For the first time in the history of the Primetime Emmy Awards, the Television Academy has nominated a non-English series for Outstanding Drama. Netflix’s Squid Game earned the distinction on Tuesday when the organization announced the nominations for the 2022 awards. In addition to Outstanding Drama, the runaway hit earned 14 total nominations, including an Outstanding Lead Actor nod for star Lee Jung-jae.

Depending on how you want to count the nominations, Netflix either earned the most or second-most of any streaming company on the list. All told, Netflix productions scored 105 nominations this year, second only to the 140 netted by HBO and HBO Max, but the grouping of HBO’s cable and streaming operations under one umbrella has been an ongoing source of controversy within the industry.

HBO also had the most-nominated series with Succession. The show earned 25 nods from the Academy, including nominations for Outstanding Drama and two Outstanding Actor considerations for Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong. With 20 nominations, Apple’s Ted Lasso earned the most nominations of any streaming-exclusive series. Jason Sudeikis will get a chance to defend his best actor win from last year. Thanks to shows like Ted Lasso and Severance, Apple had a strong performance. It earned 51 nods, up from 35 the year prior. Notably, Jon Stewart, who returned to late-night TV last year with the Problem with Jon Stewart on TV+, was snubbed in the Outstanding Variety Talk Series category.

Disney’s performance was a mixed bag. On the back of 17 nominations for Only Murders In The Building, Hulu more than doubled its nominations from last year to 58. Disney+, however, only came away with 34 nods, a significant drop from the 71 it netted last year. That said, other streaming platforms didn’t do nearly as well as even Disney+. Amazon’s Prime Video secured a modest 30 nominations, while Paramount+ and Peacock only came away with 11 and three nods apiece.

The following article includes significant spoilers for All Those Who Wander.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has never been ashamed to tip its hat to the stories it’s riffing upon, some more obviously than others. This week’s episode, All Those Who Wander, might as well just have been called “Screw it, we’re just going to do Aliens.” Thankfully, it’s so good that you won’t have time to care about the xeroxing from James Cameron’s 1986 original. This is the best episode of Strange New Worlds yet, raising the bar, and the stakes, for next week’s finale.

We start with the welcome and now familiar sight of the Enterprise crew hanging out around Pike’s captain’s table. It’s such a delight to see the crew spending time together and having fun, as the show puts in the hours to show that these people generally like each other. Ensign Duke gets a promotion, while cadets Chia and Uhura are given a send off as they end their tour of duty on the Enterprise. But the levity is punctured, first by Uhura still not sure if Starfleet is right for her, and second by an ominous message from headquarters. A Federation starship has gone missing while surveying an unstable planet, and Pike needs to go looking for it.

But the Enterprise already has an urgent mission to deliver power supplies to starbase K7, so Pike decides to handle a rescue mission with shuttlecraft. Dr. M’Benga, Chapel, La’an, Spock, Hemmer, Lt. Kirk and Duke, as well as cadets Uhura and Chia join him. Number One and Ortegas, meanwhile, take the ship on its original course, meaning this is the fifth or sixth episode this series where Number One has barely featured. Perhaps Rebecca Romijn negotiated far fewer filming days each week given her higher profile than the rest of the cast.

When the shuttles reach the planet, landing in the shadow of the crashed USS Peregrine, it’s not long before the episode switches into high horror. Corpses litter the ground, and the ship itself is covered in the sort of bloodstain made when someone’s trying in vain to cling to the ground while being dragged away. And despite the fact that this is another episode shot mostly on the standing Enterprise sets, clever lighting and direction make them feel altogether more like the sinister LV-426 from Aliens.

Then there’s Newt Oriana, a young girl who has learned to survive previous Gorn attacks by going partly feral. This episode, much more than the flat Memento Mori, is designed to rehabilitate the Gorn from the comedy rubber suit seen in the ‘60s and the awkward CG from the early '00s. Now, they’re the Trek version of the eponymous Xenomorph, complete with acid bile, quadrupedal motion and body horror reproductive process. Worth mentioning that this ain’t the sort of episode you can watch with your kids, especially not when the blue-shirted Cadet Chia succumbs to a chestburster.

