Former Deep Space 9/Voyager Writer to Helm New Star Trek Series

CBS announced this week that Bryan Fuller will be the showrunner of its new Star Trek series, which will debut in January 2017. The choice of Fuller was widely hailed by the notoriously hard-to-please fans of the franchise as an excellent choice.

Fuller's most recent high-profile role was as creator of Hannibal, which ran on NBC from 2013 to 2015. Before that, he created and wrote ABC's Pushing Daisies, which ran from 2007 to 2009. Fuller also produced and wrote a pilot for Mockingbird Lane, a proposed NBC revival of The Munsters, but the pilot received such a poor reception when it aired in 2012 that the network passed on the series.

Hopes are higher for Fuller's involvement on the Star Trek series given his pedigree. His writing career began with work on the Star Trek series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, and he has claimed a life-long love of science fiction in general and the Star Trek franchise in particular.

The new CBS Star Trek series will try out a novel distribution strategy. The series will debut at the beginning of 2017 with an airing of its first episode on the broadcast network. After that, all first-run episodes of the series will be available only for streaming exclusively on CBS All Access, the network's subscription streaming service. The unprecedented strategy is an attempt to boost business for the relatively obscure service and position the network as a stronger competitor to other online streaming services.