Oh For Fuck's Sake...
Prior to
Star Trek Roddenberry was a capable TV writer. He wrote tons of episodes for lots of shows. He even won a Writers Guild Award for an episode of
Have Gun Will Travel.
To be fair, Roddenberry was a fine "hack" writer, not in the modern pejorative sense, but in the old sense that he could churn out material on a regular basis, much like Terry Nation. Coon was, too, albeit he had a lighter touch.
Via the project I am working on with
@Harvey I have had the opportunity to read a lot of the internal memos amongst the writing staff discussing various scripts, and those show very clearly that Roddenberry was the glue that put the things together. He'd remind the other writers when they'd deviate from the "action adventure" format the show was sold as. He'd make these great suggestions on how to ramp up the stakes, the drama, the tension. He wasn't always right, sure, but when you look at the memos you see that his idea hit/miss ratio is at least as high as Fontana, Coon or Justman (who suggested cutting their losses by killing the problematic scripts "The Doomsday Machine" and "The City on the Edge of Forever").
Did he write great episodes himself for his own creations? Debatable. His script for "The Cage" is pretty damned good— rampant sexism aside. His 2nd pilot script for "The Omega Glory" (which features the weirdest take on Spock
ever) and the episode finally developed from it is interesting in bits (the starship captain who goes native) then falls apart going for a kindergarten attempt at a
Twilight Zone twist. "Turnabout Intruder" is just dire because it sets up this fascinating premise and doesn't know where to go with it and slips into casual sexism.
The memos and draft scripts also make clear that Roddenberry was the originator of a number of things people have credited other writers for, i.e. Coon getting credit for the Prime Directive when it's right there in that 2nd pilot version of "The Omega Glory".
Pure speculation on my part but once he started producing his own shows he got too close to the material and lost perspective on his own writing. I think this led him to some bad working habits that his career never recovered from.
Pillorying him for his TMP novelization is fun but a cheap shot. Novels and teleplays are very different things. Many fine novelists can't write a workable screenplay or teleplay. The reverse is true of writers like Roddenberry. His ham fisted, inelegant TMP novel prose is about what you should expect for a TV writer trying to write such a thing.
I'm by no means saying Gene was a great writer. I'm by no means saying he was a great boss or always a fair collaborator. He did take credit for things others did, but if you read old interviews with him you see how often he says "we" and credits others for things they contributed. Yes, that changed over time as
Star Trek fandom became a cash-generating myth machine.
So, in conclusion, constantly diminishing him and his contributions is to do just what people accuse Gene of: stealing credit by giving it to other people.