Marni Grossman / Paramount+

It helps, too, that the Gorn are rarely glimpsed properly, despite some excellent creature design, the shadows are always a better way to experience a villain like this. The episode’s conclusion sees the crew taking an Alien3-style chase through corridors as they lure the Gorn to a trap. Choosing to shoot from the Gorn’s perspective helps amplify the sense of dread and tension, too, since our crew is being stalked from all corners.

But the best moments are when the crew, trapped in sickbay, start to feel the screws turning on them. La’an starts berating Oriana, the child that she sees so much of herself in before Dr. M’Benga snaps at her to leave his daughter… his patient alone. Lt. Kirk, meanwhile, starts lashing out at Spock for his lack of empathy, not long before Spock lets out his own emotions in order to entrap the Gorn. And, best of all, this all feels entirely earned and in character as we’ve gotten to see how these people got these particular scars. Finally, the promise of emotional continuity comes good as we start to see the Enterprise crew almost break under pressure.

Of course, we have to offer additional praise for Hemmer, who once again gets paired with Uhura for some grace notes. The fact that even Uhura has given them a compound name (Hemura!) speaks to how delightful it is to watch the pair interact. And when Hemmer reveals that the blob of alien spit he received earlier in the episode means he’s loaded with Gorn eggs too, it’s a massive blow. I feel like Hemmer was already a figure we’d fallen in love with, and his departure hurts, even if he gets a graceful, Alien3-esque swan dive death for a sendoff. Give Bruce Horak his own spin-off, or something, please. 

(I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed that Duke, Chia and Hemmer’s death means we’ve had a Yellow, Blue and Red-shirt demise in a single episode. Hacky standups will need to look for a better punchline to their Star Trek jokes in the future.)

Also, I feel like I’ve been neglectful in not offering enough praise for this cast, and especially Jess Bush. Bush often has to sell a whole bunch of stuff in her limited screen time and does so with ease. Here, as in The Serene Squall, she shows Chapel adapting to survive against a threat, and sells it so well.

The episode ends with plenty of fallout, Uhura decides to stay on board after Hemmer’s valediction encourages her to put down roots. La’an takes a leave of absence to try and reunite Oriana with her family, and Spock’s emotional outburst has left him scarred. Pike, meanwhile, must be headed for trouble given how freely he treats his life knowing that his future is already set in stone But again, all of this feels earned in a way that prior episodes haven’t quite achieved, and I’m excited to see how we land in the finale from here.

The following article discusses spoilers for The Elysian Kingdom.

There’s a genre of writing best embodied by the serial escalation of premises found on forum threads in certain corners of the internet. It’s the sort of energy that imbues this week’s Strange New Worlds as it takes a one-episode detour into a fantasy parody. Not content with dropping the crew into a swords-and-sorcery romp, they’re all tasked with playing against type! Oh, and the only people who can save them is an awkward buddy-cop duo of the noble Doctor and the grouchy engineer! Shut this off five minutes or so before the ending and this could easily be the second best episode of the show’s first season.

The Elysian Kingdom is both the episode’s title, and the subject of the book Dr. M’Benga has been reading to his terminally ill daughter Rukiya throughout the series. She’s annoyed by the ending, which requires the noble king to choose what thing he’s willing to give up at the conclusion of the story. M’Benga tells her, when he’s cured her, she can rewrite the story any which way she chooses. And before you can say gee, that foreshadowing was a bit on the nose, the Enterprise gets caught up in the nebula it’s been studying, unable to move.

By the time the doctor gets to the bridge, the ship has been covered in tapestries and ye olde tiki torches. Everyone bar him (and, as it turns out, Hemmer), has been mind-wiped into becoming characters from the book. Pike is a cowardly courtier, La’an is a comedy Disney princess, Uhura is the big villain and Spock is an evil wizard with a Fabio wig and two-day stubble that reminds us all Ethan Peck is, in fact, hot under that goofy Vulcan haircut.

