Robert Duncan McNeill is pitching Voyager spinoff Captain Proton to people.
Never doubt Robert Duncan McNeill and his love for all things Captain Proton. For those unfamiliar, Captain Proton was an in-universe holodeck program that McNeill’s character Tom Paris designed and wrote. It was often used for comedic purposes, with Paris and Harry Kim (played by Garrett Wang) using the program as a way to cool off. The holodeck program would sometimes open episodes of Voyager and would be a tongue-in-cheek gag on all serialized television shows like Flash Gordon. Other characters from Voyager would sometimes play roles in the program, oftentimes being over-the-top in their actions.
McNeill has long been a fan of the in-show series and has talked about how he wanted to bring it to CBS All-Access/Paramount+ before on his podcast, the Delta Flyers.
McNeill revealed on the Primitive Culture podcast that he’s pitched the Captain Proton series idea to Star Trek: Picard producers (via TrekMovies.com)
"I did pitch to them. I’ve had this idea for a number of years about doing a Captain Proton on the holodeck, only. Get our cast back together. Do like a serialized like the old Flash Gordon short little stories that add up to a bigger story. I thought about trying to produce it as a podcast during COVID. I thought that might be fun, do an old radio drama with Captain Proton, but get all of our actors back together. And I actually talked to [Alex] Kurtzman’s company and those guys about producing either a podcast version of Captain Proton or a web series or Short Treks kind of version with just Captain Proton…"
Captain Proton is the kind of stuff Short Treks should be about
A lot of people haven’t seen Short Treks, and there’s a reason for that. Small segments of content that often don’t get revisited aren’t exactly the ideal thing to market. Especially on a monthly subscription service. If they were free on YouTube from the jump, then maybe. So instead of trying to do Short Treks about Spock’s favorite type of cat (because you know that’s going to get made after the sing-a-long episode), why not do a Captain Proton type series?
It would be a serialized show, like the original Star Trek, so you wouldn’t need to watch the whole thing in order and if it’s done with an over-the-top amount of cheese and deliberate bad acting, then it could be really enjoyable.