CBS CEO gives typical corporate response to future of Star Trek franchise

Corporate double-speak is a scourge. It's something that a lot of actors, writers, directors, producers, and even CEOs engage in to hide just how bad things are going. It's used by the entertainment industry a lot, to the point that it's hard to tell if they, or politicians, really made it common. Now, everyone uses vague language when interviewed to avoid actually telling the truth.

Sports stars, celebrities, musicians, and television executives; practically if there's a situation that requires more information, people are going to either revert to double-speak or intentionally vague responses in order to get away from causing a media frenzy.

So color us surprised when we read the recent comments from CBS CEO George Cheeks and saw that he was going full bore into the vague politically correct response, peppered in with some obvious double-speak when asked about the future of Star Trek and namely the Legacy television series.

Cheeks was interviewed by Vulture's Josef Adalian and when the topic of the future of Star Trek on Paramount+ came up, namely the brands' decision to scale back production on shows, as well as the future of Legacy, Cheeks went straight to his non-answer-answer playbook, saying;

"Star Trek remains one of the most important franchises for Paramount Global, and Paramount+ specifically. There’s so much great opportunity with the franchise, and it’s really about the cadence and the timeline of it. We don’t want to offer up all these amazing premium drama series at once. We want to time it out appropriately. Luckily, we have this incredible partner in Alex Kurtzman, and we all work together to sort of manage long-range planning across many years, to figure out what’s the right cadence for dropping new Star Trek series. So there’s a lot we’re focused on, but it should not suggest to you [a scaling back]. There is a tremendous amount of focus and prioritizing of the Star Trek franchise."

It'd be easy to take his words at face value until you realize that at one point, Star Trek had five shows in active development on Paramount+. Now they have two. Since its apex on the streaming giant, Picard and Discovery were canceled, and ended, while Prodigy was canceled and subsequently sold off to a new service (Netflix). That means only Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds are in active development and it's very likely Lower Decks is the next one to get the axe, and probably soon.

Yes, Star Trek is working on the Starfleet series, but that isn't due out for maybe a whole two years, and we have no idea when the made-for-streaming movie, Section 31, will actually land on the service. It should be noted that the Section 31 project was originally a series. Rumors and theories suggest that a reduction in budgets for Star Trek led to the change.

Clearly, things are being scaled back. We can see it with our own two eyes, and what's even more worrying for fans who want to see Legacy, is that Cheeks never mentioned the show once by name in that quote, nor alluded to a time-frame when people may begin to expect to see it.