Marni Grossman / Paramount+

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Star Trek lean into its often-denied campy side and, as I’ve said before, it’s a groove Strange New Worlds works well in. The fact the series feels confident enough to do this just eight episodes into its first run speaks volumes about how the creative team are doing. (You just know there’s a whiteboard in the writers’ room with Musical Episode(?) written up top, and I’m here for it.) If there’s a downside, it’s that the ensemble is big enough that some actors get short-changed in their moments to play out of character. Of course, none of this would work without Babs Olusanmokun’s central performance to hold the story together, aware of the ridiculousness of the situation but remaining true to M’Benga’s inner turmoil.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing about Strange New Worlds if there wasn’t also a small list of annoyances. The tone reminds me a lot of Futurama’s glorious M*A*S*H parody with iHawk, the robot with a Maudlin / Irreverent switch on his side. This episode wants the switch to be jammed at both ends, mixing high camp with a meditation on, uh, something.

We must now talk about the ending, (again, spoiler warning) which is such a weird left turn that it makes my scalp feel itchy just thinking about it. The denouement of the episode sees the sentient nebula offer to take Rukiya off the ship and cure her illness, allowing her to live a life of fantasy in the stars. She appears, moments later, as an adult, telling her father about her life and reassuring him he made the right decision to let her go. Suitably resolved, he’s back at work minutes later.

Marni Grossman / Paramount+

Sorry, it doesn’t sit right. I can understand the notion of giving up your kid to save their life, and parents have thrown kids from burning buildings on that basis. But the idea he’d make that decision in about half a minute’s conversation with a sentient space cloud with unclear motives? M’Benga has spent the whole season so far working to find a cure for Rukiya, and was even given a promising lead just two weeks back. This storyline has been seeded through enough of the series that this feels like it’s the creative team course-correcting.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the abruptness of this is the resolution of a production problem. My guess is that nobody realized just how quickly children age, making it difficult for Sage Arrindell to play a child trapped in temporal stasis. It’s the reason Malcolm David Kelly left Lost at the end of its first season: You can’t pretend everyone has spent just 40 days on the island if the kid visibly ages a year since they shot the pilot. (I assume, too, the episode was shot on the standing Enterprise sets as a way of saving cash for the finale unless those gorgeous period costumes rinsed through the show’s substantial budget.)

Alternatively, the writers planned this out and it was always meant to be something that resolved itself within the first season. In that case, I’m forced to wonder who in the world thought that a father just handing over his kid in such an arbitrary fashion was a smart emotional beat. Unless it’s one of those situations where more emphasis was placed on the surprise of it, rather than the logic, narratively or emotionally. To me, it feels a bit like yet another Strange New Worlds episode where, much as I want to offer praise, there’s always something that leaves me a bit cold.

Netflix isn't just milking Squid Game's success with a second season. Varietynotes the streamer is creating a reality competition show, Squid Game: The Challenge, based on the Korean series. The 10-episode production will pit 456 people against each other in games both "inspired" by the show as well as new events. No one is dying here, thankfully, but there's still a good reason for entrants to persevere to the end — the winner receives a whopping $4.56 million prize.

The company is casting for English-speaking participants worldwide ahead of filming in the UK. While Netflix didn't say when Squid Game: The Challenge would premiere, the US casting page notes that candidates may have to commit to as many as four weeks in early 2023. The Circle production house Studio Lambert and ITV's The Garden are heading up the project.

A reality TV spinoff isn't exactly shocking. Squid Game remains Netflix's most popular show of all time, and earned Golden Globe and SAG awards. The company is also eager to turn its fortunes around — it posted its first subscriber loss in a decade last quarter in the wake of fiercer rivalries, limited growth potential and account sharing. The competition could help Netflix reel in subscribers beyond those eager to watch season two.

Netflix is trying to build up hype for Stranger Things season 4 in a not-so-subtle way: by letting you watch a significant chunk of it. The service has shared the first eight minutes of the introductory episode in hopes you'll tune in for the rest. We won't spoil the finer points, but we will say that it's mostly a flashback that sets the stage for what's to come.

