Star Trek as ‘going to a national park’: Lower Decks’ creator reflects on the end of the show

Years ago, comedy writer Mike McMahan got the opportunity of a lifetime — an interview to join the writing staff of a new Star Trek series, the first in over a decade. McMahan was a massive Trekkie and had recently made a splash with a parody Twitter account called “TNG Season 8,” in which he summarized goofy, imaginary episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’d even sold the idea to Simon & Schuster and written an entire episode guide for the bogus season. Now, he was getting a chance to work on the real thing… and he turned it down.

McMahan had been working on a new animated series that had not yet premiered, but that he loved working on and didn’t want to walk away from. To hear McMahan tell it, the folks at Secret Hideout, Alex Kurtzman’s production company in charge of the new Trek spinoff, thought he was crazy.

The show McMahan was working on was Rick and Morty, which went on to be a massive pop culture sensation. More confident than ever in McMahan’s instincts, Secret Hideout reached out again in 2018, this time to ask him what he wanted to do. McMahan answered with a pitch for an animated sitcom based in the Star Trek universe, a truly wild swing for the typically reverent and cerebral sci-fi franchise. 

This gamble paid off, too, as his series Star Trek: Lower Decks has become an overwhelming fan favorite with an appeal that has reached beyond the Starfleet faithful. As the series comes to a close after five seasons, Polygon caught up with McMahan about how his wacky passion project made its mark on one of American pop culture’s most cherished legacies.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Polygon: I just saw on Bluesky someone surfaced the preface to your collection of Star Trek Season 8 posts where you said, “I’m never going to write for Star Trek.”

Mike McMahan: But even worse than that, I wrote those TNG Season 8 posts, and then I sold the idea to Simon & Schuster and wrote a fake guide to a fake season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And in the intro to that book, I talked about never having a Star Trek show, so this book is going to be it. And people bring it up and I’m just like, Man, 10-years-ago Mike, what were you doing?

No, I mean, it all worked out for you! It’s very aspirational, I’m sure, for a lot of fans thinking, This is something that can and has happened. Right?

Yeah. It was cool because when I was becoming a writer in TV and writing my own stuff all the time, I was watching Star Trek with my wife, being like, “Man, I wish Star Trek was still around,” because it was in the in-between phase. And I remember being like, “I’m just gonna write Star Trek whether somebody pays me to or not.” And, eventually people saw me doing that — especially Aaron Baiers, who became the head of Alex Kurtzman’s company. He and I were assistants back in the day, and he saw me doing that on my own volition. And then when I worked on Rick and Morty, it became like a natural sort of thing. So, if you’re a big fan of stuff, what I would say is: Keep loving that stuff, but also work on all sorts of other stuff you love, and then it might converge. That was the lucky part, was the convergence of it.

Sure. I mean, luck is usually something that only works in your favor if you’ve done a lot of hard work first, right?

Yes.

Did you ever write a Trek spec script, just like a proper a TNG script for fun?

I never did because I always wanted it to be funny. And like, TNG is funny, but I wanted it to be Lower Decks funny. So, I had written things that were kind of like, not really TNG, but were basically like The Orville kind of versions.

A thing that I appreciate about this whole new era of Star Trek is that each new series has pushed the boundaries of what Star Trek is, but in a different direction. In the early days, Discovery seemed to be aiming to be a Game of Thrones-y thing. And your project is almost in the exact opposite direction of that. 

So what I’d like to explore with you today is essentially the rules of the Lower Decks writers room, and how they evolved over five seasons. How did you come to define what this was both within and without the bounds of Star Trek?

So, season 1, I went into it day one having actually like a bible written up for the show’s style guide for the artists and the writers. I knew that the show had to feel like it took place seven years after Star Trek: Nemesis, that we had to fit into the timeline both technologically and with design and with all of the character attributes that that would come with. So that we recognize this as kind of like the last of the TNG-era shows. When it comes to the narratives that we’re telling, every episode right off the bat had to have a big Star Trek story happening to the ship and the bridge crew that was affecting our Lower Deckers, but that their main storyline was a social, emotional, comedic story pulled from experiences people had at work or dating or in life in their 20s and 30s. So we always had two stories happening at the same time — the big sci-fi story and the “getting to know who you are in life” story.

On top of that, the first season was all, Oh, I can’t believe I get to make a Star Trek. I’m going to play, I’m going to do the hits. We’re going to see a Klingon in the second episode. We’re going to have a trial episode. We’re going to have a big bad that has a metaphorical political social commentary at the end of the season. The first season it felt like we were Doing a Star Trek. And then the second season, we understood the characters better. We had spent a lot more time with the actors and finding stories with the characters. And that’s when we became “We’re doing a Lower Decks.”

