It's rather tame compared to what people here were saying about him eight or nine years ago.
Rick Berman: Yea or Nay?
- Thread starter BillJ
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It's rather tame compared to what people here were saying about him eight or nine years ago.
Definitely "Yay".
The demonisation of Berman has got to stop; it's a band-wagon-jumping reaction on the part of many fans that just embarrasses the whole fanbase. It's similar in "Star Wars" fandom with George Lucas, of all people.
Berman did an enormous amount of good for the franchise. His show-running for TNG was essential to that show's success; although DS9's fans seem to bristle under the truth, he also had an enormous amount of input into DS9 and its own success.
It seems most fans are unhappy with Berman for Voyager and Enterprise. In truth, I don't know much about either show, but they seem to certainly have their diehard fans so it's hard to say even then that he did 100% terrible job. Clearly some people liked his choices for those shows.
But the truth is, Berman was rarely solely responsible for anything you end up seeing on screen. Producing a TV show is a collaborative process, so even though he was at the top making final decisions, how those decisions end up being translated is collaborative.
I have a lot of respect and sympathy for the guy. I remember when Voyager first aired, Berman admitted he wanted to wait longer before launching another show, but Paramount basically told him if he didn't do it, they'd do it anyway and just get another showrunner. He went back and forth, but felt he owed it to Gene to try and steer the franchise on.
Somebody else made a good point - that if Berman was "guilty" of anything, it was sticking too closely to Roddenberry's ideals and trying to guess what he would've wanted. Berman has said all along, though, that this was his position; that he felt a responsibility to keep Trek in line with what Roddnberry had "taught" him; that even when his own creative instincts were pointing in a different direction, he held true to the "Roddenberry direction" as much as he could.
A wrong decision? Possibly. But he had his reasons, and I can understand them. And, when he could, he did try and allow stretching of the franchise during TNG and DS9. Perhaps he recoiled from it a little with Voyager, but then that show had a whole host of other issues (e.g. being on a network, the over-saturisation of sci-fi on TV in the late 1990s; "too many trips to the well" etc) that TNG never had to worry about.
I really hope his autobiography he's been working on for years eventually comes to fruition. Love him or hate him, it would make for a fascinating read.
The demonisation of Berman has got to stop; it's a band-wagon-jumping reaction on the part of many fans that just embarrasses the whole fanbase. It's similar in "Star Wars" fandom with George Lucas, of all people.
Berman did an enormous amount of good for the franchise. His show-running for TNG was essential to that show's success; although DS9's fans seem to bristle under the truth, he also had an enormous amount of input into DS9 and its own success.
It seems most fans are unhappy with Berman for Voyager and Enterprise. In truth, I don't know much about either show, but they seem to certainly have their diehard fans so it's hard to say even then that he did 100% terrible job. Clearly some people liked his choices for those shows.
But the truth is, Berman was rarely solely responsible for anything you end up seeing on screen. Producing a TV show is a collaborative process, so even though he was at the top making final decisions, how those decisions end up being translated is collaborative.
I have a lot of respect and sympathy for the guy. I remember when Voyager first aired, Berman admitted he wanted to wait longer before launching another show, but Paramount basically told him if he didn't do it, they'd do it anyway and just get another showrunner. He went back and forth, but felt he owed it to Gene to try and steer the franchise on.
Somebody else made a good point - that if Berman was "guilty" of anything, it was sticking too closely to Roddenberry's ideals and trying to guess what he would've wanted. Berman has said all along, though, that this was his position; that he felt a responsibility to keep Trek in line with what Roddnberry had "taught" him; that even when his own creative instincts were pointing in a different direction, he held true to the "Roddenberry direction" as much as he could.
A wrong decision? Possibly. But he had his reasons, and I can understand them. And, when he could, he did try and allow stretching of the franchise during TNG and DS9. Perhaps he recoiled from it a little with Voyager, but then that show had a whole host of other issues (e.g. being on a network, the over-saturisation of sci-fi on TV in the late 1990s; "too many trips to the well" etc) that TNG never had to worry about.
I really hope his autobiography he's been working on for years eventually comes to fruition. Love him or hate him, it would make for a fascinating read.
I'm already looking forward to the day where Abramstrek III sucks and then Abrams is suddenly the bad guy who ruined Trek forever.
I do not know whether to blame Paramount or Berman himself, but he had way too much authority (not so much control) of the franchise following Deep Space Nine (and the fantastic producer Ira Steven Behr). It was only until the forth season of Enterprise when Manny Coto gave the franchise more hope. I am not debating Berman was not a bad producer or writter, he was just stubborn. His work on TNG and early DS9 gets a yay but afterwords a nay. Brannon Braga did not help much either.
Hm, from what I've read, he had not enough authority. Especially with Enterprise, the studio constantly interfered. Personally, I liked Berman's initial ideas for Enterprise much better, they were actually fresher and more radical. Such as the Ringship Enterprise, having the first season set on Earth, etc... I think even the Temporal Cold War idea came from the studio.
Yep. They wanted something "post-VOY" with ENT, so Berman and company came up with the TCW to satisfy them. It wasn't something Berman really wanted to do, though, IMO.
No. Roddenberry remained firmly as the guy in charge actively running the show through the entire first season. Then, in the second season, Roddenberry was still actively involved, but he began to pull back somewhat. However, during the second season, the person most guiding the show below Roddenberry was Maurice Hurley. Only in season three did Rick Berman really take the reins and become the guy running the show.