It's also clear just why the fourth season is split in two — some episodes are exceptionally long. Volume 1, premiering May 27th, includes seven episodes that are conventionally-sized apart from the last, which runs for an hour and 38 minutes. Volume 2, arriving July 1st, is another matter. It consists of just two lengthy episodes, with the last running for nearly two and a half hours. You're effectively watching a feature film.

There are reasons for the long runtime. The Duffer Brothers previously said they'd planned to finish the story in four or five seasons, and this fourth run is the start of that climax. The story is also far-reaching, with scenes in Hawkins, California, Russia and "elsewhere." It's a busy plot, and the creators are apparently determined to tie up every loose end.

Amazon tried a novel marketing strategy to get more eyeballs (or eyestalks) on a new Prime Video show: it beamed the first episode of sci-fi series Night Sky out of Earth's atmosphere. The company pulled off the stunt earlier today for what it's calling "the first-ever intergalactic premiere for a TV series."

Satellite services companies SES and Intelsat used their ground stations and geostationary satellites to send the episode beyond the reach of our planet. Prime Video noted in a press release that the transmission won't be caught by broadcast satellites and sent back to terra firma, as is usually the case. "Theoretically, this makes the broadcast available to anyone open to receiving satellite signals 384,000 kilometers away from Earth and beyond — the equivalent distance from Earth to the Moon," it said.

Prime Video claims it's not only the first streaming service to send its content to space, but it marks the "farthest distance that a TV series has been intentionally distributed." The episode was transmitted using Ku- and C-band frequencies, which are often employed for satellite TV, media distribution and communications. So if there's anyone or anything out there with the right gear, they'll be able to catch the first episode of what sounds like an intriguing series.

Night Sky premiered on Prime Video today. It centers around a couple (played by Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons) who've been hiding a secret for years: there's a chamber buried in their backyard that links to a deserted planet. However, everything changes when a young man (who they believe may be an alien) enters their lives.

It seems Black Mirror is making a comeback. Three years after the fifth season of the sci-fi anthology series arrived, Variety reports that Netflix has greenlit a sixth season.

Details are scant for now, though it seems casting is in progress for a season that's expected to have more episodes than season five's three instalments. The new episodes are said to be even more cinematic in scope than previous ones as well.

Critics have suggested Black Mirror was running out of steam in later seasons, with its previously incisive criticism of where technology was headed perhaps waning. The long gap between seasons might have helped the creative team develop more impactful ideas and scripts.

The lengthy delay between seasons isn't only because of creative reasons, though (if that has indeed been a problem). Black Mirror has been held up due to a rights issue. In January 2020, creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones left their production company House of Tomorrow, which had backing from Endemol.

The duo set up a new production company, Broke and Bones, which quickly struck a long-term deal with Netflix. However, Endemol retained the rights to Black Mirror, meaning Brooker and Jones were unable to produce more episodes until they or Netflix struck a deal with Endemol's new owner, Banijay Group.

In the meantime, Brooker and Jones have developed other projects for Netflix. They created a year-in-review special called Death to 2020 (a spin on Brooker's previous Wipe series), which had a sequel last year. Brooker was also behind an interactive animated project called Cat Burglar, which required players to get trivia questions correct to advance the story.

Netflix will surely be glad Brooker and Jones are working on Black Mirror again, however. The company scooped up the series, which debuted on the UK's Channel 4, in 2015. Since then, Black Mirror has won eight Emmys and a host of other awards, including for Bandersnatch, one of Netflix's first forays into interactive programming.

The following contains mild spoilers for the finale episode of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season two.

Picard has always been an outlier in the Star Trek franchise. It’s not a show about a particular ship and its crew; the title indicates that at its heart, it’s about this one character and any unresolved issues he may have had with his life. It hasn’t been the most compelling premise, and its output so far has been divisive among fans. But as the series finishes up its second year and rolls into its third and final season, its ultimate purpose has become more clear, a purpose that wouldn’t have worked for a broadcast show but fits right in with the more intimate confines of a streaming service.

In its first two seasons, Picard has felt rather directionless. Season one was about artificial life, while season two decided to delve into time travel and emotional trauma. It may be a serialized program, but the plotlines and tone have gone all over the place (mostly notably in “Stardust City Rag,” which starts off with a gory torture scene but by the halfway mark the crew is all wearing silly disguises). But between the departures of cast members at the end of season two and the announcement that The Next Generation crew would be appearing in the series in its last season, however, a clear pathway for the program seems to have emerged from the fog.

