‘Star Trek’ at 60: ‘Strange New Worlds’ Co-Creator Akiva Goldsman on Why It Keeps Boldly Going

Time is relative, especially for Akiva Goldsman. One minute he’s a kid playing with toy phasers and zipping around the galaxy on an imaginary starship. The next he’s a grown-up Hollywood producer who’s — still playing with toy phasers and zipping around the galaxy on an imaginary starship.

As Star Trek passes its 60th anniversary, Goldsman, 64, is nearing the end of his own five-year mission as co-creator of Strange New Worlds, the Paramount+ prequel that focuses on the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike, the intrepid space explorer who, along with his pointy-eared sidekick Mr. Spock and several other familiar Federation officers, zooms through the cosmos on the USS Enterprise in the years just before Captain James T. Kirk squeezed into the command chair in the original 1966-69 series.

To commemorate the franchise’s sexagenary, The Hollywood Reporter sat down with the superfan-turned-uber-producer to talk about the show he’s loved since childhood, why Star Trek has survived for six decades, whether another generation of fans is coming, and why, despite everything going on in the world right now, he still believes humanity has a shot at making it to the 23rd century.

Let’s start with the obvious question on Star Trek’s 60th anniversary. Why has this thing lasted so long?

I think Star Trek reflects the world as we wish it was. The promise of a bright future. And with the real-world future looking scarier every day, it takes a lot of will to hold onto optimism. Articulating a sci-fi vision of a world where we actually do solve problems — that’s as important today as it was in 1966. 

Those original Star Trek years — 1966 to 1969 — they were in some ways as tumultuous as 2026. Is there something about Star Trek that actually works better when the real world looks particularly bleak?

As far as inflection points in history go, 1968 kind of takes the cake, right? It’s got the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; it’s got the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The world seemed dire when the original Star Trek was on the air. And the show offered something aspirational — the Star Trek ideals of interspecies collaboration and thoughtful intelligence and compassion saving the day. It’s what we want to believe of humanity. But yeah, probably the darker the storm, the brighter the dawn. I just wish the storm didn’t have to get quite so dark for us to have brighter visions of the future.

You were a little young to catch the original series when it first aired on NBC but like millions of other kids you geeked out to it later in reruns, right?

When I was 12, I used to watch Star Trek on WPIX channel 11 in New York at six o’clock every night. I was not what you’d call a “typical” kid. I did not find the world a tremendously welcoming place. But I found Star Trek. And that hour a day was everything to me. And I fantasized about Star Trek — I would play Star Trek. And then when I grew up, I got to play Star Trek as an adult. I’ve been insanely, spectacularly lucky.

Let’s talk a bit about how you’ve been playing Star Trek as an adult. Strange New Worlds is clearly a show aimed at fans of the original. 

We wanted it to be a show for people who loved the original series but also wanted it to be welcoming to newbies, with plots that didn’t rely on knowledge of the original canon. You don’t have to be a fan of the original to enjoy it, but if you are, there’s an extra layer. It’s like watching Roger Rabbit as an adult.

Season four is streaming on Paramount+ right now. You have one more final season after this. Have you finished shooting season five? 

Oh, it’s shot; it’s done; the sets are razed. We finished at the end of last summer. It’s going to be a six-episode season.

From what I can tell from season one through four, it looks like you’re building a ramp right up to Sept. 8, 1966, to the first episode of the original series, when Kirk is in command of the Enterprise. Is that the game plan?

Yeah, that was always the promise, at least for us, not knowing how long our show would last — that we would come right up to Kirk’s first day on the job. And that’s what we’ve done. Although they tried to cancel us after season four.

Were you saved by a letter-writing campaign like the original Trek?

No, we got into a conversation with Paramount. They said, “Make a movie.” But we were like, no, two hours would just be awful. So, we went back and forth, and to their credit we got six episodes. And that’s what next year is going to be, a six-episode goodbye that hopefully resolves everything viewers have been wondering about.

You made a prequel to a show made in the 1960s about a future that we are now hurdling towards. A lot of the technology in Star Trek has sort of come true — we’re all walking around with communicators and tricorders these days — but there are some things the show definitely missed. Like artificial intelligence. It had Nomad and M-5, but they look like dummies compared to Claude. How’d you get around that problem?

We were lucky in that we were basically filling in a coloring book, right? There were lines we had to color within. But I like adaptation. I’m sort of a serial adapter. I enjoy the parameters that come with source material, to see how far I can push them. But no, there was no AI in the original Star Trek. You can update, but only to a point. 

How long do you think this franchise can go on? The entertainment universe has changed enormously over the past 60 years. Is there even a next generation of Trekkies out there? Are kids still into it?

You know, I don’t know. I have not been able to get my kids to watch. Once in while there’s a thunderstorm and we’re somewhere and I’m like, ‘Oh, just do it,’ and my girls will watch an episode and seem to have a nice time. But they have no desire to watch it again. So, I have no evidence to suggest there is another generation coming. And yet, I deeply believe there will be, as an act of faith. Because a lot of Star Trek has always been an act of faith. We believe in a future, an aspirational future. So, yes, I believe there could be another generation of Star Trek fans.