How much of Andromeda actually come from Gene Rodenberry? I had always assumed it was based off of an outline or series bible he wrote, with the whole plot and characters, and main alien races, and all of that kind of stuff laid out. But now from the comments I've seen around the boards, it sounds like it really had nothing to do with Rodenberry beyond the basic idea of a guy waking up in the future to find his society has collapsed, and that almost everything about it actually came from Robert Hewitt Wolfe.
Sort of, but I think that's overstating it a little. According to Robert Hewitt Wolfe in
Sailing the Slipstream, Jill Sherwin's companion book to
Andromeda, he was hired to develop a starship series combining elements of Roddenberry's
Genesis II/Planet Earth premise and his
Starship premise, and he was given a foot-high pile of Roddenberry's notes and materials for both, including unfilmed scripts or outlines. To quote Wolfe (from page 5), "basically the character of Dylan Hunt, his gap in time, his quest, the idea of a sentient ship, the basic idea of the Nietzscheans -- but not the specifics and not the name -- and the name Harper -- but nothing else about it -- came from Gene. Everything else was me." Though he does acknowledge that Majel Roddenberry, Sorbo, and the production company executives had input as well.
The Beka Valentine character and her crew came from Wolfe's musings about the
Star Trek series he might create, which would've been basically... well, not unlike
Short Treks: "Calypso," with a Han Solo-esque captain a thousand years after the fall of the Federation discovering the abandoned
Enterprise-K, whose sentient computer "Kay" recruited him and his crew to rebuild the Federation. He never actually pitched it as a Trek idea, but when he was offered the chance to develop a starship show with a sentient ship, he already had the basic concept. He would've liked to have Sorbo play the Han Solo-esque captain, but Tribune wanted him to be the starship's original, more heroic captain, so he became Dylan Hunt and the "Han" character became Beka Valentine. Tyr Anasazi was also added at Tribune's request, because they'd signed Keith Hamilton Cobb to do a show for them, so they insisted that Wolfe create a role for him. Beka was originally going to be the Nietzschean character, so Wolfe split her into two characters.
Wolfe also created the main alien species, but the wider backstory of the show's universe, including the 10,000-year history of the Commonwealth, was developed with input from the writing staff, particularly Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller. To generate fan interest, it was put up online, and though the original site is long gone, it's been salvaged here:
https://philharris.co.uk/AllSystems/www.saveandromeda.com/allsystems/index-2.html This was the site that made me fall in love with the show's universe before the series even premiered, and I regretted that the actual show never lived up to the potential hinted at on the site. Wolfe, Stentz, and Miller were also the main forces behind keeping the show's science believable, along with the show's science advisor, JPL propulsion engineer Paul Woodmansee.
I made it to the end of season 2, then gave up after the season 3 premiere. Sadly the 1990s/2000s are littered with promising genre shows that lost their showrunner then fell off a cliff quality wise thanks to executive interference. An even more egregious example than SEAQUEST is SLIDERS.
True, except
Sliders actually got pretty good again once The Sci-Fi Channel revived it for seasons 4-5. There were some problematical decisions with cast changes and such, but the writing was good again.
