality, for hatred. All of that felt very much present from the very first episode of Star Trek in ‘66. It’s just that people are working their asses off to overcome it, and it’s a constant effort. It’s always there, even in the episode titles: “The Enemy Within.” “The Turnabout Intruder.” That dark side of human nature is always waiting to emerge again.
So, is that optimism? It is optimism, but it’s a very sober optimism that understands darkness. It’s a deliberate, conscious optimism that goes hand-in-hand with the kind of clear-eyed vision that allows you to reflect the times that you’re living in.
There were two things in the screeners that I never expected to hear on a Star Trek show: 1) a character dropping an F bomb, and 2) Picard—the most English Frenchman who ever lived—actually speaking his native tongue.
[Laughs.] Well, the French was all Patrick’s idea. He told us that as long as Picard was back on the vineyard, he wanted to hear him in French. We all said “great,” because what Patrick wants, Patrick gets. We all saw the fun in the idea, and it was fun to sort of wink at the fact that this supposed Frenchman with a very French name seems like one of the most English people—he even drinks Earl Grey tea. So that’s basically why that’s there.
In terms of the swearing, that wasn’t so much, “Hey, we’re on streaming, we can use the F word.” It was that naturalism that we were trying to get at. That’s the way people talk. Maybe not all people, and maybe people on Star Trek haven’t spoken that way before. But to me, the absence of curse words makes things feel less real.
As a lifelong Star Trek fan, how soon were you able to shake off the surrealness of working with Patrick?
Well, the overall feeling of I can’t believe I’m doing this, I can’t believe they’re letting me do this—some variation of that thought was always present, right up until today. But I went into meeting Patrick very awed. You’re not just working with Sir Patrick Stewart; you’re working with Sir Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard, and Professor X, all at the same time. That is deeply, deeply, awe-inspiring. But Patrick is such a lovely guy—so down to earth and funny and thoughtful and curious. He asks a lot of questions about you and your life, and he’s not just putting you at ease—you are at ease around him, because he’s at ease around you.
You’re probably the most accomplished novelist to successfully make the jump to this level of TV writing. What are the challenges of show running and how do they compare to writing a novel?
They’re such totally different jobs. What they both have in common is the writing. There were many, many, many moments during this first season where I was just sort of alone with the scripts, sitting in my chair, completely lost and absorbed in what I was envisioning and hearing in my mind. That’s the same process as writing a novel, but that’s where the similarities end.
Making a TV show in general, whether you’re the show runner or not, is a completely collaborative enterprise. Every day, you have to negotiate and work to maintain so many different relationships, and ensure that you’re all pulling together on this thing. I don’t think anybody becomes a fiction writer or novelist because they want to spend a lot of time getting along with lots of other people. It’s a very solitary pursuit. I like doing that type of work because as a kid I liked playing by myself. It was definitely both a challenge and required a new kind of behavior for me to make that transition.
You’re now working on a TV adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Is there a different kind of pressure in adapting your own work?
We’re in the very, very preliminary stages. And I’ve tried to do this before with Kavalier & Clay—I worked for five years on a film adaptation that ended up not going anywhere. The real pressure, in the end, comes with trying to produce something that proves this story also needed to be told in this way. Because, you know, it already exists and has already been told in the medium that it was intended for, and that worked pretty well. So why do it again? Ultimately, you want to answer that question definitively. It’s kind of a creative pressure about the medium itself, not so much about the characters as they already exist, or living up to the book in any way. It’s about justifying its existence.
Back in 2016, you wrote a beautiful story for us about travelling to Paris Fashion Week with Abe, your sartorially prodigious 13-year-old son. How is Abe doing these days? Please let him know that we’re keeping a seat warm for him here.
[Laughs.] He’ll be very happy to hear that. He’s still into clothes, still paying attention, still giving me fashion consults. But he’s almost 17 now. And he’s into all kinds of things he wasn’t into before, like snowboarding and white water kayaking. It’s stuff that might feel like it fits in strangely with being a streetwear guy. But somehow he puts it all together and it still feels like Abe.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The premiere of Sir Patrick Stewart's new series finds the franchise using its past to carve out a new tomorrow.
The Tie That Binds
I took my son to Paris Fashion Week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants.
Originally Appeared on GQ
