How and why Paramount decided to make a new Star Trek series says much about the changing landscape of television and its corollary, the growing symbiosis between a studio’s movie and television divisions to “maximize assets.” Television no longer means just the three networks. Paramount is making television programs this year for seven different entities—ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Broadcasting, Showtime, USA Cable and first-run syndication.
The New York Times, November 2, 1986 1
It was obvious why Paramount might want to revive Star Trek on television. Star Trek had accidentally pioneered the concept of a “franchise,” showing how a series could be more profitable than a traditional network show, and for far longer. It remained the most popular syndicated series. It was a popular movie series, and generated revenue from books, comics, toys, and other merchandise. It was now making money on home video. In a new broadcasting environment where a show’s “brand value” was important, Star Trek was one of the most valuable brands Paramount had. The old TV series had lasted a long time in syndication, but some stations had started to drop it. Fans with VCRs could tape the episodes now.
It’s far less obvious why the studio would want to hire Gene Roddenberry, whom they considered “a pain in the neck . . . a has-been.” But it was already clear that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy wouldn’t be reprising Kirk and Spock on television. Shatner was already playing Kirk in movies, and he had the starring role in a popular new police series, T.J. Hooker. He demanded a large pay rise for Star Trek IV, and this briefly held up production. The studio sketched out contingency plans, as The New York Times reported:
The trigger for the new television series came when agents for Mr. Shatner and Mr. Nimoy asked sky-high salaries for the fourth Star Trek movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. “We thought of establishing new characters in a movie we called Star Trek: The Academy Years,” says a Paramount executive who asked not to be identified. That idea was abandoned when the two stars signed for approximately $2.5 million each. But the seeds of “a new generation” had been planted.2
In fact, Nimoy didn’t even need to ask. The “favored nations” clause in his contract meant he had pay equality with Shatner, so the studio had to pay out two dollars for every dollar Shatner managed to negotiate for himself. The movies were successful; above all else they were the nearest thing the movie business got to a safe bet. Shatner and Nimoy knew they had a great bargaining position— when the studio suggested halting production on Star Trek IV until Shatner had signed, Nimoy (who was directing the movie) laughed it off and carried on working.3
Nimoy, though, was Paramount’s first choice to oversee the new television series. He quickly passed—he was happy directing movies. The new Star Trek show would need a new cast. The idea of passing the baton to the “second generation” took hold. The “Academy” idea mentioned in The New York Times report had been around since 1972, when the animated series was being developed. A vestigial form of it had surfaced in The Wrath of Khan, in which Kirk and his crew train cadets. After Nimoy had turned them down, Paramount asked producers Sam and Greg Strangis to develop a “Starfleet Academy” series.
The new Star Trek was to be an expensive, high-profile series. For the show to be as popular as the original, it needed to have the same magic ingredients, but it was starting out without any of the familiar characters or actors. Paramount knew the networks would bite their hands off for a show featuring Kirk and Spock. Instead they would be offering a series that was, in some senses, competing against the movies in which the pair featured.
They showed Roddenberry the Strangis’ proposal. He said, “when I read what they’d written, I almost threw up.”4 Roddenberry had an effective veto over new Star Trek projects, although it’s always been a little unclear if the studio were legally bound by that, or whether they just didn’t want to generate bad publicity by making a form of Star Trek that its creator was publicly denouncing. At the meeting, Roddenberry told them that if anyone was going to make a new Star Trek television series, it would have to be him. By the end of the meeting, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, that’s what had been agreed.
Gene Roddenberry had created Star Trek, and his name was all over it. While his memos to Harve Bennett as executive consultant on the movies were mostly ignored, they demonstrated that he had thought long and hard about the spirit of Star Trek, and that he remained passionate and articulate in expressing his thoughts on the matter. As with the movies, the studio understood that they needed Roddenberry on the team, and knew he would be able to win over doubters among Star Trek’s avid fans. More importantly, in the short term, his name on the project would give it credibility as Paramount pitched it to the networks. The initial meeting had been in September 1986, and from there agreement came so quickly that the new Star Trek series could be announced at a studio press conference on Friday October 10, 1986. At that event, Mel Harris, president of Paramount Television, doubled down on Roddenberry’s centrality to Star Trek: “Twenty years ago, the genius of one man brought to television a program that has transcended the medium. We are enormously pleased that that man, Gene Roddenberry, is going to do it again. Just as public demand kept the original series on the air, this new series is also a result of grass roots support for Gene and his vision.”
Paramount offered Roddenberry a good deal. The studio were willing to give him a lot of money—a $1m signing bonus, plus about $2m a season; a large stake in the show (a reported 35 percent of the gross); and an extremely high level of creative control, with no one like Robert Wise or Harve Bennett calling the shots. Paramount would even renegotiate some of his old Star Trek deals. The contract set three levels of involvement, with proportionately increasing levels of payment, from advisor through to actively running the show on a day-to-day basis, and let Roddenberry choose which one to take, allowing him to change his mind further down the line.
