Star Trek: Starfleet Academy writer Tawny Newsome explains how her time on Star Trek: Lower Decks helps the writers of Star Trek‘s next series balance the franchise’s “strange” tonal shifts. Newsome plays Lt. Beckett Mariner on Star Trek: Lower Decks, which enters its fifth and final season in fall 2024. However, Tawny is also a writer and self-proclaimed continuity cop on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which begins production in the fall with Academy Award winner Holly Hunter and Academy Award nominee Paul Giamatti cast in lead roles.

Screen Rant interviewed Tawny Newsome for the premiere of her comedy Nuked at Tribeca Film Festival. Newsome praised her role as Mariner on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and she details how Lower Decks proving Star Trek could successfully delve into the animated comedy genre helps her show her fellow writers of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy that Star Trek has a 60-year history of handling “the strangest tonal shifts” successfully. Read her quote below:

Playing Mariner has been the gift of my career. There’s no greater role than her ever, ever. She’s everything I want to be and more. So writing for Academy, it’s been interesting. Playing Mariner has given me, I was a lifelong Star Trek fan, but Lower Deck was Star Trek’s first foray into hard comedy. That’s such an honor to be the number one on the first time my beloved franchise is attempting comedy and the fact that it worked and they let us do it for five seasons and let us crossover into live action.

It was just such a proof of our showrunner, Mike McMahon’s, vision and tone. It’s also just such proof that Star Trek is the weirdest franchise on Earth and can truly handle the strangest tonal shifts. So that’s what I really bring to Starfleet Academy; I’m the one in the writer’s room banging the f-cking gong, being like, “Nope, Star Trek is strange.”

It does not matter that our last episode was all about the brutalities of war. The next episode definitely can be a madcap farce. We have 60-plus years of the franchise doing that, so deftly and crazily. That’s what our fans love and crave. I can point to examples of it. So whenever anyone in the room is like, ‘I think this is a little too out there or it’s a little too goofy,’ I just pull out my Rolodex of either Lower Deck episodes that did it weirder or Ferengi episodes from Deep Space Nine that did it wilder. And usually then people go, ‘Okay.’ They kind of can’t argue with the receipts of it.

Source: Screen Rant Plus

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  Cast

  Tawny Newsome
  , Jack Quaid
  , dawnn lewis
  , Noel Wells
  , Eugene Cordero
  , Gabrielle Ruiz
  , Fred Tatasciore
  , Jerry O’Connell

  Seasons

  5

  Streaming Service(s)

  Paramount+

  Franchise(s)

  Star Trek

  Writers

  Mike McMahan

  Showrunner

  Mike McMahan

  Where To Watch

  Paramount+

  Expand

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  Cast

  Holly Hunter
  , Paul Giamatti

  Seasons

  1

  Streaming Service(s)

  Paramount+

  Franchise(s)

  Star Trek

  Writers

  Gaia Violo
  , Tawny Newsome
  , Alex Kurtzman
  , Noga Landau

  Showrunner

  Alex Kurtzman
  , Noga Landau

  Where To Watch

  Paramount+

  Expand