TV Shows that you imagine were a nightmare behind the scenes

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Berman wasn't a leading influence during season 1 - but some very creepy later behaviour has been claimed about him. And he seems like a general dick, vetoing gay characters because he was homophobic, for example (allegedly).

Roddenberry is complicated. I think he did have some genuine liberal/utopian ideals that he put into Trek, but he always had a creepy side. He also pulled that stunt of writing (unrecorded) lyrics for the original Trek series's theme, just to take half of the composer's money.

Roddenberry had started doing coke during production of TMP (which explains a lot of the self-indulgence), then during the eighties went through a series of micro-strokes that gradually diminished him. As the film franchise had been taken out of his hands, his remaining ticket was TNG, and his obsession was to get rid of anybody who could replace him. That's why for instance David Gerrold, who had written the "bible" for the show was fired, and many of the returning writers and producers from TOS, like Robert Justman, were quickly sidelined, as they were regarded as threats. He was okay with Maurice Hurley as the head writer and show runner, and tolerated Rick Berman as the Paramount guy.

The strokes also pushed to the front some pet peeves of his, chiefly about sex, and made him a shadow of his former self. The guy had a reputation for rewriting overnight an entire episode with just the help of a typewriter and a bottle of bourbon. But he had turned into somebody who would just add sex to every script (I had once found on the Internet pages of an annotated draft for "The Outrageous Okona", and it was even more laughable than the completed script for "Justice") that the rest of the writers room or the S&P department had to clean up every time.
And when he was too diminished to go to the writers room, that's when the aforementioned attorney, Leonard Maizlich, took over and became his eyes and ears, and occasionally his ghostwriter.

Paramount ultimately confronted Roddenberry about his health, and he had to face letting Berman, who appeared harmless and consensual, take over the show while he would just become a consultant.

Berman is definitely some controversial personality, the way he handled Wil Wheaton, Terry Farrell, or any issue that could be regarded as edgy (like gay-related stories) is quite terrible, and he ran the franchise into the ground in the later years. But he also knew how to put together a good team, and he's indeed responsible for 16 continuous years of Star Trek, while Roddenberry was just fully involved for two (seasons 1 and 2 of TOS), plus TMP, then was there, in some diminished capacity, for the first two seasons of TNG. Most of what even his critics love about Star Trek was made under Berman's supervision, and not always in spite of him. He was the one who made it possible to expand the universe and to give a wider view of the galaxy.

[Replies From View]

I've experienced that when an old girlfriend I dated for eighteen months in the late eighties came up to me at a gig in 2009 and I didn't recognise her.

By the age of 110 people tend to lose their - how you say - "octogenarian vim".