The studio may have expected Roddenberry to be humble and grateful, or to meekly offer to be a part-time, semi-retired advisor on the new show. Instead, he was determined to have full control, that he would not be usurped or cheated out of anything. He set his attorney, Leonard Maizlish, to work. Paramount executive John Pike—fittingly, it’s a name that sounds like he’s the lead character in a Roddenberry pilot—described Maizlish as “a bullheaded guy who he himself could be a movie of the week.”5 Susan Sackett has the lengthiest description:
I had never been particularly fond of Leonard Maizlish. I’d met him when I first began working for Gene, and wasn’t impressed. He was then in his late 50s, had slicked down, thinning dark hair, dressed in wrinkled shirts that were not always tucked in, and wore a perpetual look of melancholy. He reminded me of Mr. Magoo, scrunchy-faced and pudgy. He’d known Gene for years and they had become best buddies. Maizlish had handled all of Gene’s contracts with Paramount, and as far as I could tell, Gene was his only client. To me, he was a leech; to Gene, a lifeline. He depended on Maizlish to guide him through the mire of Paramount executives who wanted to take advantage of him.6
When Roddenberry set up his office at the studio, he moved Maizlish in, too.
Understanding that he was extremely lucky to have been given another chance, and that running a TV show had been an exhausting, stressful experience when he’d been twenty years younger, Roddenberry went into rehab at the weekends, starting in September. Various sources say this took place at La Costa, but Susan Sackett, who made the arrangements and visited him there, names the venue as Schick-Shadel Hospital in Santa Barbara. She reports that, for several months at least, he stayed “clean and sober.”7 He marked his turnaround in fortune by buying a new cream and tan Rolls Royce Silver Spur that cost $100,000.
Roddenberry wanted to surround himself with people he could trust. As he had with the Star Trek II television series, he hired as many people as he could from the Sixties show. In October 1986, he had a “core”: two producers, Robert Justman and Eddie Milkis, and two senior writers, D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold. Costumes would be designed by William Ware Theiss, the music composed by Fred Steiner.
With Maizlish fighting the legal and financial battles, Roddenberry was free to concentrate on the creative side of his work, and clearly relished the prospect of reinventing Star Trek from the ground up. This is not to say he transcended office politics and petty disputes to dedicate himself to his art. This was a chance, after all, to demonstrate that the secret ingredient of the series was Roddenberry himself, not a particular character or actor.
Plenty remained the same—episodes would start with a “captain’s log” voiceover, complete with stardate. The Enterprise was there, with a bridge, sickbay, and full complements of shuttlecraft and photon torpedoes. The crew would beam down from the transporter room, carrying phasers and tricorders. The key difference was in the personnel who would be beaming down. Roddenberry was keen to distance himself from the original crew, and none of the characters were literally the “next generation.” The movies had seemed to be edging towards a direct continuation: they’d introduced—then discarded—a number of younger characters like Xon, Decker, Ilia, Kirk’s son David, and Spock’s protégé Saavik, who could easily have become a new cohort taking over after Kirk and his crew moved on. Star Trek III destroyed the Enterprise and introduced the USS Excalibur, a bigger, more advanced starship. Most fans assumed Kirk would take command of the Excalibur in Star Trek IV—and the DC Comics series showed this happening, in stories published between the third and fourth movies—but again, it would be the perfect vessel for the next crew.
Roddenberry moved things far further into the future. Precisely how far changed a little during production (it was reported at various times that the show would be set either 100 or 200 years after the original series), but the Writers’ Guidelines of March 23, 1987 specified that “78 years have passed since the time of Kirk and Spock.”8 This was an exact number but not a precise enough answer for fans, as Kirk and Spock had been around for decades. Eventually, it was established that this meant seventy-eight years since Star Trek IV, the most recent movie. The show wouldn’t feature a single familiar name from the old series—no descendant of Kirk or Spock, or any of the others. There would be no “whatever happened to?” stories. The Writers’ Guidelines specified that “we are not buying stories about the original Star Trek characters,” and there weren’t even a handful of mentions in the first couple of seasons.
Up until now, a great deal of Star Trek had centered around Spock. Every effort had been made, millions of dollars spent, to persuade Leonard Nimoy to reprise his role in the movie series. The times Nimoy had been reticent, it had been taken for granted that Star Trek had to have another Vulcan character. For the Star Trek II series it had been planned to substitute a younger Vulcan science officer for Mr. Spock; at the start of The Motion Picture Kirk recruits another, Sonak, to take Spock’s place. Many spinoff stories, official and fan fiction, had revolved around Vulcan society. Now, the Writers’ Guidelines specified “No stories with Vulcans. We are determined not to copy ourselves and believe there must be other interesting aliens in a galaxy filled with billions of stars and planets.”9 Roddenberry was making a conscious effort to decouple Star Trek from Mr. Spock and Leonard Nimoy.
Many elements Star Trek fans took for granted had changed: the Klingons, for example, were now allies of the Federation, and there was even a Klingon officer on the bridge—although early in the series, Worf is not a major character, and has only a few “business” lines in the pilot. Roddenberry’s plans for the show were a mélange of ideas, some very old indeed. A couple of the “new” characters were familiar from Star Trek II and other earlier projects. The android Data was a barely disguised Questor from The Questor Tapes. Riker and Troi, an ambitious first officer on the verge of becoming a Starfleet captain, and his exotic, mildly psychic ex-lover, who unexpectedly found themselves reunited on the Enterprise, were Decker and Ilia from Star Trek II (and, of course, The Motion Picture). Roddenberry did attempt a more gender-balanced regular cast—there would be three female bridge officers, and they were all meant to be central to the action each week. Roddenberry wanted to give Star Trek fans with disabilities a role model, and he decided to make one of the officers blind—he was named after George La Forge, an early fan of the show with muscular dystrophy. New villains would be needed, and these would be the fearsome Ferengi, vicious traders who plotted to acquire wealth. They were set in direct contrast to the Enterprise crew, whose civilization was described piously by Picard in the episode “The Neutral Zone”: “A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.”
