'Starfleet Academy' Could Be Star Trek's Most Relevant Chapter Yet, According To ALEX KURTZMAN: "You have a generation of kids who are facing the mistakes of their elders. I see what my son is going through as he's about to go off into the world, and it feels very much like what our cadets are ..."

ALEX KURTZMAN: "... are going through. [...] It was always the 32nd century, because whatever Trek show you're making has to individuate. It has to be its own show. It has to have a reason for being other than the other Star Trek shows. And in the 32nd century, you're dealing with a post-Burn world where trust in government has broken down, where the Federation is rebuilding, where people are divided, where there are all these major issues.

In Discovery, the ship came and started bringing the Federation back together again, and now our kids are the first class back in over 120 years. So, you have a generation of kids who are facing the mistakes of their elders, or the issues that have been handed down to them by their elders, and are now having to deal with it. It felt like a very relevant topic. [...]"

Full interview: (Collider):

https://collider.com/star-trek-starfleet-academy-season-1-holly-hunter-alex-kurtzman/

Quotes:

"In the Collider Interview Studio at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, Steve Weintraub interviewed the core cast, along with showrunner Alex Kurtzman, about all things Starfleet Academy. [...]

Kurtzman also reveals the kinds of stories fans can expect.

ALEX KURTZMAN:

"The first thing I'll tell you is that this cast, to a person, is unbelievable. Unbelievable. To be able to sit in the editing room and go through every take, and just go, “Everything is so great. Which beautiful meal on the buffet table would you like to eat, because they're all equally tasty?" It was so fantastic. What we love about our show, and our characters, is that they are not yet, with the exception of Nahla, fully formed people.

They get to make mistakes that Starfleet officers are really not allowed to make, because they're still figuring out who they are. What's really fun about that, too, is that some of them go in thinking they want one thing, but like everybody who goes to college, they may exit Starfleet Academy realizing that what they thought they wanted when they came in is not at all what their destiny is. So that's a really fun thing.

[...]

The school is a ship. The ship docks on campus in San Francisco and stays there as part of the campus. So what that does is, one of the questions everybody has always faced in thinking about Starfleet Academy in prior iterations, when people were thinking about it, was how do you sustain a show when kids are just in a classroom all the time?

Also, when we think about Star Trek, it's adventures in space and exploration, and all the things that Star Trek is, and so we thought, "What if you make the ship essentially a teaching hospital? They can go to school on campus in San Francisco, but then they can deploy with the rest of the fleet and learn in the field with real captains, with real officers?" So, the idea is that you get to have your cake and eat it too.

[...]

What I think we've found, and I would say that Starfleet is kind of the sum total of everything we've learned on all the shows, is that, yes, there are serialized stories that take you from beginning to the end of the season and that will carry into Season 2; however, we really do have standalone episodes

So, once the story has been established, and everybody gets together, we begin to foreground certain characters as the lead of each episode, and then everybody comes together, so that by the time you get to the finale, you know everybody very, very well. So it's kind of a perfect balance, I think, of Next Gen standalone episodes where there's a case of the week, or an alien of the week, or a diplomatic problem of the week, but then by the end of the season you realize it all weaves together into a bigger story. We're sort of doubling down on that in Season 2, but that's the structure of the show.

[...]

We start shooting our second season in less than a month. We do have a plan for Season 3. You know what's so fun, Steve, is that when you start breaking a season, inevitably you have too many ideas, and you go, "Oh wait a minute, this is cool. We should do this next season." I always want to leave enough room to have improvisation happen, with no pillars we are trying to hit. But we just came to the end of Season 2. We're about to write the finale, which is kind of amazing, and it's exactly where we wanted to go. But when we started Season 2, it isn't exactly how we thought we'd get there. It's really fun.

[...]"

Full interview (Collider):

https://collider.com/star-trek-starfleet-academy-season-1-holly-hunter-alex-kurtzman/