Which is why I've thought Gene Roddenberry, for all his contributions to SciFi, was really a one-trick pony. Even his TNG: Encounter at Farpoint had many similarities with ST:TMP - at least in regards Riker and Troi.
That's hardly fair, since Roddenberry had nothing to do with the creation of
Andromeda. It was Majel Roddenberry who decided, long after GR's death, to resurrect the
Genesis II concept, and it was she in collaboration with Tribune Entertainment and Kevin Sorbo who decided to rework it into a space-based series (she was actually trying to develop a more faithful Earth-based version at the same time, but only the space-based one got off the ground, so to speak). She then hired DS9 alumnus Robert Hewitt Wolfe to develop the
Andromeda concept based on a mix of the
Genesis II premise, the sentient ship from Roddenberry's unsold pilot
Starship, and quite a few original ideas and characters of Wolfe's own.
The TV pilots Gene Roddenberry conceived actually had a lot of variety. His first series was
The Lieutenant, a drama set on a contemporary US Marine base. After the Trek pilot, he did a pilot called
Police Story, a half-hour procedural drama. His original
Assignment: Earth pilot was about an enhanced human agent battling evil time travellers trying to change history (presaging
The Terminator and the Temporal Cold War on
Enterprise). Post-Trek, his pilots included
Genesis II, about rebuilding a post-apocalyptic world;
The Questor Tapes, about an android trying to save humanity from itself;
Spectre, about a team of supernatural investigators (presaging
The X-Files);
The Tribunes, a present-day series about a police division using modern technology and scientific methods to solve crimes (presaging
CSI in some ways, perhaps); the
Starship premise mentioned above; and
Battleground Earth, which was the basis for
Earth: Final Conflict but in which the aliens were initially more malevolent (presaging
V; the concept was changed for E:FC to make it more distinct from
V). A lot more than "one trick" there.
Yes, he did occasionally reuse ideas;
Questor was similar to the episode version of "Assignment: Earth," and TNG recycled Questor into Data and Decker/Ilia into Riker/Troi. But every writer reuses old ideas from time to time. If you have an old idea that didn't make it but still has potential, it's pointless to let it go to waste if you can find a new opportunity for it. It's not unimaginative, just economical.
Just a passing thought on my part in any case.