D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold threw important ideas into the mix. Gerrold had dedicated a whole chapter of The World of Star Trek to ways of improving the storytelling of Star Trek, if it returned. Some of those ideas, big and small, are clearly integrated into Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s Gerrold who first suggests that it might be good for the crew to bring a psychologist along, and that it was silly for the captain and first officer to both beam down on the same mission.10 Gerrold is thought to have written the first draft of the series bible, the document that lays out the format of the show. He stated categorically, “I wrote the bible for that show, not Gene. He took credit for it, of course. And the idea of the older, more mature Captain—that was mine. That way we could keep the Captain on the bridge and make the first officer the Mission Specialist.”11
But the early documentation clearly has Roddenberry’s fingerprints all over it, too. While the new Enterprise crew would be politically correct, their creator was still a man capable of writing character notes like “Beverly Crusher’s walk resembles that of a striptease queen.” D.C. Fontana talked Roddenberry out of another idea: “I objected to Troi having three breasts. I felt women have enough trouble with two. And how are you going to line them up? Vertically, horizontally, or what?”12
At the core of the show Roddenberry placed . . . three versions of Gene Roddenberry. The captain was to be nearing the end of his career and (after he was originally called “Julien”) Gene made him his phonetic namesake: Jean-Luc. The new captain would be an old sage offering advice to the up-and-coming William Riker, a clean-cut leading man—an idealized Gene Roddenberry firmly from the same mold as Lieutenant Rice, Captain Pike, and Dylan Hunt. Finally there was Wesley Crusher, a bright teenager about the same age that Roddenberry’s son was at the time—and who was given Eugene Wesley Roddenberry’s middle name. The three men represented “the three ages of Roddenberry.”
The main change was one of attitude. The USS Enterprise was reimagined as a community, one where Starfleet personnel brought their families along as they traveled deep into the galaxy (although the show rather squandered this by only having one of the bridge crew actually do so). The new Enterprise retained echoes of the original designs, but everything had evolved along with the civilization that had built it. Large areas of the ship would be given aside to recreation and its crew would live in luxury. The uniforms were gender neutral. Men and women all wore one-piece uniforms . . . with the option for both men and women to wear “skants”—one-piece uniforms with skirts instead of trousers. The wellbeing of the crew was catered for, indeed one of the bridge officers was the ship’s counselor, skilled in psychology and concerned with the feelings of the crew and the people they encountered. The fact that the new USS Enterprise, despite its legacy name, wasn’t a military vessel was most obvious on the bridge, a huge carpeted space with ramps instead of steps and three chairs in the center (one of them for the counselor) instead of just the captain’s, dominated by a curvy, wooden sculptural element that just happened to be the weapons and communications console. The computer panels were elegant ebony touchscreens. From the outside, the original Enterprise had been a modular design—a flying saucer, a stubby cylinder, and two missile-like rocket pods, connected together with struts. The Enterprise-D retained the basic shape, but made the ship into one seamless, curvy form. This was an elegant, beautiful, balanced future. The Federation was now explicitly utopian, post-scarcity, its people were unselfish, calm, concerned with self-improvement and serving the greater good (and, in the first season at least, keen to declaim this to anyone who’d listen).
The Enterprise-D’s relaxed vibe was in marked contrast to the tide in literary and screen science fiction in the late Eighties, much of which adopted the “cyberpunk” aesthetic of the novels of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, or were grimy, violent stories like Aliens (1986). Most SF at the time depicted the near future as being in marked decay compared to the present day. The authorities were unaccountable (or non-existent), the environment was degraded, technology turned against its creators. Android contemporaries of Data were designed to imitate humans in order to infiltrate and murder, like the Replicants in Blade Runner (1982) or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in The Terminator (1984). Roddenberry was well aware of the trend. Susan Sackett reports that they “saw virtually every contemporary (and some not-so-recent) SF film” as research for TNG.13 His original idea for the character who would become security chief Tasha Yar was a specific lift from the movie Aliens—she was to be based on Vasquez, the macho Latina who was the only female space marine sent into battle. The original casting call for the character in December 1986 named the TNG character as “Macha Hernandez.” By March the following year, the character was Tasha Yar: “born at a failed Earth colony of renegades and other violent undesirables, she escaped to Earth in her teens and discovered Starfleet, which she still worships today as the complete opposite of all the ugliness she once knew.” In other words, Yar was consciously put in the show as a response to the “darker” forms of science fiction around at the time. Roddenberry would ram the point home in the pilot episode, where we see a recreation of a kangaroo court and drug-fueled soldiers from the “Mid twenty first century. The post-atomic horror.” Tasha Yar makes it clear: “I grew up on a world that allowed things like this court. And it was people like these that saved me from it. This so-called court should get down on its knees to what Starfleet is, what it represents.”
