How much of Andromeda and Earth: Final Conflict actually came from Rodenberry? I was kind of under the impression that only the very, very basic initial concepts came from him, and that the vast majority of what was in the shows that we got came from the modern writers who actually made the shows.
E:FC was close enough that he got the writing credit on the pilot, but some changes were made by showrunner Richard C. Okie. Roddenberry's idea featured more malevolent aliens and was too similar to
V, so Okie made the Taelons more ambiguous in their motivations, so it was more like British colonialism -- they believed they were here to help us, but their worldview was so alien that their ideas of what we needed didn't mesh well with our values. That was the part that made it most fascinating, and it wasn't from Roddenberry. (Although once Okie was canned halfway through season 1, the show got dumbed down to the point that the Taelons did become more straight-up evil, at least the main one who was added by the second showrunner and ended up taking over as the main villain.)
Andromeda was a loose reworking of the
Genesis II/Planet Earth premise of a man named Dylan Hunt suspended in time, waking up in a post-apocalyptic world, and working to rebuild civilization, but since Kevin Sorbo wanted to do a space series, they revamped it from post-apoc Earth to an intergalactic far-future setting (and I actually do mean intergalactic, not just interstellar). They also tossed in an idea or two from a vague Roddenberry premise called
Starship that Majel Roddenberry had been trying to get off the ground separately for several years, mainly just the idea of a sentient starship AI as a main character. But the bulk of it came from Robert Hewitt Wolfe, largely reworked from some unused notes about a potential fall-of-the-Federation
Star Trek series.
I know this is heresy for a Trek fan, but I've never been that impressed with Rodenberry, and as I've learned more and more about him I've become even less impressed. It really seems to me that Trek's success was due more to the people he worked with, rather than Rodenberry himself. He had some good ideas, but it seems to me that they were vastly outnumbered by bad, weird, and at times kinda creepy ones.
I don't think it's heresy these days -- people have been questioning the Roddenberry myth and exposing his feet of clay for quite a while now.
He was a problematical figure, to be sure, and the only solo writing effort of his that I think was really good was "The Cage." But he did have some worthwhile ideas. He wanted to bring SFTV to a greater level of maturity and sophistication, to bring in ideas and writers from prose SF, to use SF allegory as a vehicle for sneaking social commentary past the censors, and to portray an optimistic future instead of the dystopias and apocalypses that were more the norm in that era. And while he had limitations as a writer, his work was still a damn sight better than pretty much any other non-anthology SFTV prior to the late '80s.
And a lot of the creepiness was, unfortunately, par for the course in that era. He was far from the only Hollywood producer who used the casting couch to seduce or sexually pressure young actresses. And despite doing that, he treated women relatively well in other ways, like making D.C. Fontana a story editor and hiring other female writers like Margaret Armen, and portraying a future where women were actually crew members on interstellar vessels, even if they were mostly relegated to expected feminine professions like nurse, secretary, and switchboard operator.
