Braga throws suits under the bus

[Gaith]

From that ol' TrekToday sidebar at right...

“Rick Berman and I had a little bit more of a raw conception of Enterprise than maybe the studio was comfortable with,” explained Braga. “It was actually set on Earth for a while – the building of the first starship, kind of like J.J.’s. We wanted to do the launch of the first starship and take it maybe a little bit more retro, and we initially didn’t have the futuristic temporal cold war aspect of it.”

But their plans had to change when it became apparent that their bosses weren’t on board with this version of Enterprise. “The studio was a little nervous about the prequel concept and they felt that Star Trek should be going forward, not backward,” said Braga. “So we introduced this recurring element of a Star Trek far beyond Kirk’s time, or even Picard’s time, to satisfy their concerns, which I thought was interesting. But initially our concept of Enterprise was really raw and basic and ‘prequelly.’ I’m not saying it would’ve been better but it would’ve been a little bit different. It’s a collaboration; it’s a collaboration, it’s their franchise, it’s their money. We did the best we could to accommodate their notes.”

Oh, dear. Where to begin?


"They felt that Star Trek should be going forward, not backward."

Then don't green-light a prequel series!


So we introduced this recurring element of a Star Trek far beyond Kirk’s time, or even Picard’s time, to satisfy their concerns, which I thought was interesting.

No. No, it was not.



“It was actually set on Earth for a while – the building of the first starship.... We wanted to do the launch of the first starship and take it maybe a little bit more retro."

*gasp* A prequel series, going retro?!


I myself'd have loved to see a lot more Earth. Show us Starfleet politics, the civilian Terran government, and how they overlap. Start out with several potential captains, a la First Flight. And for Pete's sake, go retro with red shirts and actually feature a crewman fatality before the bloody third season!


B&B clearly made a lot of missteps over the years, but if it's true that the suits demanded the TCW and a TNG/VOY clone right out the gate, well, anyone would've had a hard time making lemonade out of that.

 

[Jax]

Am not convinced at Braga especially as it took him 5 years to come out with this. Personally am not sure how a few episodes on Earth would of helped though it would of been nice to have a few flashback episodes or sequences like LOST does about all the crew.

My own version of Enterprise would of kept the Sulbian but as a dying species whose DNA allows them to be genetically mainuplated and are pawns of the Romulans working behind the shadows for there own agenda instead of TCW man who was probably a Roumlan anyway. You could of esclated it as the show went on eventually having a full season on the Romulan war. Take the Azati Prime final scene and turn that into a 3rd season finale of The Roumlans coming out of the shadows and pounding the NX01 hard. Also I would of changed the name to avoid the backlash/cannon issues something like Apollo since thats the most famous ship name in our history to date.

 

[JarodRussell]

I get the feeling that Berman and Braga, without Paramount's intervention, would have been able to come up with a show that would have been awesome. I read on Doug Drexler's blog that at one point it was planned to feature the ringship Enterprise and make space travel far more realistic, NASA style. Now that I read that Braga wanted to make it way more Earth-centric, I think that was the same idea. And it sounds awesome, imo.

The studio had then destroyed Nemesis pretty much, forcing Baird upon them, vetoing the idea of Patrick Stewart playing his own clone, etc... . Paramount made some real bad decisions that made both Nemesis and ENT turn for the worse, when Berman, Braga & Co actually wanted to go into another direction.

 

[Danny99]

I got to agree with Jax on the point that it seems fishy of Braga bringing this out five years after the fact.

However, the ENT that Braga says he wanted sounds intriguing.

 

[star]

It all sounds like rainbows and lollipops... I mean he described a show that I might have been very interested in seeing.

And yet... what the heck happened with TaTV. When entrusted with a series finale, they, B&B, screwed us over royaly. So forgive me if I have a hard time believing it would have been as awesome as he makes it sound.

 

[Gaith]

The studio had then destroyed Nemesis pretty much... vetoing the idea of Patrick Stewart playing his own clone

Ooh, any documentation on that? I always thought that that would have been much more awesome. Better yet, it coulda been Mirror Picard, snatched from a MU!