This is all well documented. Pull up Berman's interview with the Archive of American Television. Or check out the quotes in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion". There's lots of sources which corroborate it.
^ Berman didn't want to do Voyager or Enterprise, feeling they should wait. And when convinced to do them, wanted to be more daring with the concept, such as having the Federation/Maquis conflict be a regular element on Voyager. He got shot down by the studio at every turn.
However, if any of us were in his shoes, where the studio says on one hand "we're doing this with you or without you" and on the other hand "we'll give you boatloads of cash if you do this," how many of us would turn it down?
However, if any of us were in his shoes, where the studio says on one hand "we're doing this with you or without you" and on the other hand "we'll give you boatloads of cash if you do this," how many of us would turn it down?
Berman wanted a maquis/federation conflict to be a regular theme on Voyager!?
Assuming that's true, I think there have been a lot of fans who are blaming Berman for things he never did. People have often complain that after the first episode of Voyager, there were only a couple of reminders that this ship had two separate crews who were former enemies. I've often said one season of Chakotay as captain after a mutiny, would have been awesome, and would have kept the audience in suspense of whether there would be another mutiny or not.
The great thing about the premise of Voyager is that they faced a different type of threat than the dominion or the borg presented, they faced the fear of the internal enemy; the two crews threatening to take and retake the ship.
Or at least that could have been what Voyager offered had they gone any where with it.
And now I hear Berman was in favor of the conflict? Wow.
And that just goes to backup my point that Producers do not have 100% control over the product they produce.
It's my understanding that the Network has more control than the producer.
Berman was a saint for keeping the dream of his friend Gene alive as long as he could. Although I'm not a fan of VOY or ENT, i respect that fact that they do have fans and brought happiness to millions. TNG had a great run on tv and while the movies could have been handled better I wouldn't consider them failures by a long shot. DS9 was some great television in it's later seasons. Brought a lot of character to the universe. Berman was a success. I think he should have bowed out sooner is all.
Nope. As I said before, Roddenberry stepped down from overseeing day-to-day operations of show during the first season, particularly after the departure of Bob Justman. He was running the show as I specified earlier, with Roddenberry giving final approval of what was going on.
Which basically just says the same thing I just did (corroborated by the Star Trek Encyclopedia). Roddenberry took on the role of "a front office supervisor," but Berman was the "daily showrunner" as far back as season one. But just because someone steps back, doesn't mean that they go away, just that they become less actively involved.
A lot of the problems Voyager had, which Berman and Braga are frequently blamed for, were in fact UPN's fault. The best example is Year of Hell, which Braga originally pitched as a season long arc which would have lasting consequences for the series. Berman gave the idea his approval, but then UPN stepped in and said the story could be no longer than a two-parter, and had to be reset at the end.
I recall reading somewhere, perhaps on these boards, that the reason actress Gates McFadden (aka Dr. Crusher) left TNG was because producer Maurice Hurley was harassing her and she came back to TNG after he left the show. Is that true and is there a reliable source?
Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
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Roddenberry's last writing credit for the series was "Datalore," the thirteenth episode produced. According to Rick Berman, "By two-thirds of the way through the first season...Gene had all but stopped writing and rewriting" (Engel, 1994, p.257).
Berman goes on to say, "The last three years [1989-1991]...virtually the only thing [Roddenberry] did every day was to get into his golf cart and go down to the set and chat with the actors" (Engel, 1994, p.257).
It seems like he was still involved with the series until the end of the second season, but not in the active capacity he had been during the first two-thirds of the first year.
I've never understood the series attitude of "it musn't contain long running arcs, networks might want to repeat the show out of order, etc etc"
Maybe it's just a British thing but we've had many different channels get their hands on Trek rights, from the 90s up until now, some with different levels of professionalism and commitment to others, and yet ALL of them have still started at season 1 and worked through them all in order.
They might pause a week or two for a sporting commitment or something else of that nature, but they always picked up next week right where they left off.
The only time I can ever remember the order being different is when Voyager was ending, Sky did a fan poll top ten episode rundown in the week before the finale, which meant they used up the rights to those episodes so in the next repeat run they missed out those eps, but once they reset themselves again it was back to normal.
Is this just a UK thing?
I don't know how TV works in the UK, but in the US, there are two things at work that have traditionally caused shows not to be allowed to do long arcs.
First is what you're talking about, potentially running the episodes out of order. That can happen when a show is in reruns, traditionally during the summer, because they don't have time to re-run every single episode from the previous season and may pick the "best" ones. Or it can happen when the show is later sold into syndication, where hundreds of individual TV stations get the rights to air re-runs of the show and can air them in whatever order they want.
But what I suspect was at play here is a second reason. And that is that networks, like UPN, have traditionally felt that if stories are more serialized and arc-based, it would hurt viewership because potential new viewers couldn't easily pick up halfway through the season and start watching without knowing all the backstory, and also that casual viewers who may not tune in every single week will be lost when they do turn in. That attitude has faded in recent years, with more and more shows given the freedom to do serialized storytelling. But for decades, that was the standard thought process in prime-time network storytelling: the biggest story you do is the occasional two-parter in order to keep the show accessible to new and casual viewers.
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