Star Trek Works Better When It’s Cheaper and One Show Proves That

Star Trek: Picard is weirdly the perfect show to illustrate this point because you can plainly contrast the first season’s higher budget with the third season’s reduced budget. The first season featured Picard and crew traveling to multiple exotic planets and getting into battles against entire fleets of Romulan ships. By season three, most of the action took place on a cramped starship bridge, all because Paramount was no longer greenlighting huge budgets as they once did.

This blunt reality is something that Picard production designer David Blass has been very open about. He has discussed receiving ambitious scripts that would require Paramount to spend a cool $5 million bringing them to life. That sounded great on paper, but once the designer realized they could only spend $500,000 on the set, he had to cut corners and just do the best he could on a fraction of the budget that he needed.