The Star Trek universe could encompass such places, but the utopian Federation offered a path to a brighter future—for the audience as well as the characters.
This was an aspect of the show that Roddenberry felt was central, but was often the subject of scorn from sections of the Star Trek world, including some of the people who would go on to make the show. Ronald D. Moore would rise quickly from writer on the third season, to co-producer, to producer of the final season. Moore was particularly scathing of the humanist aspects of The Next Generation. He saw them as an indication that Gene Roddenberry was “starting to believe his own publicity,” that the show’s creator was determined to use it as “a vehicle to demonstrate this vision.”14 Each new iteration of Star Trek would end up drifting further from utopia: the next TV series, Deep Space Nine, was set on a space station far from the comforts of the heart of the Federation. The show after that, Voyager, was set on a starship smaller than the Enterprise, and compromised by being marooned on the far side of the galaxy. Enterprise was a prequel series, consciously bridging a gap between present-day NASA design work and the starships of Kirk’s era. When the Enterprise-E was introduced in the second Next Generation movie, even Picard and his crew suddenly found themselves on a dark vessel with a clear military aesthetic, but no sign of the crew’s families or airy recreational spaces. Moore later dreamt up a revamped version of Battlestar Galactica that took this process even further, making his vast starship clunky and prone to mechanical failure.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was a major investment for Paramount, whose executives would talk of it being “a $100m project.”15 The budget would average out at around $1.3m an episode, but this would include a lot of upfront costs, because the standing sets, models, costumes, props, and so on would all have to be ready for the opening episodes. In fact, Roddenberry insisted that the pilot should show the audience all the sets he had in mind, and he wrote in a tour of the ship. He knew from the first Star Trek series that if he waited to include a sequence in the engine room, battle bridge, or sickbay until the later episodes, the bean counters might stop him from building new sets.
Roddenberry’s plan to do this with the pilot episode of the Seventies Star Trek II series had been one of the reasons The Motion Picture, based on the new series’s intended script, had burned through so much money. This time, it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. As with the original series, virtually all the costumes, props, and sets had to be built from scratch, although imaginative use was made of a few older sets. The Klingon bridge from the first movie had been re-dressed as the photon torpedo bay for The Wrath of Khan, and would be called into service as all sorts of rooms, offices, alien ships’ bridges, and so on. The most obvious bit of recycling was that the corridors of the Enterprise from the first movie were repainted, widened, and became the corridors of the Enterprise-D.
Roddenberry thought the show would only need a limited number of model shots of the USS Enterprise— flying through space, orbiting a planet, turning, going to warp speed, firing phasers, firing photon torpedoes, separating the two “sections” of the ship—and was sure to include all of these in the first episode. It was a sensible plan, but again it meant money was spent at the start of the season. As it happened, once the show was underway, it became clear both that modern audiences wanted fresh model sequences every week and that twenty years on from the original series, visual effects were far cheaper and more flexible than they used to be.
Paramount shopped the new Star Trek series to the three existing networks—NBC, ABC, and CBS—and the newcomer, Fox, which was launching in spring 1987. As it turned out, all four were keen, but there were issues. As would have been true for any new show, NBC and ABC wanted to see a pilot episode. Fox were interested in thirteen episodes, but wanted them by March 1987, and it was already late fall 1986. The huge upfront costs would see Paramount losing a minimum of $10m if a network dropped the show after thirteen episodes—much more, obviously, if they all they made was the pilot episode. CBS came closest to meeting Paramount’s needs, by offering to buy a six- or seven-part Star Trek: The Next Generation mini-series. Ordering fewer episodes than Fox might seem like an odd way to solve the problem, but at the time one-off TV movies and miniseries could be huge events for a network. Nicholas Meyer had gone from making The Wrath of Khan to a TV movie about a nuclear war, The Day After (1983), and over a hundred million Americans had watched it. The ratings of miniseries like The Thorn Birds (1983) and North and South (1985) justified their huge budgets. The Winds of War (1984) cost $35m to make, but averaged eighty million viewers. Miniseries could be sold to foreign television stations, and re-edited as TV movies and for home video. If the Star Trek series was popular, obviously there was potential for a follow-up.
All four networks wanted a great deal of say in the running of the show—and a share of the profits. Paramount were very wary of signing away any control or ownership of Star Trek. Lucy Salhany, president of Domestic Television at Paramount, came up with a more radical solution: “first run syndication.” The Next Generation would debut on the hundreds of smaller stations already showing the original Star Trek . . . and those stations wouldn’t pay Paramount for the show. Twelve minutes of commercials would run during each episode. Paramount would get the revenue from seven of those minutes, while the station would get the revenue from the other five. They had to commit in advance to broadcasting a full season, and only stations that agreed to the deal would be allowed to keep showing the lucrative original series.
It was not a tough decision. Many of these stations had been asking for new Star Trek material for years, and Paramount quickly signed deals with so many of them that 90 percent of the US population would be able to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It would give Paramount full control over the show, and allow them to make a whole season. The worst-case scenario wasn’t too bad: if a second season wasn’t commissioned, then the Next Generation episodes would be added to the Star Trek syndication bundle, eking out at least a few more years for the original show. It was a brilliant solution, although not without its issues. For one thing, Roddenberry and his cast and crew had signed up to make a show that would be the centerpiece of a national network television channel, not one for the fractured and far less prestigious syndicated market. There had been first-run syndicated shows before, but most were light entertainment—panel shows, variety hours, very safe comedy.
