Development In June 2018, after becoming sole
showrunner of the series
Star Trek: Discovery,
Alex Kurtzman signed a five-year overall deal with
CBS Television Studios to expand the
Star Trek franchise beyond
Discovery to several new series, miniseries, and animated series. Aaron Baiers of Kurtzman's production company
Secret Hideout brought
Mike McMahan—the head writer of popular animated comedy
Rick and Morty—to a general meeting about animation in
Star Trek. Baiers and McMahan had been television assistants together when McMahan was running the
Twitter fan account @TNG_S8, suggesting stories for a theoretical eighth season of
Star Trek: The Next Generation. McMahan was asked what his dream
Star Trek series would be, and
pitched a series following "the people who put the yellow cartridge in the food replicator so a banana can come out the other end". promoting
Lower Decks at the 2019
San Diego Comic-Con with executive producers
Heather Kadin and
Alex Kurtzman After McMahan won over executives with his initial pitch, Secret Hideout moved forward with the series. It was marketed to different platforms and networks before being picked up by
CBS All Access, the streaming service that was releasing
Discovery, who officially ordered two seasons on October 25, 2018. Titled
Star Trek: Lower Decks, it was the service's first original animated series and the first animated
Star Trek series since the 1973–74 series
Star Trek: The Animated Series. McMahan was set to create, write, and executive produce alongside Kurtzman, Secret Hideout's Heather Kadin,
Rod Roddenberry (the son of
Star Trek creator
Gene Roddenberry) and Trevor Roth of
Roddenberry Entertainment, and veteran animation executive-turned-producer Katie Krentz of the newly formed
CBS Eye Animation Productions. In January 2019, Kurtzman said the series would not be "
Rick and Morty in the world of
Star Trek" and would have its own tone, but would "skew slightly more adult". In July, McMahan said the
first season consisted of 10 episodes and would be released in 2020. By late March 2020, work on the series was taking place remotely due to the
COVID-19 pandemic forcing staff to work from home. In May, McMahan said animation was "uniquely suited for this moment" since the series' animators could continue work on the series from home. In July, All Access scheduled the series to premiere in August 2020. The streaming service was rebranded
Paramount+ in 2021. A
third season was ordered in April ahead of the
second-season premiere that August. The third season was confirmed for a late-2022 release when a
fourth season was ordered in January 2022, and the fourth season was confirmed for a mid-2023 release when a
fifth season was ordered in March 2023. That October, McMahan said he wanted to keep making the series but further seasons beyond the fifth were not guaranteed, particularly after Paramount+ cancelled fellow animated series
Star Trek: Prodigy and confirmed the final seasons of
Discovery and
Star Trek: Picard. He was open to continuing the series in other media, including films, comics, books, and video games. In April 2024, Paramount confirmed that the fifth season would be the last for the series. McMahan and Kurtzman expressed their hope that the characters' stories would continue beyond the end of the series.
Writing The series begins in 2380, one year after the events of the film
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), and focuses on the support crew of a starship rather than the main bridge crew like previous
Star Trek series did. McMahan set the series shortly after
Nemesis, which was the last
Star Trek film in the era of
The Next Generation, due to his love of
The Next Generation. The series is named after the
Next Generation episode "
Lower Decks", which also focuses on the lives of lower-ranking starship personnel and which McMahan said was his favorite episode of any
Star Trek series; the episode was the first thing McMahan showed the
Lower Decks writers' room when they started work on the series. McMahan was inspired by the social side-stories in episodes of
The Next Generation, and Kurtzman explained that the "A story" of a typical
Star Trek episode would be taking place in the background of each
Lower Decks episode, so "huge, crazy, crazy shit is going on in the background and that's super peripheral to the story that you're actually focusing on". Kurtzman felt this made the series a unique addition to the franchise. Starting in late 2019, astrophysicist
Erin Macdonald joined the
Star Trek franchise as a science advisor. Macdonald said each series was on a "spectrum of science to fiction" and the
Lower Decks writers approached science from the perspective of being able to "get away with a lot more" than the live-action series, so her role was mostly to fix dialogue to ensure the correct terms were used rather than strive for complete scientific accuracy. The main setting of the series is the starship USS
Cerritos, a "California-class" ship. This
ship class, created for
Lower Decks, is a class of support starships that work with larger starships like those seen previously in the franchise, but are not "important enough" to have appeared on screen before. McMahan described the mission of the
Cerritos as "Second Contact": after Starfleet has made
first contact with a new alien civilization and invited it to join the Federation, the crew of support ships like the
Cerritos arrive to find "all the good places to eat [and set up] the communications stuff". McMahan wanted California-class ships to be named after Californian cities, and chose the city of
Cerritos because he otherwise only knew it for local
Cerritos Auto Square car dealership advertisements. He wanted to give the city "one more thing other than just being the home of the Auto Square". McMahan did not want the humor to be "punching down on
Trek" and focused on telling
Star Trek stories where the characters happen to be funny. Writers from different comedic backgrounds and with different levels of
Star Trek interest were hired. Kurtzman described
Lower Decks as a love letter to
Star Trek, and it is filled with many references to other
Star Trek series. McMahan said these were there to "create a rich, vibrant, fun expression of the world of
Star Trek in that era" rather than just be
Easter eggs for fans to pick through. It was important to the team that these not distract from the emotional storytelling and also fit within
established canon, with
Star Trek author
David Alan Mack consulting on the series to ensure that it fit into the franchise. McMahan hoped that references to
The Animated Series specifically would honor it as the franchise's first animated series. The characters often use the real-world titles of past
Star Trek episodes when referencing those events, with McMahan explaining that the personal logs of famous characters are given similar in-universe titles to the episodes they are from. The franchise established that "
Star Trek characters watch
Star Trek" in
the series finale of
Star Trek: Enterprise, where the events of an earlier mission are recreated with a hologram, and McMahan felt many events from past series would be common knowledge within Starfleet. Acknowledging this allowed the main characters to be "geeks for
Star Trek", which let
Lower Decks be a "
Rosetta Stone" connecting all previous
Star Trek projects.
