13 Star Trek Pitches Out There (And Where They're At)

4. A JANEWAY LIVE-ACTION SERIES?

Kate Mulgrew Janeway Star Trek
Getty Images / Arturo Holmes

Normally, we’d chalk this one up to simply happy actor talk — but this time, there’s more than a happy actor on one side of the conversation.

Back in late 2024, none other than Kate “Janeway” Mulgrew herself told interviewers more than once about “conversations” she’d had with none other than Alex Kurtzman as early as 2022. Or maybe it was more than that: “I'm not sure it has all the elements,” she told a Fan Expo audience, in public, as if there’d been work put into it. (and, weeks later, something about its “Wild West” vibe). Fast forward to earlier this year, and she has been quoted as saying “Alex and I are still talking.”  

Voicing Janeway for Prodigy was eye-opening for Mulgrew, and it's clear now she's embraced the idea of returning in live-action—but only if it was “something pretty great” and still brought the Star Trek mix of hope, promise, excitement, and danger. "And Janeway’s mind is the mind of somebody who can go anywhere at any moment, on a dime," she explains. :"I’d like to go back to that, but only if it’s excellent.”

On one hand, this is exactly how Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout team approached a skeptical Patrick Stewart about doing a live-action Picard series of some kind — and overcame his reservations after more than one pass at it. On the other hand, Secret Hideout's unclear contract renewal status by fall means any iteration of a Janeway series is just as uncertain.

Status: TALKING STAGE — AMONG CURRENT TALKERS FOR NOW

Contributor
Contributor

Back when nerds and geeks were just called "hobbyists," Larry's ninth-grade science teacher ended a bewildering conversations with him about Halkans by finally saying, "Oh Larry — don't tell me you don't know Star Trek!"— along with a commandment to go home and begins watching the daily after-school rerun. The rest is history — well, future history, anyway. Larry had always been a NASA kid and a history fan (not so much sci-fi), so Star Trek fit right in: for the phenomenon that was worldbuilding before the term was invented, Larry felt passion-called to take up "backgrounding" and gap-filling before the term "retcon" was invented. Star Trek is fun and inspiring, but it doesn't pay the bills —at least in those days— but after college and work in theatre and print news, Larry somehow managed to combine both fields with his non-fiction Trek fandom and created the monster that today is Dr. Trek. His self-published, pre-Internet star charts and TNG Concordance were precursors to the official Stellar Cartography map set and the bestseller TNG Companion, after a move to Hollywood /SoCal in the 1990s boom years. Add in a stint as managing editor of official ST Communicator magazine, the first editor and later content producer of the original startrek.com, and the franchise consultant for everything from the Star Trek World Tour to the storied Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. When Star Trek went wandering in the wilderness for the first time in 18 years amid the "Paramount divorce" of 2005-06, so did Larry — until, finally, the entrepreneur web world eventually found a path and a way to stay afloat. Since then, Larry's "Trekland" has come to mean more media projects and podcast/streaming alongside the old standbys like convention guest speaking and even text writing. Sure, there's The Trek Files for Roddenberry, his own Trekland Tuesdays Live, and Dr. Trek;s Second Opinion reaction shows — but that passion for spotlighting and archiving the creatives of Trek across all arenas and eras still drives him to pioneer experiences like the monthly backstage Portal 47 features, and the Trekland Treks day tours of Trek location sights. And now ... in-depth Dr. Trek turns for TrekCulture, too!