CBS

The final TNG movie (Nemesis) is generally considered to be awful, with a weak nonsensical plot, some out-of-character moments and just a bad sendoff for fan favorite characters like Data. Picard has sought to heal some of those wounds by giving Data a proper death, Troi and Riker a proper family, and Jean-Luc himself some needed character growth. That last one was a particular sticking point since the finale of the show, “All Good Things,” ended with a message that Picard needs to grow as a person. And then in the films… he just didn’t.

It’s hard to imagine creating a network television show just to fix some problems with a series of films made twenty years ago, which is why Picard is most definitely a product of the streaming model. I’ve talked before how streaming affects the creative development of shows in both good and bad ways. A streaming program is given a full season order before it starts, meaning that creators know they have at least six or 10 or 13 episodes to play with. It’s a big part of why serialized storytelling is even possible, since showrunners no longer fear being cut off in the middle of an ongoing story (like the recently canceled Legends of Tomorrow on the CW, which ended on a big cliffhanger).

CBS

There are also some drawbacks, to be sure; without audience feedback, it means a creator can’t fine-tune a show as it goes along. They can’t make changes at all until the new season starts production. And if the show hasn’t been renewed for another season, they can’t seed plot points in the current season and be sure they’ll pay off. At least with broadcast shows, they may hear of their renewal while still in production, allowing them to add in some hook for the next season.

But as I said, Picard doesn’t have to worry about any of this. The show was intended to be three seasons and no more, and they’ve already shot the entire thing. Many lapsed fans have publicly stated they intend to jump on board merely for the presence of their TNG faves, meaning Paramount+’s streaming strategy does seem to be working in this case.

CBS

And it’s because the show has such a limited life span, because it’s ending up to be less a tentpole than it is a nice little coda for long-time fans, I find it easier to make peace with the show’s existence. Like many viewers I’ve had problems with Picard, some I’ve written about. The same goes for Discovery. But as the Star Trek universe expands and more options become available, each show has a lot less weight to carry.

They no longer have to try to meet every expectation; instead fans have a fuller menu to choose from. Discovery can be for those who like a quirkier Trek with a progressive cast, Picard is for TNG diehards, Lower Decks is for fans who like the sillier aspects of the franchise, Prodigy is for kids and Strange New Worlds is trying to be an old-fashioned-style Trek for fans who literally hated everything else on this list. And I don’t think any of this would have been possible without the streaming model. There may be too many shows to keep up with, but at least it’s easier to find something that fits your unique taste. Whether the growth of streaming is sustainable is yet to be seen (RIP CNN+) but for now, we can enjoy the plethora of options at the buffet.

There are reasons that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds exists beyond the need to keep the Trek content pumping so nobody thinks too hard about canceling Paramount+. It’s designed to quell some of the discontent in Star Trek's vast and vocal fanbase about the direction the live-action shows have traveled under the stewardship of uber-producer Alex Kurtzman. It’s also a slightly bewildered response to the criticism of its predecessors, Discovery and Picard, made by the same people behind those two shows. In short, it’s designed to appeal to people who, when asked what their favorite live-action Trek show is, unironically say The Orville.

We open on Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the once-and-future captain of the Enterprise after his sojourn leading Discovery in its second season. There, a magic time crystal told him that, in less than a decade, he’ll be non-fatally blown up in a training accident. Armed with a standard-issue Grief Beard™, he refuses the call to return to the stars until the siren song of non-serialized space adventure becomes too great. It isn’t long before he and Spock are reunited to rescue Rebecca Romijn’s Number One from a spy mission on a pre-warp planet gone wrong. Sadly, Paramount’s restrictive embargo on discussing the first few episodes forbids me from discussing much of what I've seen, so things will get vaguer from here on out.

