Last month’s Emmy nominations shined a spotlight on Star Trek: Short Treks, the short-form mini-episodes of Trek canon that have touched on various corners of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard over the last two years.

While it’s unclear if there’s any official plans to continue with the series quite yet, Star Trek franchise boss Alex Kurtzman is hopeful that the award nomination for ‘Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series’ will help spur on another wave of Short Treks in the future.

In a new interview with award-buzz blog Gold Derby, Kurtzman shared his thoughts on the future of Short Treks, including a few ideas for what kind of formats he’d like to see:

It was an amazing experiment, the Short Treks, because I think I love was the idea of using them to experiment with different tones and different styles and push at the boundaries of what ‘Star Trek’ feels like it can be.

[…]

Thanks to the Emmy nomination, I’m really hoping [there will be more]… There are so many different forms that the shorts can take. I’d love to do a musical, for example, I’d love to do one in black-and-white, and figure out what that means.

I could probably think of fifty different ways that we could tell stories, in fifty different little crevices of the ‘Star Trek’ universe to explore, that may not be the right kind of crevices for the larger shows, but we always think of the ‘Short Treks’ as scenes just as important as what’s going on in the main shows — but that you wouldn’t have time [to include].

He also spoke for a moment about how the various Star Trek Universe writers rooms are making progress on future seasons of the shows during pandemic life, including mentions of Discovery — hinting that, despite what some corners of the Internet may tell you, Season 4 is on the way, though no official CBS announcement has yet been made — as well as Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, and initial seasons of both the Captain Pike-centric Strange New Worlds and the Michelle Yeoh-starring series Section 31.

We’ve been running all of our writers’ rooms on Zoom. The silver lining is that we’ve been actually been able to get quite ahead [on] scripts for upcoming seasons of ‘Discovery,’ and ‘Picard,’ and ‘Strange New Worlds’ — which is going to be shooting next year — and ‘Section 31.’

It was fairly obvious that Star Trek: Discovery was set to follow Picard in the 2020 television line-up — thanks to promotion beginning nearly a year ago — and here Kurtzman confirms that it was planned for a spring debut before the pandemic impacted all areas of post-production.

The thing that we’re very lucky about is that we wrapped ‘Discovery’ [Season 3] ten days before the lockdown happened, so the challenge that it posed is that is slowed [post-production] down quite a bit; it slowed visual effects; it slowed editing. I’m now editing with our editors, and we’re both on our laptops.

Obviously, the visual effects companies took a very hard hit, and it took them a minute to get back on their feet after everything that happened. And when it comes to recording music, you can’t have musicians in an orchestra in one room any more, so each musician is individually recording their instruments and sending it to Jeff Russo – our composer – and Jeff has to mix them together as if they were all sitting together in a room.

So all of that takes a lot longer. That being said, everybody’s been heroic about it, and I think it’s given everybody a real purpose: we get to keep working, we get to keep occupying ourselves during this really difficult and challenging time — and we are planning to go back into production.

A lot of time has been taken, coming up with a big plan for how the sets and the stages are going to be run — that’s still being iterated right now — obviously, safety being everyone’s number one concern. Everybody’s working on that really diligently, because everybody wants to go back to work, and nobody wants to do it in a way that’s unsafe.

The good news for the animated shows is that those shows have been barreling full steam ahead, both ‘Lower Decks’ and ‘Star Trek: Prodigy.’ The animators are obviously working from home, the writers have just finished Season 2 of both shows….

We will be airing ‘Discovery’ after ‘Lower Decks.’ We’re done editing — we’re still doing work on the mixes and visual effects — but it’ll all be coming out soon, and I can’t wait for people to see it. I’m just so sad people couldn’t see it in the spring when it was supposed to originally come out — but that’s what COVID did to us.

Star Trek: Lower Decks continues weekly through October; Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 debuts on October 15. Air dates for Picard Season 2, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, and Section 31 have not yet been announced.