Blueshirts: A Star Trek police procedural

Welcome to the fifth part of The Search For Story, a series of articles where we’ll take a character, group, species, timeline, or event and look at what that might look like as a standalone series, miniseries or movie.

In this series we’ve gone from comedy to spy thriller to political drama, this time we’ll be looking at one of the most popular trends in television, the police procedural. With CSI, NCIS, Blue Bloods, and a seemingly Limitless list of other such shows under their belts CBS would certainly be game to bring such a show to the air and with all of the shows of this type currently ruling the television landscape I think it would also be fair to say we might just have an audience for it.

Title: Blueshirts
Inspiration: CSI, Holodeck Moriarty
Setting: 24th Century, Alpha Quadrant

I began looking at this idea to both celebrate the 30th anniversary of Elementary, Dear Data and as a vehicle to return Brent Spiner as Sherlock Holes and Levar Burton as Dr. Watson to the Star Trek fold in the same way as Patrick Stewart will be returning as Captain Picard in late 2019, however it didn’t take long to realize that while this would be a killer special or very limited run series as BBC’s own Sherlock series is it may not quite hit the demographic numbers of a CSI.

There was also the issue of a low stakes game when all of their cases take place on the holodeck, after all they can’t exactly create another Professor Moriarty and make him sentient right?  But none the less a holodeck must be a great tool for crime scene re-enactments!

Enter the Blueshirts…

For this series we’re going to stick to the 24th Century, let’s call it right in the middle of the Next Generation timeline, our team is stationed on Earth and consists of an outstanding forensic expert with a chip on his shoulder, a rookie doctor fresh out of the academy for the viewers to get their information through, a security officer who will help keep them safe and liaise with local authorities and of course their tough as nails boss back at headquarters, who I kind of like to picture as Doctor Katherine Pulaski, even though it seems unlikely they would be getting orders from an 80 year old surgeon.

There would of course be the crime of the week, a murder at a local creole restaurant, a body found in a bulkhead during a refit at Utopia Planitia, perhaps even a strange case involving a video game that primes everyone in the surrounding departments for some sort of external takeover, the tie ins are infinite and that’s just for starters.

Theres also potential for crossover with the guys from the Starfleet Archives crew as they try to solve an historic case, or recreate a historic event that may have involved a previously unknown or hidden assassination.

As with most of the great cop shows we need a McGuffin to keep the character development moving forward, yes a few years in it could easily be the mysterious events surrounding the Founders infiltration of Earth, but what about in the beginning?

We know that almost every Admiral is dangerous, corrupt, on a witch hunt, or stashing bodies in photon torpedoes while secretly building insanely massive warships, so that’s one possibility. Perhaps there is an early connection to Section 31 as one of their operatives comes under suspicion for a series of crimes and slowly goes from mysterious villain to unlikely or even unwilling ally before ultimately ending up as one of their victims.

There are certainly a lot of avenues to explore as this series and it’s potential spin-off’s, (BlueShirts: Beta Quadrant, Blueshirts: Delta Quadrant and Blueshirts: Gamma) might just dominate all of television for decades to come.

Would you be interested in this series? What would you do differently?

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