‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Creator Mike McMahan Is Making a Star Trek Show, First

On May 18, Star Trek: Lower Decks will boldly go where no modern, animated Star Trek series has gone before: to Blu-Ray and DVD.

Originally streaming on CBS All Access, and now Paramount+, the satirical take on the Star Trek universe was created by writer Mike McMahan, who is probably best known for his work on Rick and Morty, as well as co-creating Hulu’s Solar Opposites. So it was reasonable to think that the 10-episode first season would be raunchy comedy in the vein of those other two series. Instead, McMahan created an animated series that was Star Trek first; and comedy, second.

“I’m never going to be one to write a drama,” McMahan told Decider. “I’m always going to be writing comedies. So how can I tell the most Star Trek comedy I can, and finding that balance all the time is what makes this show feel different to me, and feel like such a joy.”

If you don’t have Paramount+, this physical release is probably the first time you’ll be encountering the adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos. Instead of focusing on the main deck crew — though they do appear — the series stars a cadre of ensigns who do the grunt work, while everyone else is off on adventures. That includes the by-the-books Boimler (Jack Quaid), the very much not by-the-books Mariner (Tawny Newsome), a medical ensign named Tendi (Noël Wells) who has a habit of going a little wild with genetics, and serious starship nerd Rutherford (Eugene Cordero).

But just because you’ll be following entirely new characters, and a relatively new mission (the Cerritos is tasked with “Second Contact,” essentially following up on the business details after a ship like the Enterprise makes First Contact), doesn’t mean this isn’t the Star Trek you know and love. In fact, the series is chock full of nods to the rest of the universe. And as you can see in an exclusive featurette from the Blu-Ray/DVD below, some extremely deep cut Easter eggs.

In advance of the release of the Star Trek: Lower Decks: Season One Blu-ray, DVD and Steelbook from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment, we talked to McMahan about developing the show, how the Easter eggs aren’t really Easter eggs, and a little bit about what to expect in Lower Decks Seasons 2 and 3.

Decider: Looking back at season one, despite repeatedly telling people, “this show is not Rick and Morty in space,” a lot of viewers certainly went in thinking “it’s Rick and Morty in space,” which clearly it’s not. So what led to the decision to say “no, this is not going to be Rick and Morty in space?”

Mike McMahan: Oh, well, that’s easy. I mean, I love Rick and Morty. I loved working on Rick and Morty, but there’s no part of me that wants to try to be Rick and Morty without Dan [Harmon] and Justin [Roiland]… You don’t leave a show to go make a new one and be like, “let’s just do that one again.” I think that in the defense of everybody who is saying that, I have a certain comfort level of style of animation that I like to tell stories in. I started my career at Drawn Together, I worked at South Park, I worked at Fox Animation across all the shows as an assistant to the head of animation for three years, ended up working at Rick and Morty and worked there for a while, and it’s really that look and style of show. You see Solar Opposites. You see Star Trek: Lower Decks. When you condense those down to an ad, it’s hard to not see those big, expressive eyes, those things that to a lot of people say Rick and Morty, but to me says adult, primetime animation. It says Futurama, King of the Hill, Simpsons. Family Guy. All these different shows. It says, that’s a style that I think is fun to surprise people with a serious story and comedy.

My whole thing was, “holy shit, I get to make a Star Trek.” I love Star Trek. I’m never going to be one to write a drama. I’m always going to be writing comedies. So how can I tell the most Star Trek comedy I can, and finding that balance all the time is what makes this show feel different to me, and feel like such a joy. The rules that make it Star Trek are to the benefit of this show. That’s why this is a fun show. It’s the only writers room where I get to be like, when we’re talking about pitches, I get to say, “that’s just not Star Trek. Funny pitch. That’s a great idea. But how can we make it feel like it fits into this genre that Star Trek has become?”

Definitely one of the more surprising aspects when you’re watching the show is, like you’re saying, it’s a Star Trek show first, and then a comedy show is layered on top of that. How do you strike that balance? How do you make sure that you don’t go too far, comedically?

I mean, it’s a constant dance. From design, we were literally taking design cues from Star Trek… In animation, we can put the camera wherever we want, but a lot of the times we’d be like, “that wouldn’t feel Star Trek,” we have to almost mimic the physical design of Star Trek that people know and then push the boundaries when it comes to character and comedy.

The very first thing, when I first pitched the show to [Alex] Kurtzman was, “what is a funny Starfleet officer?” You can’t have a Mortian Starfleet, everybody has to be capable. You can’t have a Jerry. The worst Starfleet officer has to be better than the best of us, and where I always came down on was that there are ways to be comedic, there’s ways to have comedic flaws and still feel Starfleet.

You’ve seen it in characters across all the series, like Worf is a great example of it… Star Trek is about human beings, and human characters are characters with emotions, exploring themselves as well as space. That’s what comedy is about, too. So it’s just making sure to find that balance at all times, and make sure to express it on screen. When you’re expecting Star Trek, we give you comedy. When you’re expecting comedy, we give you pathos… Just trying at all times to be aware that our job is to be Star Trek and funny the entire time, not to get lazy on either half.