Bob Justman, though, relates that after some initial skepticism, the production team realized:
This, this is heaven. This is heaven for a film producer. There was no network. There was no network, folks, no network. There was no Broadcast Standards Department. There were no censors. We censored ourselves, so to speak . . . Paramount tried to step in and get involved with the cutting of an episode, and Gene Roddenberry blew them away and told them “Don’t come back again,” you know, we’ll take care of the creative end of everything.16
Roddenberry didn’t get everything his own way. Once again, his casting choices were overridden by studio executives. He had a very clear favorite for the role of the Enterprise’s new captain: Stephen Macht. Known from roles on Knots Landing (1982–3) and as Christine Cagney’s boyfriend in Cagney and Lacey (1985–8), Macht looked like a film star version of Gene Roddenberry, and had come to Roddenberry’s attention when he’d auditioned for the role of Decker in The Motion Picture. The studio weren’t happy with the choice, although this was clearly no reflection on his abilities, as Macht was later considered as a potential Riker. Other contenders for Picard, Mitchell Ryan and Barrie Ingham, could also have passed as Roddenberry in a movie version of his life. Roy Thinnes, star of the Sixties show The Invaders—another old-school conventional lead—was considered. The studio spread the net a little wider, apparently offering the role to Edward James Olmos, who’d appeared in Blade Runner and would go on to play Adama in the twenty-first-century revamp of Battlestar Galactica. Olmos turned down the role because he was signed as a regular in Miami Vice. Yaphet Kotto was very seriously considered.
A memo dated April 13, 1987 lists Ryan, Thinnes, Kotto, and two actors called Patrick. Patrick Bauchau was a Belgian actor who’d started in New Wave cinema in the Sixties, but after appearing in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985) had begun to work steadily in Hollywood movies and American television. The other candidate was Patrick Stewart, a British actor who had been spotted by Bob Justman while reading to an acting class at UCLA. Stewart had an extensive background in British theater, twenty years in the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, but was somewhat overshadowed by others in his cohort, like Ben Kingsley, Ian Richardson, Paul Schofield, David Warner, and Ian McKellen. He had a memorable role as Sejanus in the television series I, Claudius, but his television and movie work had been limited to small, if often important, roles—he played Karla, the arch enemy of Alec Guinness’s Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, but had no lines and only appeared in a handful of scenes. He played Guinevere’s father in Excalibur (1981), Gurney in Dune (1984), and a doctor possessed by a space vampire in Lifeforce (1985).
Roddenberry hated the idea of Patrick Stewart as Picard. The English actor looked and acted nothing like the mental image he’d had of a gruff, French veteran explorer. John Pike liked him and, perhaps overestimating Stewart’s place in the firmament, was amazed that a Shakespearean actor who’d worked with directors like David Lynch and John Boorman would consider a leading role in Star Trek. He was, though, very concerned that he looked too old. Stewart was forty-seven—hardly ancient, and actually a little younger than the character was meant to be—but he was bald.
The April 13 memo states that Bauchau read for the part “today” and the others would come in “next week,” and listed Bauchau and Stewart as “favorites for the role.” It came down to the two of them, and they both did a number of auditions and screen tests.
Stewart auditioned affecting a French accent he himself has said made him sound like Inspector Clouseau, and wearing a wig FedExed from London that he’d recently used in a play. Having finished the audition, and feeling he’d done very badly, he removed his wig and was leaving the building when he was called back in for another run through. This time, Roddenberry was convinced Stewart had the authority to be his captain, and he brushed aside the fact Stewart was bald by saying such things didn’t matter in the future.
The same memo also states that “Denise Crosby seems to be the only possibility for the role of Troi at this point; the same for J.D. Roth for the role of Wesley.” Neither had signed a contract, and none of the other roles had been cast. The actors who would go on to play “Ryker” (the spelling changed late in the day), Geordi and Beverly—Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, and Cheryl Gates McFadden—were on the shortlist. McFadden was up against Anne Twomey and British actress Jenny Agutter, well known from Logan’s Run (1976) and An American Werewolf in London (1981). Wesley Snipes was one of those shortlisted for the role of Geordi. Rosalind Chao, who would go on to play Miles O’Brien’s wife Keiko in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, was one of the contenders for Tasha, as was Bunty Bailey, a British actress whose most prominent role probably remains that of the girl in the pop video for a-Ha’s “Take On Me.”
Tasha and Data proved difficult roles to cast. A new casting call went out, and from that emerged Wil Wheaton (Wesley), Brent Spiner (Data), and Marina Sirtis (Yar). Sirtis was small, dark, and of Mediterranean ancestry, and so resembled the original model for the character, Vasquez from Aliens, more than anyone named in the April memo. It’s clear from the actresses shortlisted that by this point Roddenberry wanted Yar to look either Chinese/Japanese, or somewhat Nordic. Denise Crosby now looked more like Yar to him than Sirtis, and the two actresses swapped roles. At this point, the Klingon character Worf was considered a minor recurring role, not a series regular— something akin to Billy Van Zandt’s alien ensign in The Motion Picture—and Michael Dorn was initially signed up to play him for only seven episodes.