That’s when we were like, We want to incrementally move these characters forward. When they learn stuff, we don’t want to have them unlearn it the next episode, like a classic sitcom. And the main goal the whole time was that the big surprise of this show should be that it’s funny, but it’s also thoughtful Star Trek and that there’s different ways to do that.

Like, I love the original animated series. I think it’s fascinating and I grew up watching it too, but I didn’t want Lower Decks to become that. I didn’t want Lower Decks to be an “asterisk” show, a show that, like, people probably had never heard of or didn’t care about. Our goal was, if you’re talking about your favorite Trek shows, you should at least admit that Lower Decks is one of the Trek shows. And I feel like we maybe overshot that a little bit, because a lot of people love Lower Decks.

I think that of the crop of new shows, Lower Decks is the predominant favorite.

Which is crazy! We must have lucked into that, because I think they did some amazing stuff on those other shows. And we’ve just been doing, you know, literally what we set out to do from day one. It feels very lucky that we got to do it, and that people respond to it feels lucky, too, because sometimes I feel like I’m making the show for me, whether or not other people are going to like it. So when they do, it’s a very nice surprise.

I’m curious, when you were working on that first season, what kind of conversations you were having with your fellow storytellers about the accessibility of the show versus We’re a bunch of fans and we want to see these things.

We weren’t worried about the accessibility because the only people who think Lower Decks isn’t accessible to outside viewers are people who know a lot of Star Trek. And people who don’t know a lot of Star Trek are just meeting aliens that are not too complex to figure out for the episode. Like, when you meet a Klingon, you know who they are in the first 30 seconds. In Lower Decks, you don’t need to know who Kahless is. If a Klingon is talking about Kahless on Lower Decks, the lines are designed for you to understand the meaning it has to them, even if you don’t know all the apocrypha, just like you can watch any episode of Star Trek and not have to have seen them all.

In Rick and Morty, we were creating pastiches of other sci-fi characters all the time that felt like it was world-building, but you didn’t have to know the backstory of the aliens they were meeting. That was the same way we were treating legacy species in Lower Decks. But luckily, with, say, the Cardassians, there are many episodes that define them for us. We just get to kind of give a slightly broader take on them. So for me, the stuff that a lot of people were railing on and worried about was not going to be a problem for me because all of the little legacy stuff, all of the design choices, the understanding that Mariner has seen the holologs of the things that we call episodes, that all of that stuff is to turn Star Trek into a world so that we can have comedy take place within it. It’s kind of like when I worked at Second City in Chicago, there were a lot of sketches where you kind of have to live in the city to get what they’re making fun of here, but they were doing it in a way that even if you’re in it from out of town, you’re still laughing in the scene. It just has a different kind of resonance for you. That is what the deep-cut stuff in Lower Decks usually plays as. Now, sometimes, just to be little stinkers, we’ll put in, like, an extremely deep cut that makes no fucking sense to you unless you’re way in.

Like the Spock helmet.

Yeah, the Spock helmet, or Mariner referencing Xon. That’s a character who never even ended up on screen. Those moments are for deep, deep fans. But in a way, I always talked about Lower Decks being sort of like a translator for all other Trek. Like, if you watch Lower Decks, you could go pop into any other Trek and you kind of get the gist because the Lower Deckers either encountered somebody or talked about it or we did an episode that sort of honored it. You know, you could pop into Voyager, you could pop into Enterprise or TOS. I mean, our characters literally popped into Strange New Worlds. Like, they should feel kind of like an “Every-Trek,” in a way.

And I think that as a fan, you always worry — especially as a Star Trek fan — that somebody using the things you liked from before are gonna ruin them, or they’re gonna be the wrong version of them, or they’re gonna lessen the thing you liked about it. But we always talk about Star Trek as being like going to a national park. Like, when we’re writing and designing stuff, you have to enjoy it, to enjoy being there, but don’t change it so that the next person can’t enjoy what you liked about it.

Right. You always want to be additive to what you’re working on.

Yeah, additive and celebrating it. And originally, there wasn’t even a big drive to have legacy actors reprise their roles on the show. But, I had met Jonathan Frakes when I was shooting a Short Trek that I wrote, and he was directing an episode of Discovery. And I showed him the pitch that we were about to take out for Lower Decks, and he was cracking up and he made me promise him that we would have Riker show up in it. And that’s why Riker shows up at the finale of the first season, because I was like, Oh man, I promised Frakes we would do this, and we better get Marina [Sirtis] in there. And then, you know, we had Q show up for a quick bit. But that created the feeling of, like, Oh, I guess part of this show is having these characters come back. How are we going to do that? We’ve got to keep them funny. We’ve got to honor what they set up before. And everything on Lower Decks is really hard to write because it’s got to be funny, but also deeply thoughtful.

