ViacomCBS launched the second season of its Paramount+ animated sci-fi comedy, Star Trek: Lower Decks, with a star-studded, fully-vaccinated, Hollywood backlot Block Party and double-feature screening for media, cast, crew and guests.
Forbes.com was granted permission to come aboard to meet the makers of the streaming series, and to get to know the voice actors at a premiere party that redefined the word “relaxed.” Sure, there was the traditional red carpet, TV cameras and microphones, but there was also a selfie-station, a food truck, free-flowing adult beverages and claw crane machines that easily yielded Star Trek T-shirts.
In the words of one attendee, it was “so very chill.”
The first episode, Strange Energies, is now streaming on Paramount+ and reunites the voice cast of Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Jerry O’Connell, Dawnn Wilson, Noël Wells and Eugene Cordero.
Watch the trailer for season 2, below, and scroll down to see photos from the Block Party premiere and watch video and read interviews with four members of the cast plus, creator Mike McMahan!
Despite the fake houses on the fake street, everyone was really very genuine and kind. It felt just like a neighborhood block party.
You could not possibly lose with this claw crane toy game. Everybody’s a winner!
The Lime Truck food truck served up awesome burgers, fries and vegan food, too.
The bar. Mike McMahan says like the bar on the U.S.S. Cerritos, it’s called... The bar.
That’s the back of my head at table 38 in the foreground!
Creator Mike McMahan. We talked about transgender and LGBTQ representation on Star Trek: Discovery and if his series will follow suit. I also asked him who inspired the names of the fans’ favorite characters and why does Boimler have purple hair? Scroll down for a transcript of my interview!
The incredible cast.
Scenes from season two’s episode one, Strange Energies.
McMahan tells me his original idea for Ransom was “California Riker.”
Watch my interviews with four members of the cast in the video below. Oh, and Jerry O’Connell: Thanks for asking to take this selfie with me...
What follows is a partial transcript of a phone interview with Star Trek: Lower Decks executive producer and creator Mike McMahan. Some parts have been condensed for space and clarity, but most of it is verbatim. More to come!
Dawn Ennis: How’s your summer been?
Mike McMahan: ”My summer’s been great! I have a three year old and a seven year old and everything seems to cater to what they want to do, which is fine. If all I wanted to do is lie around, they’ve been good. Yeah, they’re sweeties. They’re keeping it real around here. They’re handling all this much better than I am for sure.
Ennis: Like you said at the at the block party, maybe this was a little blip where we got to enjoy each other and be out and about and who knows what the future holds, right?
McMahan: I know. That's was so amazing and surreal. What a night! I had such a good time at that. Oh my God!
Ennis: Tell me how it came about. Was it your idea?
McMahan: You know, I would love to say it was my idea. I know that we didn't want to do another virtual premiere. We wanted to do something real, if we could. I think it was, how can we do it safely with safety being the number one priority, obviously. So outdoors, everything spread apart, mask mandate, vax mandate, all that stuff. Look, we’re Star Trek, we believe in science, everything we can do to make it safe, but then also to give our community something to enjoy. The only thing I wish we could have done is literally have the entire crew there, but that would have been hundreds of people and it would have been dangerous.
So, again, you know, when you get to this moment, you want to celebrate the show and you want to want to see everybody who made it and come together as much as you can. And it's rare to get to watch a TV show with 100 people sitting together, you know? And like it changes the experience: it turns it into seeing a movie; jokes are funnier and the surprises are bigger. I couldn't imagine a more beautiful.. I was telling my friends at CBS: I want to do a block party every year.
Ennis: What impressed me as a writer was that you didn't leave the writers out, that they were part of this extravaganza.
McMahan: I got some of the writers there. I think I invited all of them and some of them couldn't make it. But you know, it's so funny. Everybody's always feeling like somebody else is more important. And at the end of the day, that's just not true. Writers are important. The artists are important. Our composer was there. Obviously, our voice actors. Everybody who has a hand in making that show. And we want to celebrate everyone. I had a 30-thousand foot look at the whole thing. And without every one of these people, we don't have a show. You just want to share the love.
Ennis: How did it come to be that you are the helmsman of Star Trek: Lower Decks?
McMahan: You know, I think about that sometimes, because it feels surreal, like when we get to this point, where there's going to be a new episode airing, I'm like, how the hell did that happen? Like there’s literally a Star Trek book I wrote at one point [2015’s Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never-Aired 8th Season] where in the opening. I'm like: ‘Listen, I'm never going to get a Star Trek show.’ I didn't even know Discovery was coming at that point!
I think that for me, honestly, there's the literal answer, which is I love sci-fi. I’ve worked in great television sci-fi before. I’ve worked in great animated comedy before, and I’m a huge fan of Star Trek. So, like, I'm a pretty good bet for this kind of show. But I think in a little less of a literal way. I'm not the world's biggest Star Trek fan. There are other Star Trek fans that are more of a fan than I am.
But I am the biggest fan of the way Star Trek makes you feel. And I am a huge fan of the world that [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry created and all the different expressions of it. So, sometimes I forget character names. I'm really bad at episodes names, you know? Like I'm bad at remembering the dimensions of the Enterprise-D, or how many decks there are, or which thing happened in which order chronologically. Because the thing I like about Star Trek is the community in the overall sense of joy that it gives me. And that's what Lower Decks is. And, you know, it's important to me that every Star Trek fan needs to chew on and argue this kind of stuff. I know you can't make a Star Trek show without that.
So it's important for me to make sure everything is right. And that's why I surround myself with people who are, you know, even bigger fans of the franchise than I am in a literal sense, who can name all those very specific details, like my producer Brad Winters, used to help me write episodes because he knows, you know, every episode title, everything about everything. So I'll be making an episode that feels right to me. And then I have all these people around me that I'm like, ‘OK, I think I remember this.’ And they're like, ‘Yes, you're getting that right. But here's the detail of it.’ So it really is a coming together of all these different fans.
And I think that's why Lower Decks feels like it opens gates to me. Like you can watch Lower Decks knowing nothing about Star Trek and you can get a pretty good pitch of what Star Trek's all about. And you should watch all the other shows, and if you do watch all the other shows, you’ll be like, Hell yeah!
Ennis: What you did watch growing up? What was your jam?
McMahan: I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so it was TNG, Ren and Stimpy and the other kind of NickToons stuff. I wore out my James Bond VHSs and my Star Wars VHSs, that kind of stuff. I was never huge into Saved By The Bell kind of stuff. But when X-Files came out, I was like, oh, this is the best show ever made. I love that kind of stuff. I'm just like, “Ooh yeah, give me that.”
Ennis: What's the difference between doing what you do in animation compared to with actors who are on camera?
(OH, NO! MIKE’S ANSWER AND THE REST OF THE TRANSCRIPT IS STUCK IN THE PATTERN BUFFER! STAND BY FOR MORE TO COME!)
