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Originally Posted by Frazod

Wow, that was enlightening. Roddenberry basically ruined the first TNG season the way Lucas ruined the Star Wars prequels. Both were bloated, pompous asses with complete control who wouldn't listen to anybody else. I suspect that a big part of the show improving was a result of his failing health limiting his interference.

The whole documentary is worth watching and kind of gets into that. As Berman and Piller started exerting more control, the show definitely got better. I read this the other night about TNG's "Family" (which is a great episode at the beginning of S4 but which would have never got made if Roddenberry still had the same power he did in the first few years):

Ira Steven Behr: It was simple. I created this planet called Risa, which was a pleasure planet. The captain was stressed out and needed a vacation. He went on this vacation and there was a holosuite there – or a holodeck – I guess a holosuite, we called it.

Ronald D. Moore: It was a holodeck.

Ira Steven Behr: Holodeck. It said, “Face Your Greatest Fear!” and it was like a carnival place. It wasn’t what it became, this sensual, open-sexuality place – Gene turned it into that! It was like this carnival atmosphere place; a true vacation resort. And he thought, “Oh, cool, this is going to put me in a good mood. What I need is to fight some Klingons without thinking about the repercussions of it, or go after some Romulans or whatever it is.”

And he goes into this holodeck, and it was all about the captain being promoted to admiral, and losing the Enterprise, and Riker being bumped up to captain of the Enterprise. Basically, though we never really hit it on the head, it’s about growing old. Not to grow old, but your time of life changing and suddenly you’re not going to be the guy going off on adventures, you’re going to be sitting at a desk somewhere, SENDING people on adventures. That’s his greatest fear.

Gene went STARK RAVING MAD. It was like, “Picard fears nothing. If it’s time for him to grow old, to become an admiral, he becomes an admiral! He would not think about that, AT ALL. Picard is John Wayne!” Well, John Wayne had all kinds of fears and guilt and angers and bitterness in his best movies… “No. John Wayne is a hero, Picard is a hero, we are not doing this episode.” Even though I guess this had happened a lot on the show in the first couple seasons, it hadn’t hit us.

It hadn’t hit me, or certainly Ron either… it was just like, it’s dead! But Michael loved it, and it was gonna happen, and Rick was saying, “Look, there’s nothing we can do.” And that’s when Gene sat there, “…but I LOVE the pleasure planet! Get the captain laid!” “Patrick wants to get laid; he doesn’t do enough f—ing and fighting, you gotta get him laid!” Suddenly, it turned into sexual fetishes, and we were gonna have women making love to women in the background, and men kissing men… it’s like, I’m thinking, “I have entered into some kind of Phantom Zone. Some kind of strange new world!”

I walked out of the office, Gene’s office… and Gene was very nice, but it was like NO discussion. I turned to Rick, and I said, “Men kissing men? Women caressing women?” He goes, “Oh, don’t listen to anything Gene says. Write a story where the captain gets laid and has some fun.” And it was like, that was it. If that’s the show… and I wrote it, because I’m a whore! And, you know, it was okay, but it wasn’t what it set out to be. And that’s ultimately why I left.

Ronald D. Moore: And what a difference a year makes, because the next season, I wrote a show called “Family“. Picard goes back home to Earth, with his brother and so on. Same kind of setup, I wrote this story; he goes home and has this fight with his brother, it’s an old family animosity and bitterness that boils to the surface of these two brothers.

Gene HATES it. I had my version of this meeting, not by myself; it’s with me and Rick Berman and Michael Piller, we all go into Gene’s office. Gene goes through this whole thing about how much he hates this script. “It says terrible things about Picard’s parents; these brothers don’t exist in the twenty-fourth century; they have such profound personal animosities; this would never happen. I don’t buy any of this, this is not a Star Trek episode. There’s no action in this; there’s no jeopardy. We can’t do this show.”

I was like, shell-shocked. We walked out of the office, and I remember going into that hallway of the Hart Building with Rick and Mike and saying, “What do I do?” At that point, Rick and Mike just looked at each other and said, “Don’t worry about it; we’ll take care of it. Go write your script.” I went, “Okay…” and I went off and wrote it, and never heard another word. Somehow, they were then dealing with Gene in a different way and that script just went through after that point. He just stopped kind of throwing out scripts and chaning things from that point forward, and just started slowly to change.

http://blog.trekcore.com/2013/05/exc...view-part-ii//