So it sounds like you didn’t have to have anybody in the writers room who was just like a casual Star Trek fan who could be your test audience, like you could kind of just trust that it was going to work.

You know, it was a mix. In the first season, it was me, Ben Rodgers, Brad Winters, David Wright, M. Willis. Like, the writers room was a mix of comedy writers, animation writers, and deep, deep Star Trek fans, but not somebody who had worked on Star Trek before. Brad Winters, my producer, has a brain that is so deep in Trek. Like, we can have a conversation when we have an episode written where he’ll be like, “You have the characters doing this here, but there’s an episode in the middle of Voyager that says this can’t happen. So let’s talk about why you wanted to do it and how we can fit it in.” 

So everything is always, when it comes to the Trek lore, guiding us to what we wanted to do, and then sometimes we just have to adjust. We also have Dr. Erin [Macdonald], who is our science advisor, and she’ll get every script, because part of what feels right about Star Trek is that the science actually makes sense, even if we’re doing something silly. She does a pass on every script to make sure that I’m not making stuff up that’s crazy. And then we have the Star Trek franchise team, like John Van Citters and Marian Cordry and Dayton Ward. Not only have they worked on so many episodes of Trek, but also on all of the side stuff, the comics and the books and everything. I’ll have them look at everything and make sure that it passes the sniff test with them too. So, like, we would have a lot of Star Trek fans, you know, watching the stuff and like, the reviews we always got were, “Oh, yeah, a new Lower Decks episode just came in!” You know what I mean? It felt like we were doing something right.

Like in almost any show, but especially in comedy, there’s usually a period early on where the writers and the actors are all kind of figuring out the characters together. Like how it takes a season and a half for TNG to really find Will Riker as he gradually becomes more like Frakes. And I’m curious how the animation workflow affects something like this, going back and forth between writer, actor, and animator. It really does feel when you see interviews with Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid and Noël Wells and Eugene Cordero, that there’s so much of them in these characters.

Yeah.

Do you feel like you can pinpoint a moment where you all found your stride, and how did it come about?

It kind of came about naturally. It was, you know, I had done a lot of direct, like, voice directing on Rick and Morty and on Solar Opposites. So, when we started recording Lower Decks, I just kind of put them through hell at first. Like, I would have Tawny do, like, 25 takes of each line, and then we found those characters together. And, over time, Brad, my producer, also was able to start voice directing the show primarily because over time, we all started to understand the characters together. Not only from watching the show together and performing the show together, but Tawny and Eugene were going to conventions and having really interesting conversations with fans of the show and with actors on other Star Trek shows.

Like, at first there were no wrong answers. And then over time, as you start to learn the characters, it’s like, “Oh, Rutherford wouldn’t say that. What’s a Rutherford way to say that?” And you don’t have that at first because you don’t know Rutherford. But I think it just speaks to the patience and the talent of the cast. We really lucked out in some respects in casting, that we made some right choices right off the bat. Jack Quaid didn’t know anything about Star Trek coming in, but he’s an amazing actor and he’s super funny. And he wanted to know about Star Trek. He wanted to know what it means to be in love with Starfleet. Every actor had that desire. There wasn’t really any one miracle moment. It was just really loving to work with this cast, really believing in the scripts and the cast thinking they’re funny too. Nobody was at odds with each other and there was tons of communication. Anybody on the cast could call and ask questions beforehand or when we’re there, and we were never trying to force them into something. We were trying to find the best version all together from the very first episode.

Well, now you’ve got sort of a legacy being built out of that experience. Tawny’s in the writers room for one Star Trek show and apparently developing another one, which I’m sure you can’t tell me anything about.

I can’t, but Tawny’s a genius and everybody she’s working with seems amazing. Like, everybody on the show feels like a mega star I got before the rest of everybody else found out. You know what I mean? So, yeah, I would think Tawny can do literally anything that she wants to do in this world.

And on top of that, just wrapping up here, can you tell me anything about Starbase 80?

Starbase 80 smells really weird; its systems are very old. It’s like a mix of Enterprise, TOS, lots of stuff.

Are we going to be going there again?

I would love to go there again. There are no plans to go there again. I pitched a Starbase 80 spinoff to CBS like, three years ago, which is where a lot of this came from. I would love to go back to Starbase 80, but right now there are no plans to do it.