And yet... what the heck happened with TaTV. When entrusted with a series finale, they, B&B, screwed us over royaly.

As one who appreciated the valentine to TNG fans, I say: speak for yourself. I know that those who don't mind TATV probably don't frequent the ENT subforum, but either way, it's got nothing to do with Braga's stated ideas quoted above, so it's not relevant.

Of course, a different premise - even a better premise - would not necessarily have meant a better end result. So we may as well leave the final quality speculation/comparisons aside, imho.

I got to agree with Jax on the point that it seems fishy of Braga bringing this out five years after the fact.

Right after ENT, Braga worked on Threshold for CBS. It probably wouldn't have done him any favors around the office if he'd blamed the suits for kneecapping ENT just to try to clear his name with the comparatively small online Trek community. Indeed, it's often the case that people become more honest about such things as time goes by, so I don't see anything fishy about it.

 

[Dukhat]

a. This is not new news. Everything Braga stated in that interview I already knew, so to me anyway, he's not "throwing suits under the bus," he's just reiterating old news.

b. People keep forgetting that at the time, Braga really thought TaTV was a good episode and a fitting send-off to all of Trek. Only later did he express that perhaps it wasn't as good an idea as he once thought.

c. It is 100% correct that UPN was primarily responsible for the silly decisions that ruined ENT as a legitimate TOS prequel, and eventually doomed the show to early cancellation. I also personally think that if UPN just let B&B do the show the way they wanted, without external studio influence, it would have been a much better and more believable show.

d. At least Braga admitted that he fucked up. I'd bet we'll never hear an apology from Dawn Ostroff about how her dumb decisions ultimately caused the show to get canned. I doubt Dawn Ostroff even gives a shit.

 

[star]

And yet... what the heck happened with TaTV. When entrusted with a series finale, they, B&B, screwed us over royaly.

As one who appreciated the valentine to TNG fans, I say: speak for yourself. I know that those who don't mind TATV probably don't frequent the ENT subforum, but either way, it's got nothing to do with Braga's stated ideas quoted above, so it's not relevant.

I think it's extremely relevant to speak of quality. I'm sorry but if we're all jumping on the "damn it was the suits who ruined ENT, if left alone B&B would have made it GREAT!" then I think it's perfectly relevant to talk about how they f-ed the ENTERPRISE fans in the finale. I love TNG, don't get me wrong.

I'm saying that the idea might have been great but I feel ambivalent because they were in charge of wrapping up the series for us and I'm pretty certain that the majority of the Enterprise fans felt a huge let down. The writing lacked the growth and just plain rational logic that the series had developed over time.

The concept is interesting... but I worry that the execution might not have been all rainbows and lollipops as it appears.

And I agree with another post that it's awfully convenient that this comes up so many years after the fact. Guess the gag clause in the contract was up?

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

[Gaith]

I think it's extremely relevant to speak of quality. I'm sorry but if we're all jumping on the "damn it was the suits who ruined ENT, if left alone B&B would have made it GREAT!"

Others may have intimated that, but that's not what I said: I was quite careful to word the poll in such a way that it wouldn't make any assumptions about the quality of the episodes that made it to air.

 

[BenRoethig]

If it was anything like season 4, I would have quite liked that Enterprise

 

[Tom]

Only if Manny Coto was in Braga place in the beginning of the series... Ah what could have been.

 

[Danny99]

I got to agree with Jax on the point that it seems fishy of Braga bringing this out five years after the fact.

Right after ENT, Braga worked on Threshold for CBS. It probably wouldn't have done him any favors around the office if he'd blamed the suits for kneecapping ENT just to try to clear his name with the comparatively small online Trek community. Indeed, it's often the case that people become more honest about such things as time goes by, so I don't see anything fishy about it.

