How Grey's Anatomy Influenced The Creation Of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

The new series "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" is half college drama, half starship adventure. Part of the series takes place on the Starfleet Academy campus, located in San Francisco, circa the year 3195. The other half takes place on the U.S.S. Athena, a starship that regularly takes students off-campus to give them on-site space training. The Athena portions of the show are kind of a no-brainer for a "Star Trek" series; one must have some trekking. And, thanks to 60 years of "Star Trek" shows before it, the starship scenes will be familiar to all Trekkies. The Athena has a captain, a first officer, a chief engineer, and a bridge crew steering it into colossal negative space wedgies. The drama that springs from serving on a starship is well-worn and familiar. 

The Earthbound Academy campus scenes, however, are going to be less familiar to Trekkies. Indeed, the makers of "Starfleet Academy," while developing the series, weren't really sure, at first, how they were going to write a sci-fi version of a college campus drama. Alex Kurtzman, the current head honcho of all things "Star Trek," recently spoke with Empire Magazine, and he seemed to want a TV series that contained a lot of action and danger. 

Kurtzman did not create "Starfleet Academy" — that was Gaia Violo — but he is one of the showrunners alongside Noga Landau, and he expressed a need to regularly put the show's main characters in peril. He wasn't sure how to do that, however, until he remembered the premise of the medical drama "Grey's Anatomy." If the med students in "Grey's Anatomy" are regularly thrust into life-or-death situations as part of their academic training, then surely the cadets at Starfleet Academy could go through something similar.

Alex Kurtzman is very fond of mayhem and violence. That would, at least, explain all the shootouts and murders in his "Star Trek: Discovery" (which some might say clash with "Star Trek" ideals). "Discovery" is, in many episodes, outright R-rated, and the main characters regularly commit murder, usually in shootout situations. Because "Starfleet Academy" takes place at a college, however, there weren't many organic opportunities for Kurtzman to feature shootouts or reasons for the protagonists to kill. 

Kurtzman said he unlocked the danger of "Starfleet Academy" when he put together that cadets can go into space and learn dangerous missions on-site. As he put it, "I think this was the thing that was challenging for people who had previously developed Starfleet Academy projects [...] because it was hard to imagine how cadets could be in danger if they were just in the classroom in San Francisco." He continued:

"Our idea was to say, 'What if you look at it like a teaching hospital?' With a ship that can base itself out of San Francisco, but then can travel into the stars and have the kids learn in the field? When they're teaching med students how to become doctors in 'Grey's Anatomy,' they're thrown into real-life or death situations, and that's how they learn. Once we applied that model to it, suddenly it opened up a whole new world." 

"Grey's Anatomy," of course, is the massively successful ABC medical drama that has, as of this writing, completed its first 22 seasons. "Grey's Anatomy" also has several spinoffs. It mostly follows medical interns and has an educational bent. If Kurtzman is going to crib structural ideas from another show, "Grey's Anatomy" is a smart one to eyeball.