Was a Rick Berman a bad choice to run the Star Trek Franchise after Gene Roddenberry died?

I did a selected rewatch a while back, it definitely has aged well. Episodes like "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" are still a treat to watch.

 

I would have to say YES it was a good idea to give the keys to the kingdom to Berman. Keep in mind this was before Gene passed. Berman was already in charge by season 2 of TNG.

TNG, DS9 Enterprise seasons 3, and 4. Much of Voyager. These shows I adore. DS9 my fav show of all time. So based on that for me and having watched the great interviews of Berman below I think he did a very good job.

I liked the films too except Nemesis but I can forgive one screw up.

3 1/2 hours of a great interview. I didn't know his best friend is Brent Spiner!

https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/rick-berman?clip=81823#interview-clips

 

No, it was not a bad idea.

And he was running it before Roddenberry died.

There is, sadly, no shortage of twats with webcams and dumb opinions on Youtube.

 

The attacks on Rick Berman have more to do with politics then substance.

 

No.

 

The stories I read were more about a toxic work environment than politics. Like ripping Denise Crosby's com badge off and telling her she's not going to need this anymore. I would disagree with behavior like that while still offering that he did a good job in overseeing the franchise except for Nemesis and the series finale of Enterprise.

I also am compelled to compare his reign to the reign of Alex Kurtzman. This bad robot style of Trek has had multiple show runners and trouble in the writers room from day one. So the bad old days have to feel like a bastion of Trek stability compared to today AND that's with the head of Paramount being anti trek back then which has got to be rough.

 

Berman like Gene was complicated, he helped get the TNG era back on its feet but he could be a pig sometimes as a producer and was very much a big reason why voyager sucked along with *cough* Braga *cough* his actual work as a writer was not too good

 

Braga is not as bad a writer as he's made out to be, and indeed many fan favorite TNG and Voyager episodes are either written or co-written by him. A lot of the problems on Voyager and Enterprise that he gets blamed for are things that were really the fault of UPN's interference, and Braga himself has admitted he was burned out by the end of Voyager's sixth season because of UPN's horseshit.

 

He has his moments on his own, but a lot of his stories required a bull crap tech solution that made no sense, and if he and Berman write a script together it was almost always awful

 

For those of us old enough, Berman breathed new life in to Trek. NG seasons 1 and 2 were not very good. When Berman was given more control, starting in season 3 onward, things started getting better. After Roddenberry, Berman WAS the force behind Trek.

And he was human. It is human nature that when someone has drive and a goal, they fix things and make it better (someone mentioned Marvel and Jim Shooter earlier). But, those people, when things are 'fixed' are often not the ones to see the NEW problems on THEIR watch. Eventually, they need to be replaced with the new wiz-kid with new ideas. It doesn't make the old wiz kid bad or wrong, it just means that often, when you're in charge, you can't see the problem.

 

Yeah, I agree with you there. I think the fault with Berman was probably that he stayed in charge for too long and started losing sight of some problems that were cropping up. He probably got too comfortable.

They did finally start to make some changes with Enterprise, but it was obviously too little too late. He brought in Manny Coto, which was a good decision but probably was a season too late. And while Discovery and Picard have these season long arcs, really, it was Enterprise that did it first with the Xindi arc, then mini arcs in the 4th season. So Berman wasn't afraid to juice things up, I think it was he just let things get a bit stale.

Personality wise, yeah, he sounded like a creep. I mean, I'm not talking about him being a hard ass really. He's in charge, sometimes you got to kick someone in the rear to get the job done. But some of the other stuff I've heard about him.

But as far as a showrunner, a lot of good Star Trek came out under his watch. He got TNG on the right track, I don't think there's any denying that. He pushed for DS9...yes, there were a lot of people involved with DS9 that made it a great show, but he pushed for the idea. I was dubious about a station based show and I'll admit I thought it was crazy. But DS9 ended up being one of my favorites of the spin offs. Voyager is where things maybe started getting stale. Don't get me wrong, I've come to like Voyager over the years, and there are some standout episodes. But it was a show where they really could have pushed things a bit farther and Berman and co. too often decided to play it safe (and yes, I can see where UPN might have had something to do with that--I even read somewhere that Berman actually wanted to take a break and just let DS9 stand on it's own for a while before starting another show and UPN was like we'll do it or take a hike).

