Production on Star Trek: Picard Season 2 has been delayed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

"We were not shooting. We were to start shooting in June, which I guarantee you we will not unless the world opens tomorrow," executive producer Akiva Goldsman told Collider. "We had broken the season, we were about halfway through the writing of it. You know, we will start as soon as we can once the world opens, you know? Prep will have to resume, and then we’ll start. We know what it is, and it’s cool. And we’re excited by it, and I feel like we learned a lot from season one. It’s… of the things I have in my life it is the one that is most imminent when the world opens. It’s the one that feels like *that’s* the thing, at least in my life, that’s going to come back fastest."

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Despite this, Goldsman explained how the shutdown has been a blessing for the writers' room, saying, "it is fundamentally a gift to be able to do all of them [the episodes] if you can. Because unlike previous iterations of television, this serialized ten hour narrative has setups and payoffs that require a thoughtful view of the object once it is completed. It’s very funny, in the first season of Picard, there were all these reviews of the beginning, ‘Oh it’s so dark, it’s so dark, it’s so dark.’ And I kept saying, ‘They’re reviewing the first act of a movie.’ The first act of a movie is always dark. If you stopped It’s a Wonderful Life at the bridge, it’s a really dark movie!"

"Because fundamentally in a longform narrative, it’s a redemption story, it’s a healing story, it has to be bad at the beginning so it gets good at the end, otherwise there’s nothing to fix," he continued. "So we’re in this weird world now where we create one narrative object but we dole it out bit by bit, which is fascinating. And can be kind of fun. But what you really want is to be able to refine your setups once you’ve written your payoffs… if in fact you could have the time to write 10 hours first, that would be amazing. And maybe we will."

 

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Star Trek: Picard stars Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Evan Evagora, Isa Briones, Santiago Cabrera and Harry Treadaway. The first season is available on CBS All Access.