At least Ellison senior is giving is kids ‘loose change’ to cut their teeth on managing businesses before they need to take over.

As bizarre as that sounds, it’s better for the employees and investors than the alternatives.

Sumner Redstone fought to keep control until he was incapacitated, severely damaged the value of his legacy instead of letting his daughter learn to manage it.

Ellison seemed to be making an effort to reassure many of their longtime creative partners that they want them to stay with them.

He definitely isn’t looking to cannibalize and raise cash the way the Redstones were doing since the remerger. He’s determined to hang on to BET which I read as a significant signal.

One has to wonder what role Redstone’s desire to sell off pieces played in reintegration and failure to find synergies.

It also seems that Ellison has a personal vision of what he wants to do with legacy media that goes beyond just treating IPs as cash cows. I don’t think we’ve seen everything he intends and it sounds as though he’ll be very hands on in making sure the vision is realized. It will be interesting to watch.

Many of us used to say the same about TNG, DS9 and Voyager bringing fans to TOS, TAS and the TOS movies.

But others of us just tried to give each show a chance to become favourites on their own merits.

In terms of the GenZs in our household, who had seen all the classic series by the end of middle school, the new shows have superceded their old favourites. One’s really into animated Trek, another loves Discovery. Star Trek Online has also played a role in retaining interest in the franchise.

I’d rather talk about reactions to a show that’s actually happening — even if they are based only on a trailer and pre promotional interviews — than endless hyping, speculation and claims of groundswells of fan enthusiasm about projects that aren’t happening.

Now that it’s no longer the officially sanctioned con, STLV’s panels seem to be set up to encourage producers and actors to hype projects that never even got to the development he’ll’ stage let alone any consideration for being greenlit. These include Tarantino’s bat-sh*t movie idea, Captain Worf, Legacy and the recently revealed Unity proposal.

‘Fans’ fundraised to pay for full page advertisements in major US newspapers as a campaign to persuade NBC not to broadcast TAS even after its season one production was almost complete.

I’m still frustrated that none of the Canadian cast got good development.

Almost all of them have significant awards within Canada. Most have other shows, films or are producing themselves.

While many of them took these roles for steady work, it was clear that they weren’t intended by the executives be more than regular wallpaper. It’s unfortunate.

I feel the same about Mitchell in SNW.

However, he has made Skydance profitable unlike another famous billionaire by inheritance who repeatedly went bankrupt.

It seems that his father’s approach is to let his heirs learn to run companies on their own with injections of capital that are staggering for others but just a couple years earnings on the family’s wealth.

It’s confirmed but after a second read, I think that’s clear.

Interesting that Skydance Studios television, which was a prestigious brand, will sublimate under the Paramount Television Studios name. It does show a certain commitment to the merger on David Ellison’s part.

Is there information where the Skydance television production will go?

Is that with the Paramount side?

It wouldn’t make sense to have three television/streaming production arms.

My brain isn’t firing on all cylinders today.

Yes it’s Michelle Hurd who played Raffi.

Also, yes I am bitter that Ro Laren was killed off and even more ticked that Picard played it as though there had been a romantic tension between them rather than a mentor-mentee one.

And it sounds as though Paladin in Vision Quest will be another version of the same character but as a Mandalorian analogue.

Tawny as the principal character as well as co-creator and EP is very interesting.

The fact that she’s been able to state publicly that she would be the lead suggests that the proposal was as advanced as it could be until the new ownership and team could make decisions.

Setting it in the late 24th to early 25th century will also provide the kind of ‘legacy’ opportunities that many Berman-era fans and actors are hankering for while satisfying the apparent executive demands that legacy characters be included for marketing purposes.

Frankly, having legacy characters come to a single planet would be a lot less unrealistic than Matalas’ concept of having the Enterprise G travelling around to visit legacy characters and locations. Production costs and staging would be manageable.

If this is intended to run as a true 22-30 minute comedy, I really hope that Paramount’s streamer greenlights an initial double season as Netflix does. It really takes about 8 episodes for a half hour show to take off.

Star Trek Prodigy is the sequel to Voyager.

It’s not just for kids, although intended for a family audience.

My partner and I had a blast watching it.

I wanted both.

But with a truncated 5th season and the very long lead time required for animation, I can see why the animated version ended up being dropped.

Treklit - both comics and books gets short-shrift in promotion.

No idea why, but it’s definitely a longstanding and worsening trend.

We’ll have to see whether David Ellison reorients the scheduling strategically. It’s hard to imagine he will not.

5 years ago, as the transition was happening after the remerger, the demographic statistics I saw showed that CBSAA/P+ had the best range of demographics. And it had the best youth/teen/kids audience after Disney+.

Unlike, NBC Universal’s problem with Peacock and Discovery+, which had two very different demographics with little interest the content the other offered, Paramount+ launched with a broad and diverse base.

But the programming and production choices of the past five years have brutally squandered that. It seems that the millennial, middle age Bro, and older male audience has been the target — live sports, Taylor Sheridan everything etc.

It already feels as though P+ has been reprogrammed to make the current US administration happy, pushing a certain kind of American exceptionalism, but that’s not a successful global business strategy.

It’s really only the content coming in from CBS linear and Star Trek that’s kept the balance on the platform.

We keep hearing about content being produced in Paramount’s South American studios or in agreements with partners in Spain and France, but none of that richness in offerings are making it to the North American platform. Netflix remains dominant in offering high quality content from outside Hollywood.

I agree. The more we see, the more enthusiastic I am.

The concept of an Academy show was in development hell for so long - basically, since the hiatus after Discovery’s first season.

And we know that it was originally kicked around before TNG went into production.

So, this seems to have been a hard one to make work. The cost to produce a high quality VFX-rich show that appeals to a teen and young adult demographic, requires that the show must also be rich enough elements to draw the wider Trek base.

I’m hopeful that, as with Prodigy, Starfleet Academy may be one of the rare shows that satisfies a mass demographic despite the streaming era.

The risk is that, like Prodigy, Paramount may not promote it broadly enough.

However, with A-listers heading the cast, one can hope that it will get a lot of promotion beyond the genre media.

Commodore should be abbreviated to Cmdre (Canadian Navy), CDRE (former US Navy) or CMDE (several including India).

But given all the oddities of NCOs in Trek, this a weird acronym for Commodore seems on-brand.

Still, I think it may be some kind of physicians’ designation the writers came up with. One would expect some kind of Medical Officer such as CMO, but could it be Commanding Doctor or something bizarre like that?

That makes sense. Something like this would need a lot of runway and would involve contractual obligations that could not be easily terminated.