 

Personally I think late TNG and VOY started getting stale because they used the same writers over and over and didnt do what made middle TNG and TOS did and that was get outside writers to freshen it up. DS9 is kind of its own thing entirely with the writers TNG and VOY had more writer crossover. I personally think TNG season tends to be stale sloppy and a little too silly

 

The success of the Rick Berman era speaks for itself, it was the golden age of star trek and even Enterprise was vindicated by Netflix ratings.

 

By that logic, I could point to Nemesis being one of the worst box-office failures in history, and Enterprise's mediocre viewing figures and premature cancellation, and say those things speak for themselves. When you're dealing with a timespan that covers almost two decades and a considerable number of ups and downs in terms of the franchise's success in popularity, it gets very difficult to make any fast and hard proclamations about how much credit Berman deserves, or doesn't deserve.

 

Interesting question.

Berman was a mid-level executive that was sent to keep a watch on the TNG producers and wound up genuinely buying into Gene's doctrine and intentions. In that sense, he was good for the franchise. Roddenberry himself was very pleased with his choice as he became the day-to-day show runner.

He was, however very much a middle-of-the-road "TV Guy" and often kept Trek from becoming really experimental, both in terms of story and production. As the "Berman era" continued the format got stale, and despite some standouts, eventually petered out as a new style of TV dawned.

In retrospect, I think we will see Kurtzman as a much better overseer of "All That is Trek". He's more experimental, has a writing pedigree (which Berman did not) which he developed partially in the Trek movies (garnering Trek film's only WGA Award nom), and has fostered a lot of new talent with Short Treks. He has also hired people as show runners who keep the individual shows fresh, notably Michael Chabon, and the creative teams behind the 2 new animated shows, something Berman should probably have done. He has also updated the look, firmly placing Discovery and all that followed aa cinema quality Trek.

Berman should always be admired for the positives, but also should be noted for his limitations.

RAMA

 

I thought Piller had a bigger role than Berman, I could be wrong though.... Berman was the executive producer, Piller showrunner so I don't know?

Does someone know did TNG stop using open-door policy for scripts, like Ron Moore who came to the frachise that way or did it continue all the way to the end of season 7?

 

Not only did it stay in place through to the end of TNG, it was also in place for the entire duration of Voyager. It was with Enterprise they stopped the open-door script policy.

 

I think they did tighten up the submission criteria in TNG's final years. If my memory's correct, Lisa Klink once said that she tried submitting a script during TNG's seventh season, but was told that they had changed their policy and now only accepted scripts that were submitted via agents - and by the time she actually found an agent, TNG had ended, forcing her to retool it into a Voyager script.

 

Or maybe they just didn't bother because for Voyager because there its seemed like tehs am writers on rotation. Taylor, Berman, Pillar, Braga over and over

 

While Mr. Berman's treatment of women was certainly unacceptable, and his hamstringing Voyager's characters was wrong, I can at least understand his hesitation regarding gay characters.

Around 1990, the AIDS pandemic was still a very real thing, and the resurgence of homophobia (even the press was demonizing male homosexuals in the mid-80's) that came with it, was less than a decade past. In a number of states, it was still illegal to have consensual sex with a same-sex partner. That essentially means that they could not get 50% of the voters in those states to even agree that what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their own damn business. The decades-long media campaign to gain acceptance for gays was in its early stages; Lynn Johnson (who wrote "For Better or For Worse") got death threats for having a minor character in her strip be gay. In short, it was a very different world. Introducing a gay character would please a small percentage of Americans, but infuriate a much larger percentage. And for someone who thinks in terms of ratings, that's risky. Berman might have simply been trying to play it safe.

Proponents of cancel culture might judge a person who was active in the 80's and 90's by 2020's standards, but I refuse to.

 

Except he ran Star Trek until 2005. I can completely understand it during TNG, whether I like it not, as well as during DS9 and VOY up to an extent, but definitely not by ENT. There's no excuse by the Turn of the Millennium.