RTÉ IS SET to air a new six-part crime series featuring a number of actors who have boldly gone to the strange new worlds and who will now converge in the wilds of Connemara.

The Yank is set to feature Kate Mulgrew and Colm Meaney, who both portrayed much-loved Star Trek characters from the 1990s.

Irish-American Mulgrew played Captain Janeway, the captain of the USS Voyager in the Star Trek series that bore the name of that vessel.

As well as a back catalogue of iconic characters from Irish film, Meaney also played Miles O’Brien in over 200 episodes of Star Trek across several different series of the space-travelling franchise.

According to RTÉ’s blurb for the newly commissioned show, Mulgrew will be the lead actor in The Yank where she will play “a seasoned NYPD detective” who takes a career break to move to west Galway before being “unexpectedly pulled into a murder investigation involving a female climate activist”.

The show was written by Eithne Verling, who has worked in the Galway City Museum for the past 12 years, and who met Mulgrew in chance encounter some years ago when the actor was on holiday.

The script was created specifically for Mulgrew and the drama “also explores Traveller culture” and is set to “a rugged and beautifully atmospheric backdrop”, according to the description provided by RTÉ.

Verling says of her debut TV script:

“The Yank deals with some of the bigger thoughts which I have set in a story about a woman’s attempt to find meaning in the world following a deep personal trauma. I wrote The Yank for Kate, who I met a number of years ago. Our meeting felt like it had been pre-ordained, a friendship both instant and familiar.”

Traveller activist and actor John Connors is also part of the ensemble and, to add another Star Trek connection to the cast, so is Cillian O’Sullivan who had a role in the third series of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

The Yank has been commissioned by RTÉ and is being made by Two Cities Television, the Belfast and London-based production house behind the hugely successful PSNI cop show Blue Lights.

Speaking about her role in the show, Mulgrew said that her involvement was “borne out of my love for Ireland” and her creative relationship with Verling.

“The character we contrived is Nora Savage, a woman very like myself, had I been slashed with grief, blessed with raw courage and born a natural hunter of that which destroys,” she says.

The Yank is being produced for RTÉ in association with Screen Ireland with ITV Studios set to be the global distributor for the series.