At the beginning the four main characters, with the exception of Mariner, are all excited nerds. They’re very into the ship, they know a ton of information. One of the joys of the season is seeing them branch off and find their own bits… When you look at the characters where they started, and when you’re setting them up, and where they end at the end of season one, what was important in terms of their growth and change?

The more you work with our voice actors, who are so great, and they bring so much life, you’re learning about the characters and the stories you’re telling. For instance, Rutherford, when we were first breaking the first season, Rutherford wasn’t Rutherford; he was gonna be our look into, what is social life like on a Starfleet ship? He was going to be our Seinfeld, going on dates, navigating social issues. Then in writing the pilot, I kept being like, “man, this doesn’t feel like Starfleet.”

When we figured out that, Rutherford and Tendi fall into friendship love in the first episode, because they both love the ship, and they both love their craft… That felt Starfleet. That really changed what I saw about that character. We’ve written season two, we’re into color, it’s coming out in August. Where we go with all of our characters is really interesting to me it, it really leans into “Who am I in Starfleet? I’m an ensign. But where am I going to end up?”

And how do you get there? What mistakes do you make and what victories you have? All four of our leads, we’re writing season three right now and exploring who they are and how they’re becoming the people they are, is really the most exciting thing about this show because it’s one of the few things we haven’t seen in Star Trek. Starting from one of the lower levels. I know, ensign isn’t the lowest. It’s not the last one… But truly focusing on four different people with four different paths… I know where I want them to end up. Let’s watch together how they get there. It’s really fun to watch happen.

I do want to ask you about this DVD clip that we have [NOTE: watch it below!]. It’s talking about the Easter eggs, and particularly a notable rock formation from the real world that shows up in a bunch of different places. Why was it important to include that? And just generally speaking, when it comes to Easter eggs, where’s the line there? I mean, I know everybody is a Star Trek nerd, but do you have to stop yourself with Easter eggs at a certain point?

Yeah, it’s so funny. We never really refer to them as Easter eggs. For us, because we’re telling new stories, new characters in half the amount of time of a classic Star Trek episode and with comedic timing, it’s going to be fast, it’s going to be funny, there’s going to be moments you’ve never seen before in Star Trek, because we’re asking the audience to be okay with that. Be okay with it looking like it fits into a Sunday night animation block. Be okay with there being a new set of crew that you’ve never heard of before, on a new design ship. We’re asking for all this stuff at all times. So it’s incumbent on us to also allow the audience to have enough familiar stuff, and to build out the world so that it really feels like we’re in the world that the other shows have created.

We knew that there were going to be some people who were like, “Oh, yeah, look, that’s from this, and this is from that.” But we’re not really putting it in there as a Waldo hunt. Occasionally, we’re goofing around, and we’ll be like, “hey, in the background of this shop, let’s make sure to put this specific thing from this specific episode.” But for the most part, the edict on the show is, let the world be as familiar as we can be. Let’s reuse, like how Star Trek live action shows would reuse props, reuse sets. How much of the world can feel not comedic, how much of the world can feel like the familiar. Then the characters can be funny and the stories can be funny, and it can be fast and animated.

So the line is really, we don’t want to put something in there and have it just be like, “why would that be there?” It has to make sense diegetically, it has to make sense in the world. So that part of your brain can be like, “yeah, we’re watching Star Trek right now. Then the characters can surprise you, and they can bristle, and they can bend.

When Picard came out, they had that Museum of Captain Picard stuff that you could walk through at San Diego Comic-Con and at the Vegas Star Trek convention. You never want it to feel like you’re going through a museum of stuff that’s just been curated, and collected and mashed together. There’s going to be Klingon stuff. We’re talking a lot about Klingons. We’re making sure that the language translates, we’re making sure that the weapons are the right size, and that they feel like the right weight and that they look right. But then we’re not going to throw those into every scene. We literally get down to, if [Starfleet is] shooting their disruptors, versus a Klingon shooting his, what are the different colors of beams? What do those look like? That’s the ticket price to get to tell stories in Star Trek. Unlike any Star Trek before, all 700 something episodes of Star Trek are stuff that we get to utilize for our show, as opposed to fight and have to dance around.

Before I let you go, you have this amazing voice cast, incredibly experienced, awesome actors. When are we going to see a live action version of Lower Decks?

Oh my god, CBS pick it up immediately. I would love it, they’re so funny. Watch everything that our leads are in because they bring it, they’re great at live action, great at voice acting. I got to do one live action Star Trek: Short Trek before I made Lower Decks and that was such a blast, actually getting to be there. I think that really helped me understand what I needed to define visually about Lower Decks.

But what I do miss is, with all these actors — we record them individually — getting them all together on a set and letting them be funny there. These guys are hilarious. Definitely watch Space Force for Tawny. I don’t know if a lot of people have seen it, but Other Space. Eugene is hilarious in it. All of these folks I would love… Just everybody tell CBS, let’s get these guys going live action, and I’ll be there. I’d love to do that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stream��Star Trek: Lower Decks on Paramount+