Starfleet Academy is here! The latest entry in the Star Trek franchise premiered on Paramount+ this week, and in the capable hands of executive producers and co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau, it’s everything fans have been waiting for. Set in Discovery’s far future timeline, the show focuses on the first class of cadets to attend Starfleet Academy since the collapse of the Federation more than 100 years ago.

Kurtzman is a franchise veteran with four previous Star Trek series under his belt (Discovery, Short Treks, Picard, Strange New Worlds). Landau, on the other hand, is new to Star Trek but she’s not afraid to take on a beloved iconic property - in the last few years Landau created both Nancy Drew and Tom Swift for the small screen.

SciFi Vision caught up with Kurtzman and Landau ahead of the premiere. The pair described how their working relationship combines deep trust and creative debate to “make the diamond.” Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streams on Thursdays exclusively on Paramount+.

Watch the interview and read the transcript below.



SCIFI VISION:   We only have a couple minutes together, so I'm going to jump right in. Alex, you are a veteran now of Star Trek, and I think really a household name to genre television fans. Noga, you're newer to Star Trek, but you certainly bring chops in developing iconic, really venerable franchises, like Nancy Drew for television.

I'm interested in how you bring your wonder-twin powers together to make this ship fly. Maybe Noga could go first.

NOGA LANDAU:   Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, I had been wanting - I was so excited to work with Alex when we embarked on this wonderful voyage together, and I think that as soon as we met and as soon as we started talking about story, we both wanted to tell the same story, and we both are moved by the same things about the universe and about these characters.

I have so much respect for Alex and what he's done and what he's accomplished. And we said this thing to each other all throughout the first season, which is like, “pressure makes the diamond.” And it's an amazing saying, because I feel like we learned how to perfectly push on one side and push on the other.

And then slowly, I love that Alex is willing to debate me on ideas and stories, and the debate and the love and the care is what makes the diamond.

ALEX KURTZMAN:   There's a huge amount of trust between us, and it happened instantaneously. We have so much fun together all day long. It starts with a lot of dog memes and then a lot of pictures of our kids that go back and forth, and then we laugh a lot. Then, we sort of dissect, what are we trying to say? What is this episode about? What's the emotional perspective of it? Who do we foreground as a character? And those conversations happen at a deep level when you really understand that the boss is the right idea, and then, you divorce your ego from it. It's just like, what feels like the right idea? And I think we're both very unprecious about that.