www.ditl.org

Terry Matalas was hired as an executive producer to work on the final two seasons of Picard, which included being brought in early in the development of season 2, which was transitioning showrunners from Michael Chabon to Akiva Goldsman. Together, those three three executive producers, along with writer and co-creator Kirsten Beyer, worked out the initial outlines for season 2.

The executive producer offered some details on how the second season had to be rewritten based on feedback from Paramount+:

“We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in-Star Trek.’”

Matalas shared some details about that first version of the season and described why Paramount+ asked for a change:

“There were Romulans—there was a whole thing. The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.”