Re: Did gene's lack of nco's hurt believability of tng in early season
There were far worse offenses done by Roddenberry, or rather in his name, that did more damage to TNG in the early years than not having any non-coms.
Like what? B & B were the real damage inflictors
B&B didn't come to run the franchise until the mid-run of VOY. Let's not digress into yet another "discussion" of what those two did or didn't do to Trek. Here the OP was asking in regards to the early seasons, particularly one and two when Roddenberry had more direct input before he's health really started to decline.
Roddenberry, as has been documented in various Trek-related text and discussed here on these boards, was not a saint. By TNG, he fell into what I like to call "Ayn Rand Syndrome" where he grew to believe his own press and the accolades/worship that he got from Trekkies. He saw Trek not as a vehicle for good storytelling, but rather a platform for the so-called utopian vision that the media and fans stamped upon his creation. The early seasons, especially, smack of this philosophical soapbox.
His policy of "no conflict" hurt the characters and the series early on in that the TNG characters, with the exception of Data and Picard, felt like cyphers fulfilling a part rather than being distinct. Interchange any of them and the plot of the story doesn't change. Characters, and the audience, grow and learn through conflict and adversity. Piller tried to fix some of this, but the damage was done and the characters, for me, still felt like a function of plot rather than fully-developed people whose world-views and choices organically effect the plot. In other words, solutions came from tech rather than character. Unlike in TOS, where Kirk, Spock and McCoy's different outlooks allowed the plot to move and change because of who those people were. Those three, working together and occasionally disagreeing, allowed solutions to come from their choices rather than "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow."
Roddenberry, in the first season, allowed his lawyer to run amok which resulted in departure of David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana. Roddenberry, through his lawyer, didn't give Gerrold the proper credit for writing the TNG bible. Imagine if those two had stayed, we'd might have gotten better written science-fiction stories that didn't rely on technobabble as solution.
Speaking of which, Roddenberry in early statements stated that he didn't want to work with SF writers because he'd worked with them before on TOS and found that many of them couldn't write television or were difficult to work with. Instead, he surrounded himself with television writers like Maurice Hurley, who in interviews has always come across as a little too Hollywood, in the early seasons.
He also dictated that there be an A and B plot structure to TNG, but still kept the series relegated in 60s and 70s storytelling format whereas the one-hour drama had already become more sophisticated with shows such as
Hill Street Blues and
St. Elsewhere.
Roddenberry was a great visionary and I would've loved to have seen what Trek would've been like had he carried forward with the Trek 'verse from TMP, but he was a human. As such, he was fallible, as we all are, to his ego and his proclivities. The damage of his drug and alcohol use combined with his ailing health and his ego, did a lot more to hurt the first two seasons of TNG than not having seeing any NCOs.