Casting was completed in May, and announced on May 15. Filming began May 29, 1987. The first scenes shot saw Data and Wesley meeting for the first time on the holodeck.17
While bringing a new television series to air is always a fraught process, with lots of money and prestige very publicly at stake, and while almost every artistic production somehow manages to attract a battle of egos, the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation was almost legendarily messy. In 2014, a documentary about the making of the first season was released. It is called Chaos on the Bridge. And at the center of the chaos was Gene Roddenberry.
Virtually every television show takes a little time to find its feet, as the people making it build on what’s working and drop things that don’t. Watch the pilot episodes of most shows and compare them with one from two or three years later—you’ll often see that major characters have disappeared, minor ones have been promoted. Actors leave, guest stars impress the producer and return. Chemistry between actors is built on, plotlines that aren’t going anywhere are quietly put to bed. Going back and watching “Encounter at Farpoint,” the first episode of The Next Generation, knowing where the show will end up, it’s particularly odd what’s emphasized in the pilot (the civilian population of the ship, the mission to explore deep into uncharted territory) and what’s missing (everything is so very stiff and humorless).
Fans have many and differing opinions about Star Trek in all its various forms, but it’s fair to say that there’s a near-consensus on The Next Generation: it took a while to get going; some of the early episodes were terrible; it only really started to come into its own in the second season; the introduction of a powerful new enemy, the Borg, in “Q Who” (the sixteenth episode of season two, broadcast May 8, 1989) marked a turning point; the third season was a very strong one, and the last episode of that season, “The Best of Both Worlds,” which ends with the shock cliffhanger of Picard stepping into shot converted into a Borg, and acting-captain Riker immediately giving the order to kill him, is one of the finest episodes of Star Trek ever made, possibly even one of the finest episodes of television ever made.
This arc of improvement, from “It’s Star Trek, so I’ll keep watching and hope it improves” to “Wow! This may even be better than the original!” was not a case of Gene Roddenberry and his original team steadily building on what worked and steering the show to reach its potential. Instead, there’s an almost complete turnover of writing staff, and the incremental improvements coincide almost entirely with Roddenberry being prized away from the show. Writer walkouts and firings, disruptive events like a lengthy writers’ strike that affected the whole industry, and interventions from actors forced the show to try new things that worked far better than Roddenberry’s initial plans. As with the original show, as with the movies, things improved despite of Gene Roddenberry, not because of him.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had the time to fix its problems. The first-run syndication deal meant only an utter catastrophe would have seen it canceled mid-season, and in fact the ratings were very strong. To the intense relief of Paramount, more people tuned in than watched many network shows, and there were weeks where it would have been a top ten drama. The show only grew in popularity. Seven years later, the last episode would earn the highest ratings Star Trek had ever achieved or ever would again, a Nielsen rating of 17.4.
The first half of the season suffers with some very clunky “message” stories, the second half with the fact that a lot of the money had already been spent. It’s striking how so many of the stories are driven by the issues, rather than the characters—the Enterprise arrives at a planet, the crew gets a tour of the planet, there’s some form of moral dilemma, the crew react to events rather than instigate them.
Roddenberry passed an edict that frustrated the writers: the main characters were professional people from a mature civilization, and so they would never let their passions overwhelm them. No one would go rogue, come to blows, or even raise their voice. Instead of a captain barking orders from his command chair, the crew would gather around a conference table and agree on the best course of action, and then they would follow the plan. It’s a warming prospect to think that in the future, there might be great advances in human psychology as well as technology, that there will be an organization of highly skilled scientists with great empathy, dedicated to assessing the needs of others, and non-violent conflict resolution. It didn’t, in this case at least, make for compelling action-adventure stories. As so many times in his career, Roddenberry came up with an interesting idea, but one more subtle and delicate than he was able to articulate. It translated into characters telling each other that they were above such petty things as jealousy, rather than showing how that might work in practice.
The older writers who’d worked on the original series felt it was weak beer compared to the infighting and gentle putdowns that marked out the Kirk–Spock–McCoy relationship, and the younger writers felt it hemmed in their attempts to disrupt and challenge the characters. It also left the actors with very little to work with. They were playing perfect people who all agreed with everything their colleagues said, and kept making little speeches about how great humanity was. As one writer, Maurice Hurley, put it: “it takes away everything you need for drama, in Gene’s wacky doodle vision of the future.”
Roddenberry found it immensely frustrating that his writers needed what he saw as cheap tricks to create false drama. The writers found it frustrating that he would rewrite their scripts without telling them. Everyone, Roddenberry included, struggled with the format. The Writers’ Guidelines stressed that these were fast-moving action adventure stories, but what made it to screen was frequently predictable, formulaic stuff. The writers found it hard to come up with stories about the families onboard the ship, and could only think of two ways to involve young Wesley Crusher—he accidentally put the ship in danger, or his genius saved it.
