Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Showrunner Wishes He Could Change One Thing About The Show

There's nothing on TV right now quite like "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds." Serving as a prequel to the original "Star Trek" TV series, "Strange New Worlds" is a throwback to an earlier era of television in the 1960s — a time where tech optimism was still reasonable and space held infinite possibilities rather than being filled with junk satellites and billionaires trying to escape their earthly problems.

"Strange New Worlds" is indeed built around evoking these nostalgic memories and channeling them into something new and exciting. Its title sequence is reminiscent of the original "Star Trek" series, the costumes are full of details that eagle-eyed Trekkies will recognize, and the show's state of the art visual effects are beyond anything that was possible in the '60s. The result is a series that is both a smash hit, with a 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a much anticipated season 3 on the horizon, and a show that stays true to what made the original "Star Trek" series so beloved. Trekkies both old and young love the show, and it's something "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry himself would be proud of.

But as much as the show is a throwback to the original series, there is one area in which "Strange New Worlds" is frustratingly modern — at least according to showrunner Akiva Goldsman — and that is the number of episodes it gets for each season.

Back in the day, TV shows like "Star Trek" would make 24 episodes each season like clockwork and were constantly churning out new stories and adventures. Of course, this model has both its pros and cons. After all, it wasn't always easy to create that many stories every season, which meant that the original "Star Trek" series had more than a few stinkers to go along with its strongest outings (the highest-rated "Star Trek" episode on IMDb among them).

Now, in the streaming age, we're lucky if we get 10 episodes of a show every year. Speaking with SFX Magazine (via ScreenRant), "Strange New Worlds" showrunner Akiva Goldsman admitted he wishes he and his fellow writers could have twice as many episodes to tell the stories they've ended up generating for the series:

"Honestly, 'Strange New Worlds' is the only show I've ever been on where I've yearned for double the episodes. When you're in the writers' room breaking the season, we have 10 more good ones. We discard 10 that are as good as the 10 we keep because we just don't have the space for it. You sort of wish it was back to the old 24-episodes-a-season with this show, because there's so much you can do."

Elsewhere in the interview, Goldsman explained that the 10 episodes that comprise season 3 are ideas the show's writers had originally wanted to explore in season 2 but couldn't due to the short episode order. Let's pray that Paramount+ decides to go all the way with this throwback series and give us a 1960s-sized episode order for "Strange New Worlds" one day.

All episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" are streaming on Paramount+.