So he let one show be drove into the ground to make sure he got another one? I can't blame him for greed, I just wish they had all decided to fuck over another show.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Ah, Enterprise. Every show since The Next Generation has generally needed a couple of seasons to really become regularly enjoyable, but alas, you only got a couple more.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I'm certainly in favor of ditching the idiotic TCW, but why hang around on Earth? The way to do a prequel series is simple: assume that Earth is less enlightened and united than in the 23rd C; that Starfleet is more military; and that resources are not unlimited and capitalism is not dead. In other words, the 22nd C is halfway between the 21st and 23rd. Not an unreasonable assumption.

So if Earth needs resources and there are worlds out there to trade with, then Starfleet has a motivation to start making alliances for economic reasons. If space is filled with dangerous, powerful alien empires - and we know it is - then Starfleet has a motivation to start making alliances for security reasons. And once they're out there, mixing it up with the big dogs, pretty soon they'll make enemies as well as friends through no fault of their own, and any number of stories can be extracted from that premise.

Building starships is not the point. The point is, how to make a show about Starfleet with no Federation? Simple. Earth plays the role of the Federation. TOS has already provided the story template since half the time, Kirk and the gang were doing the Federation's work, not "exploring" - checking on colonies, mining operations and looney bins; taking part in diplomatic maneuvering; and fighting off external threats.

I myself'd have loved to see a lot more Earth. Show us Starfleet politics, the civilian Terran government, and how they overlap. Start out with several potential captains, a la First Flight.

Star Trek has never been good at interestingly depicting internal political maneuvering. There's a reason that the Federation is a black hole that we know next to nothing about - the Star Trek story is not in the Federation, it's at the margins of the Federation, on the frontier, where the exploration and fighting happens. So if Earth is our "Federation," then the story is anyplace but Earth.

DS9 is the only series that made an attempt to show the inner workings of a society, with all the political and religious wrangling that implies - and the Bajoran stuff sent the ratings into a tailspin because frankly that stuff is a big fat bore to a lot of people. I liked it, but I can see why a lot of people called the show Deep Sleep Nine, and why the producers scrambled to bring in a war plotline, just to wake the audience up.

 

[I am not Spock]

I actually like Braga's original concept for ENT. I like the idea of building the ship on Earth. Its a shame the more familiar Trek trappings (phase pistols, photonic torpedoes, etc) and the TCW were forced on them by the UPN suits. We could have got a much more unique take on Trek than what we ended up with.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I think a few episodes of Starfleet people puttering around on Earth and getting into squabbles with Earth bureaucrats and politicians would have bored the spit out of the audience and the ratings would have crashed far harder than they did.

What kept the ratings going was the simple fact that bad writing is tolerable when you get to look at crazy aliens and alien worlds. But bad writing when we're stuck on Earth with the bureaucrats? Deadly!

And I have no evidence that Berman and Braga could turn in actual good writing, like the DS9 team did, that could take a challenging topic like "internal politics of a futuristic world" and make it seem even remotely interesting. I've seen TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT, and paid attention to who wrote what. Braga was good at telling zany stories but his writing has no emotional substance. Strip away the gee whiz elements by marooning the story on Earth, and we'd see just how shallow his writing is. For an Earth-based 22nd C story to work, you'd need DS9 writers.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Braga's a good, hard working guy and a fine writer. I hope he continues to do well.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Braga mentioned adding the temporal cold war at Paramount's request on one of the DVD sets so this is pretty old news. I'm moving soon so I've got my DVDs packed away so I can't check to see which one it was on. It might've been on the Broken Bow commentary. He's said it in several interviews over the years so he just didn't come up with this recently.

 

[number6]

B&B wanted "The Right Stuff" of Star Trek.. The TCW was added because UPN/Paramount didn't think their concept was futuristic enough. UPN mandated the familiar Trek trappings and a lot of rehashed storylines. UPN did the same with the Twilight Zone (which was supervised by Ira Behr.) and kept retooling all their non reality shows they had on the air every time UPN changed their target audience. This is why we had the Rock on VOY!!

People want to keep dumping on everything B&B say, it's your choice, but get your facts straight for a change.

 

[Jack Bauer]

I remember that Braga said that they originally didn't include the trasporter but UPN wanted it so they put it in. But I liked how they had them use shuttles more of the time so it was an end around the dumb suits.