One huge early misfire was the Ferengi. The plan was that they would be the recurring villains, arch capitalists, whip-wielding slavers, a culture that devoured planets in the pursuit of profit. Instead, as Armin Shimerman, who played one of them, said, they ended up looking like “angry gerbils.”18 They only appeared once more in the first season, plans for a Roddenberry-scripted two-part story called “Ferengi Gold” were dropped, and then the Ferengi vanished completely until the end of the second season. It was the third-season episode “The Price” where they found their niche, as comic relief “pests.”
A key difference between The Next Generation and the original series was that in the Sixties, writers and performers had worked with Roddenberry’s material, added to it, adapted it. Much of what worked in the early episodes of the original series came from other people, encouraged by Roddenberry. Now, Star Trek’s creator hoarded his control of The Next Generation. He made it clear that every decision was to be approved by him, and that he didn’t want people coming up with stuff behind his back. It stifled innovation, or indeed the desire to contribute suggestions or improvements.
One of the new writers, Tracy Torme, expressed his surprise at Roddenberry’s manner, characterizing him as someone whose “energy level went up and down” and who was “mercurial.”19 Elsewhere, he described the show’s behind-the-scenes atmosphere in the early seasons as an “insane asylum.”20 D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold had known Roddenberry for twenty years, had known both Gene Roddenberrys: the warm pop philosopher who made you feel great and inspired tremendous loyalty, and the slightly paranoid one who closed the door and railed against the people trying to cheat him, while happily taking credit for others’ work. Even as he made self-serving moves against them—for example insisting on a co-credit for Fontana’s script for the first episode—they felt very protective of him. It was self-evident that he was in poor health. Fontana says he suffered a series of mini strokes; Gerrold described him as “deteriorating.”21
But even his old allies found themselves marginalized. Increasingly, Roddenberry would not see people to talk about their scripts, but would issue notes and annotations. Fontana and Gerrold knew Roddenberry’s handwriting, and some of the handwritten notes were coming not from Roddenberry but from Leonard Maizlish. The lawyer seems to have taken against Fontana in particular. She had a writing credit on five first-season episodes, but left the staff after the thirteenth. David Gerrold was keen to write a story that was an allegory for AIDS and blood donation, a political issue at the time. Gerrold’s script, “Blood and Fire,” was a fairly tame—if timely—plea for tolerance. Roddenberry assigned another writer to rework it, and the episode was eventually dropped. Gerrold would leave the series soon afterwards.
“I’ll tell you why. Part of the problem on TNG was Gene’s lawyer [Leonard Maizlish] was making it impossible for anybody to do any real work. He was rewriting scripts. He was committing Guild violations. People were very unhappy. It was one of the worst working environments I’d ever been in. So when my contract came up for renewal, I asked Gene not to [renew it]. Later, I found out that Maizlish was telling people what a troublemaker I was, that I’d been fired because I was mentally ill, that I never did anything useful for the show—real character assassination of the worst sort . . . Maizlish was a disgraceful man.”22
It was clear Roddenberry’s lawyer was rewriting scripts himself and, leaving aside matters like the discourtesy it showed to the original writers or what qualified a lawyer to write television scripts, it was strictly against Writers’ Guild rules. Fontana and Gerrold filed separate claims with the Guild, and when Paramount discovered Maizlish was working on scripts, he was banned from the studio lot.
Susan Sackett understood what was happening. “This was Gene Roddenberry’s last gasp, he had the need for some support. Maizlish gave him support.”23 She saw the effect the long days and arguments were having on Roddenberry, how it was “exacting an enormous toll of his emotional and physical health. With his reputation on the line, he insisted on writing and rewriting the first eleven episodes (although he only took credit for his original ones).”24 Roddenberry was living lavishly, had started drinking again. He was diagnosed with diabetes, needed to hire a chauffeur, and was becoming, in Sackett’s word, “curmudgeonly.”25
There was turmoil in the writers’ room. Something like twenty-five to thirty writers were hired and fired over the course of the first season. From the eighteenth episode, “Coming of Age,” Roddenberry had Maurice Hurley promoted to co-executive producer—essentially making him head writer. Hurley had worked on hit shows Miami Vice and The Equalizer. He did not consider himself well-versed in Star Trek lore, but knew where credit was due: “People get confused about who really is Star Trek, and that messes people’s heads up. Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry and nobody else.”26 Hurley saw his role as preserving Roddenberry’s vision for the series, which led to a series of running battles with the other writers. He would remain in the role until the end of the second season.
Many of the actors were unhappy. Patrick Stewart initially found the playfulness of the rest of the cast on set rather irritating, believing that the show would only work if everyone took their roles seriously. The cast began to gel as they compromised on this, Stewart coming to see the value of seeing the lighter side when problems hit filming, and the rest of the cast warming to his sense of commitment to his character.
Three characters in particular were poorly served by the first-season scripts. The show’s commitment to non-violent conflict resolution meant that in the early episodes, phasers were rarely drawn, there were no gun battles. This left Tasha Yar, the security chief, with very little to do. Denise Crosby spent most episodes in the Uhura role—reading out to the captain what the computer was telling her.
Many of the writers didn’t like Troi’s character, and her “empathic skills” were soon downgraded to the mere offer of banal running commentaries that explained that a child who had just been orphaned was lonely, or that the warlord threatening to attack the Enterprise was feeling angry and violent. Her relationship with Riker, set up in the first episode as central to the show, was barely ever mentioned, and the idea it would be a model of futuristic sexual partnerships became another example of a potentially interesting idea that Roddenberry was unable to articulate, and which the other writers had no investment in developing.