It looks like it was August 2020 when Alex Kurtzman said that the show would be episodic rather than serialized. This was a way to address the criticism of the heavily serialized, go-nowhere, do-nothing grimdark mystery box stories that sucked so much of the joy from Discovery and Picard. Strange New Worlds is, instead, a deliberate throwback in the style of The Original Series, albeit with serialized character stories. So while we visit a new planet each week, characters still retain the scars, and lessons learned, from their experiences.

There are more refreshed Original Series characters than just Pike, Spock and Number One along for the ride. Babs Olusanmokun is playing a more fleshed-out version of Dr. M’Benga, while Jess Bush takes over for Christine Chapel. André Dae Kim is the new Chief Kyle, who has been promoted from intermittent extra to transporter chief. Then there’s Celia Rose Gooding as Cadet Uhura, whose semi-canonical backstory is now firmly enshrined as a Dead Parent / Troubled Childhood narrative. Uhura aside, most of these roles were so under-developed in the ‘60s that they’re effectively blank slates for the reboot. Oh, except that everyone is now Hot and Horny, because this isn’t just Star Trek, it’s Star Trek that isn’t afraid to show characters in bed with other people.

Rounding out the cast is Christina Chong as security chief La’an Noonien-Singh, a descendant of Khaaaaan! himself, Trek’s in-series Hitler analog. From what we learn of her so far, she also gets saddled with a Troubled Childhood / Dead Parent narrative, as well as a case of the nasties. I expect her character will soften further over time, but right now she’s officially the least fun character to spend time with. Of more interest is Melissa Navia’s hotshot pilot Erica Ortegas who can launch the odd quip into the mix when called upon, and Hemmer. Hemmer is a telepathic Aenar (a type of Androian first introduced in Enterprise) played by Bruce Horak. Horak plays Hemmer as an old-fashioned lovable grump and mentor figure for some of the other characters and will clearly become a fan-favorite.

And having now seen the first half of the first season (a second is already in production) I can say that Strange New Worlds will be a frustrating watch for fans. Frustrating because there are the bones of a really fun, interesting Star Trek series buried deep inside Strange New Worlds. Sadly, it’s trapped in the usual mix of faux-melodrama, clanging dialogue and dodgy plotting with the usual lapses in logic. Many writers are blind to their own flaws, which is why it’s so amusing that this is what Kurtzman and co. feel is a radical departure from their own work.

Maybe I’m being unfair, but this is the seventh season of live-action Star Trek released under Kurtzman’s purview. The three lead characters all had a full season of Discovery to bed in, too, so it’s not as if everyone’s starting from cold. But despite the gentlest of starts, the show still manages to stumble out of the gate, trying to do too much and not enough at the same time. The first four episodes, especially, feel as if someone’s trying to speed-read you through a whole season’s worth of plot in a bunch of partly-disconnected episodes.

An aside: Ever since the mid ‘80s, Paramount was desperate to reboot Star Trek with a younger cast to cash-in on that Kirk/Spock brand awareness. It eventually happened, but only in 2009 with J.J. Abrams’ not-entirely-successful attempt to reboot the series in cinemas. While a Young Kirk movie made sense in the ‘80s, mining that seam for nostalgia today seems very weird indeed. After all, most people under the age of 50 will likely associate TNG as the One True Star Trek. The fact that not-so-closet Trek fan Rihanna’s favorite character is Geordi La Forge speaks volumes about where millennial love lies. But I’d imagine a La Forge spin-off series was never going to fly with any generation of Paramount executives.

Now let’s talk about that emotional continuity, because while people will take their experiences with them, little effort has been made to pre-seed conflicts before they erupt. Arguably the weakest episode of the bunch tries to cram four (4!) A-plots into its slender runtime. One of which is a coming out narrative for one crewmember – and once they’ve come out, another character reveals a deep-seated antipathy toward that group. It would be nice, if we could have let this particular battle brew, but it’s introduced about 25 minutes in and resolved with a punchfight by minute 40. We’re not shown the person wrestling with the decision to come out and risk their professional and personal relationships beforehand, either. Just… punchfight.