Casting and voice recording Kurtzman stated in June 2019 that the series would mostly focus on new characters, but there was potential for characters from previous
Star Trek series to appear at some point. The next month, McMahan announced the main cast and characters, including ensigns serving in the "lower decks" of the
Cerritos—
Tawny Newsome as Beckett Mariner,
Jack Quaid as Brad Boimler,
Noël Wells as D'Vana Tendi, and
Eugene Cordero as Sam Rutherford—and the ship's bridge crew who believe "the show is about them, but it's not"—
Dawnn Lewis as Captain Carol Freeman,
Jerry O'Connell as first officer Commander Jack Ransom,
Fred Tatasciore as security chief Lieutenant Shaxs, and
Gillian Vigman as chief medical officer Dr. T'Ana. Voice-overs for each episode are recorded before any animation work is done, with the recordings edited together into what McMahan described as an "old-timey radio play version of the episode". Initially, actors were recorded together such as Newsome and Quaid, but this stopped during production on the first season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This became one of the biggest challenges for the series during the pandemic, with a need to use remote recording equipment in each actor's house. Newsome used a recording studio that she already had in her home.
Animation and design Independent animation studio
Titmouse provides the animation for the series. "Board teams" draw a rough version of the episode in black-and-white based on the initial "radio play" version of the voice actor recordings. These are put together as an
animatic which the animators use as a basis for the final animation with full details and colors. Juno Lee was supervising director for the first season, with first-season episodic director Barry J. Kelly taking over as supervising director with the second season. Titmouse CCO Antonio Canobbio guided the series' overall visual style.
, while the uniforms were based on unused designs for the 1994 film Star Trek Generations''. McMahan wanted the series' animation style to reflect the look of "
prime time animated comedy" series that he grew up with, such as
The Simpsons and
Futurama, as well as previous comedy series that he had worked on such as
Rick and Morty. This included a "prime time look" for the characters based on the "every-man vibe of
The Simpsons" which meant that even the alien characters felt human and grounded. However, he wanted backgrounds and environments to be more detailed than usual for prime time animation, reflecting the designs of the
Next Generation era of
Star Trek for the series' sets, starships, cinematography, and character movements. The team tried to follow the same rules that would apply to a live-action
Star Trek series set in 2380, and used the
wiki encyclopedia
Memory Alpha and other fan resources to stay accurate to the eras's original designs. The animators also watched episodes of
The Next Generation while working on the series, which uses the same blue font as
The Next Generation for its credits. The opening title sequence features the
Cerritos flying through
Next Generation-like situations with a sweeping musical score, but with twists such as it being sucked into a vortex and immediately turning around after arriving at a battle. The
Cerritos crew's uniforms are based on unused designs for the film
Star Trek Generations (1994). Kelly said the
Cerritos was designed to compare favorably to the franchise's live-action starships, with adjustments then made to fit the show's animation style. The
Cerritos is a
Next Generation version of the USS
Reliant from the film
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), McMahan's favorite
Star Trek starship. The California-class starships seen in the series feature the same colors as the uniforms, with yellow for engineering, blue for medical, and red for command (the
Cerritos is yellow). Elements of the
LCARS computer system from
The Next Generation were included in the
Cerritos design, with "those swooping shapes [being] part of the overall architecture of the ship" as well as the carpet, walls, and ceiling. The particles of transporter beams were also drawn to be "little pill-shaped tubes" in the LCARS style, while actual LCARS displays are featured throughout the ship as well.
Michael Okuda, who designed the LCARS system for
The Next Generation, consulted with the animation team on the series' LCARS designs and colors. Once the animation is completed, the last element of the series is the final sound design. McMahan noted that the same level of care was applied to the series' sound design as its animation in terms of honoring "legacy" elements from previous
Star Trek series. Sounds from earlier in the franchise that were studied and replicated include those for existing technology, such as the noises made by different
phasers, the different sounds made when making or receiving a call using a Starfleet badge, or the sound of the ships' warp core. They also include the general "room tone" of different areas of the ship, such as the bridge, different hallways, and crew quarters. General sound design was also required, such as for the sound of characters' footsteps. Once the sound design is completed, these sounds are mixed with the voice recordings and score in a final mix for the episodes.
Music In January 2020, frequent
Star Trek composer
Jeff Russo said it might not be possible for him to compose the score for
Lower Decks due to his workload and the large number of
Star Trek series being produced at the same time. He suggested that he could oversee some other composers for
Lower Decks and the other
Star Trek series if Kurtzman asked him to. In July, Chris Westlake was revealed to be the composer after working with McMahan on
Solar Opposites. McMahan said Westlake's score sounded like a traditional
Star Trek score that fit within the fast-paced, comedic style of
Lower Decks. Westlake felt it would be funnier if sincere music scored the comedic series, which is why the main theme includes a choir. He wrote six or seven different main theme ideas that were narrowed down to two, one being energetic and the other having a slower, more stately feel; the final theme is "between" these two. A soundtrack album featuring music from the first two seasons was released by
Lakeshore Records on October 8, 2021. All music composed by Chris Westlake: ==Release==