Rick Berman, supervising producer on the first season, has said that Maurice Hurley “had a real bone to pick” with Gates McFadden because he wasn’t satisfied with her performance.27 Others have said Hurley disliked the actress personally. McFadden’s agent was surprised to receive a note from Hurley saying her services wouldn’t be needed for the second season, and this decision upset a number of the cast, reportedly including Patrick Stewart. Berman would take over from Hurley at the start of the third season, and he brought McFadden back. Berman would soon become executive producer, assuming the role from Roddenberry, and he steered the whole franchise, television and movies, until 2006.
The show was shifting around, finding its strengths. The first episode spent a lot of time around Picard, Troi, and Beverly/Wesley. With the second season, the writers started concentrating on Picard, Riker, and Data as the core characters. The three most marginalized characters, Yar, Troi, and Beverly, had something obvious in common; the net effect was that, having started with three women in powerful positions, The Next Generation’s first season ended with two of the actresses gone, and Troi moved from the heart of the show to become something of a bystander. Was this evidence of sexism among Roddenberry and his team, of institutional gender bias? Or was it just an unfortunate accident?
Roddenberry clearly had good intentions. He had put three strong female characters on the bridge, and had changed the tagline of the series from “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to “Where No One Has Gone Before.” Susan Sackett says that one of the things he found irritating about the scripts in later seasons was that gendered language like “four-man landing party” had crept back in, when he’d sought to eliminate it. While there’s been some criticism that Troi and Beverly were given feminine, “caring” jobs, they’re roles, like Tasha Yar’s as security chief/weapons officer, with the potential to be in the middle of the story every week. The writers clearly had more fun writing for Worf than for Troi. LeVar Burton was also given mainly functional lines, but managed to do more with them than Denise Crosby could with hers. There were more interesting things for Picard to do than reminisce with Beverly. The bottom line is that the show was better for the changes.
In 1995 Rick Berman admitted, “The fans never knew that Roddenberry’s active involvement in The Next Generation diminished greatly after the first season.”28 As with the movies, the studio felt that it was important to present new Star Trek episodes as coming from Roddenberry.
Ironically, a Hollywood writers’ strike at the beginning of the second season helped the show. While a number of unused scripts, including material written for the abortive Star Trek II television series, had to be dusted off, it also gave the cast and crew a breather, and time to think through fresh approaches to the material. Patrick Stewart introduced a new note to his performance, and started to subtly start playing against the scripts. Rather than sit and nod while someone gives a little speech, he’ll make a subtle movement that suggests Picard is secretly more impatient, amused, or angry than he’s saying. Gradually, this starts to infect the rest of the cast, who relax a little—start to give each other knowing looks.
Maurice Hurley’s big plans to introduce a new enemy, the Borg, who would take a whole season to defeat, were curtailed by the strike. His replacement for McFadden, Diana Muldaur’s Dr. Pulaski, proved unpopular. The show, though, was coming together. Geordi was now chief engineer. Data featured more prominently. Picard was involved in the action rather than simply staying on the ship. Whoopi Goldberg was added as the semi-regular guest star Guinan, in charge of a new recreation area, Ten-Forward, where crew members and families socialized.
The emphasis shifted away from the “high concept” of the episode to the featured character. Instead of coming up with worlds that had odd rules or customs (“a planet where every crime is punishable by death,” “a planet where men are the weaker sex”), the writers were invited to pitch for “a Data story” or “a Troi story.” The approaches weren’t mutually exclusive. “The Measure of a Man,” a second-season episode Patrick Stewart cites as one of his favorites, is concerned with Data’s legal status—is he a man or a machine? Do the rights of a sentient machine trump the rights of scientists who wish to study it? The moral dilemma is the same as the first season’s “Home Soil,” in which miners have disturbed small crystals and a determination has to be made if they are “alive” enough to suspend drilling, but when it’s “a Data story,” the audience is more invested in the outcome, the stakes seem higher and more concrete.
By this point, The Next Generation was the third highest-rated show in its timeslot. The most successful episodes would get around eleven million viewers, and throughout its run, the show only dropped below nine million for one episode. Roddenberry trusted Hurley enough that he took a break during the production of the second season, heading to the Solomon Islands with Maizlish.29
Then the inevitable happened: Roddenberry and Hurley fell out over the direction of the show. The studio had to pick a side, and they sided with Hurley. Roddenberry had fired Fontana and Gerrold, and other people who might have stood up for him. By 1989 and the end of the second season, Gene Roddenberry’s day-to-day involvement with Star Trek: The Next Generation was all but over. This time, he simply lacked the strength for the fight. He’d had a series of minor strokes in October 1988. He was apparently prescribed amphetamines, and as that meant he was now off the wagon, Roddenberry started using cocaine again. He began having violent mood swings.
He did, though, manage time to start a new love affair, with “a computer programmer and writer from Santa Monica who was an extremely intelligent woman.” Maizlish described this as “a delayed mid-life crisis and one last fling as old age set in.”30
In September 1989, Roddenberry had a more serious stroke, one that left him in a wheelchair. His health had deteriorated to the point he found it difficult to use a pen. Things were slipping away from him.