I'm here, feeling awkward at the very mention of his name.Where is TheGodBen?Mike Sussman
Thank Christ Joe Menosky didn't show up in the hater thread, if I feel this bad for complimenting a guy's work I can only imagine how bad I'd feel for portraying Joe Menosky as a Gollum-like figure.As far the the writers go, this is how I understand it:
TNG season 1 was Gene's baby with Robert Justman as his right-hand man, but once Justman retired 2/3 of the way through the season Rick Berman and Maurice Hurley replaced him. By season 2 Gene stepped back from the writing and Maurice Hurley took over while Berman began to take over Gene's producer roles. Hurley allegedly had trouble getting along with the cast and crew (McFadden supposedly quit due to being sexually harassed by him) and when he finally fell out with Gene it was the last straw. Michael Wagner was brought in to replace Hurley in season 3 but quit after a few episodes due to having brain cancer, so Michael Piller was hired as the new head writer. He knew Ira Behr and hired him, he also hired René Echevarria and Ron Moore because he liked scripts they had submitted. Season 3 was tumultuous because many on the writing staff were resisting against the "Roddenberry box" and by the end of the year Richard Manning, Hans Beimler and Ira Behr left the show. To replace them Jeri Taylor was brought in for season 4 along with Joe Menosky. Half way through the season Braga was hired as a lowly staff writer, he co-wrote his first script with Ron Moore and the two of them were quite friendly.
By season 5 Paramount asked Berman and Piller to begin development on a new show, something Gene was supposedly against. Gene died, development got underway and DS9 was launched during TNG's 6th season. Piller was head writer on both shows, but the staffs themselves were separate, I think the only TNG writer to write for DS9 during its first two seasons was Joe Menosky. Piller knew that this show would be a bit darker and wouldn't have to adhere so much to the "Roddenberry box" due to all the aliens in the cast, so he managed to coax Ira Behr into joining the writing staff. Peter Allan Fields had done some work on TNG and he left that show to join DS9, while Robert Hewitt Wolfe wrote the TNG episode A Fistful of Datas and that landed him a job on DS9.
Meanwhile, on TNG... Paramount was launching a new television network and they wanted a Star Trek show to be the flagship, and Berman had also convinced the suits in the company that the TNG cast would be able to make the transition to the big screen. During season 7 (DS9 season 2) Piller and Taylor were at work creating Voyager, Moore and Braga were asked by Berman to write the first TNG movie and Piller had also asked for them to write the TNG finale about half-way through the season, while Joe Menosky began to write for the show on a freelance basis. The suckitude of TNG season 7 is largely down to the fact that most of the show's heavy-hitters were distracted with other work. Piller in particular was stretched due to working on three separate shows at the same time.
When TNG ended the writers had three options: join DS9, stick around for Voyager or get work somewhere else. Ron Moore wanted to join Voyager because the prospect of working on a Trek show from the beginning was hard to pass up, and his sometime writing partner Braga was going there. After talking with Ira Behr he decided that he liked the direction DS9 was going in and he was offered the job of creating a new hero-ship for the show (Defiant) so he and René Echevarria moved to DS9. Peter Allan Fields left the show, although he continued to write some scripts throughout the seasons. Once Voyager started up mid season 3, Piller left DS9 in Ira Behr's hands so that he could focus his attention on Voyager.
From this point on DS9's staff was relatively stable; Ira Behr managed to convince Hans Beimler to join the staff during season 4 while Bradley Thompson and David Weddle wrote Rules of Engagment and started writing for the show during season 5. The only writer to leave while the show was on the air was Robert Hewitt Wolfe.
Voyager's staff was much more tumultuous, Kenneth Biller being the only full-time writer from the beginning to the end. Piller was lead writer for the first two seasons and wanted the show to go down the same type of arc route that DS9 was beginning to go down, but the Kazon were never treated seriously as a villain and things fell apart. He left the show at the end of its second production season and Jeri Taylor took over, reportedly rewriting Basics Part 2 to put an end to the Kazon arc. Joe Menosky started writing for Voyager around this time, and Lisa Klink was hired to the Voyager writing staff after having written the script for DS9's Hippocratic Oath. Voyager's third season was not well received and in a desperate ploy to save the show Braga came up with the idea of Seven and he and Joe Menosky teamed up as writing partners to write Scorpion. The success of this story meant that Braga was the go-to guy to replace Jeri Taylor when she stepped down at the end of season 4, but even before then Braga and Menosky were tasked with writing all the big event episodes (Year of Hell, The Killing Game, etc).
During season 4 Bryan Fuller was hired after two of his stories were sold to DS9, and Lisa Klink left the show at the end of season 4. Robert Doherty joined the staff some time during season 4 or 5. In the 5th season Michael Taylor was hired after writing DS9's powerhouse episodes The Visitor and In the Pale Moonlight. He and Fuller teamed up on quite a few episodes, particularly during the final season. Then comes Ron Moore's brief stint on Voyager during the start of its 6th season, which I wont go into because it has been discussed to death on this board. At the end of season 6 Joe Menosky decided to leave the show, while Braga took a step back so he could focus on creating Enterprise. Kenneth Biller took over for the final year and was part of the team responsible for Endgame. The final season saw the introduction of Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong (Mike Sussman having sold episodes to Voyager in the past) while André Bormanis (of Playboy mansion fame) came out from behind his science desk and became a full-time writer. James Khan also wrote a few episodes.
Supposedly B&B wanted an entirely new wrtiting staff for Enterprise but UPN insisted that they keep as many as they could from Voyager, so Mike Sussman, Phyllis Strong and André Bormanis joined B&B on the NX-01. The first season had a few other writers, many of whom jumped by the end of the year, and season 2 saw the introduction of John Shiban and Chris Black. Shiban left at the end of season 2, so in mid season 3 Manny Coto was brought in to take charge of the Xindi arc so that B&B could take a step back. By the end of the season Phyllis Strong left the show along with Chris Black. They were replaced in the final season by the Reeves-Stevens who along with Coto, Sussman and Bormanis provided the show with a lot of continuity porn. Of course, Berman and Braga came back after hiding for the better half of a year to write the finale, and everyone wishes that they stayed hiding.
That's not all the writers, of course, I failed to mention writers such as Naren Shankar and Nick Sagan, but this post has taken too much time as it is. I bet that nobody even reads the bloody thing, and those that do will probably nit-pick it and exclaim that I'm a worthless piece of dirt for getting some of my facts wrong.
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