A lot of these episodes don’t properly resolve themselves either, which is the standard problem for any 50-minute TV show. It’s hard to build a new world, flesh out new characters, establish and resolve their problems in the space of two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But at least three episodes feature conclusions that either aren’t clear or take place entirely off screen, explained away with a line of dialogue. I don’t know if it was a production problem, or if a majority of the show’s 22 (yes, twenty-two) credited producers signed off on it, but it feels a hell of a lot like cheating. It's almost as if the writers wanted to provoke surprise in the subsequent scene — how did this get resolved!? — over concocting a satisfying emotional and narrative catharsis on-screen. 

In fact, I’m going to harp on about this one particular episode because it’s not content with just dropping one major character revelation. The episode basically stops 10 minutes early in order to – shock horror – drop another Kinda Dark Secret About A Crewmember You Barely Know. One thing I said when Discovery started was that if you never get to know the characters in their default state, it’s not valuable to see their bizarro-world counterparts straight away. It’s the same here, Strange New Worlds refuses to do the painstaking work of filling in these characters before they start changing as a result of their experiences together.

The cast is all solid, and clearly working hard to elevate the material they’ve been given, because the dialogue here is so rough that I think they all deserve danger money. Now, nü-Trek dialog has always been awkward and/or impenetrable, but it’s beyond dreadful here. Kurtzman and co. forgot the whole “show, don’t tell” nature of screenwriting, and so characters just stand there and tell you everything, constantly. This is made worse because rather than giving space for these talented, well-paid actors to act, they’re instead forced to say what they’re feeling.

Here’s an example of that: In one episode, a character is trying (and failing) to remember a key memory from a traumatic experience in childhood that holds the key to saving the day. But rather than use the performer to convey that, they have the actor in question stand there, blank-faced, and say “I am trauma blocked.” Then there are scenes in which two characters describe what’s happening in front of them with the sort of faux-gravitas that only Adam West could pull off.

Remember when I said there was promise? There really is, and you feel like if the writers could get out of their own way, things could improve massively. There’s one episode you could easily describe as the (actually fun) comedy romp of the season and it’s great. Every Trek fan knows that The One With The Whales is the most financially successful Trek property ever made. And yet whenever a new Trek property is made, it’s always with the promise of more grimness, more darkness, more grit, more realism. Yet here we are, with the fun episode reminding you why you watch Star Trek in the first place, and making the characters fun people to hang out with. If the series could continue in that slightly slower, more relaxed groove, then Strange New Worlds could be brilliant.

I haven’t talked much about the production design or effects, both of which are great – this new Enterprise is gorgeous inside and out. Nor the series music, with Nami Melumad’s score being smart, subtle and lush in all of the right places. That’s a compliment not shared with Jeff Russo’s now standard fare, which neither matches the delicacy of a good prestige drama intro nor the soaring bombast associated with Star Trek. The best and worst thing I can say about the intro theme is that it sounds like it came from one of Interplay’s mid ‘90s CD-ROM games.

Fundamentally, I can only really damn Strange New Worlds with the faintest of praise – it can be fun, every now and again. I would imagine, and hope, that things will improve as time goes on, and the show’s makers won’t indulge their worst impulses. Given that I walked away from Picard after the end of its first dreary-as-hell run, the fact I’m at least prepared to stick around here speaks volumes.

The alt-history space race drama For All Mankind is headed to Mars for its third season. Apple unveiled a trailer today for the upcoming season, set to debut on June 10th. While the second season depicted a turf war on the moon between the US and the Soviets set in the eighties, the newest season fast-forwards to 1995. The US is vying to be the first country on Earth to colonize Mars.

Fans of the show can expect to see a mix of familiar faces and new ones. Last season's finale depicted the untimely demise of Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) and Tracy Stevens (Sarah Jones). Sonya Walger is returning as Molly Cobb, despite being exposed to (at least what seemed) like a fatal dose of radiation during her walk on the Moon. Returning cast members include Joel Kinnaman (Ed Baldin), Shantel VanSanten (Karen Baldwin), Jodi Balfour (Ellen Wilson) and Cynthy Wu (Kelly Baldwin). Also due back are Coral Peña as Aleida Rosales and Casey W. Johnson as Danny Stevens.

You can watch the new (albeit, frustratingly brief) teaser below.