Facing the challenge of creating new Star Trek

I had very little to do with creating The Next Generation. It was very much created Gene Roddenberry. although I worked with him from the very beginning on it.

I would say, undoubtedly, the biggest challenge was all the nay-sayers, all the people that were saying, 'This TV series that we hold in such esteem, that has been off the air for seventeen years, how dare you think that you're going to put a new bunch of guys onto a starship called Enterprise. How dare you think that you're going to have somebody who's going to take the place of Captain Kirk!' There were a lot of people put their nose in the air and had an attitude of 'You can't do this.' The question was always was it going to work? There were a lot of negatives. It was a sequel, which had never worked in television before. Science fiction was not very popular in the mid 80s, there was no science fiction on the air. It was going to syndication in the United States, and there were really no successful one-hour syndication series on the air.

We had a lot of strikes against us as we went into this. We were just hoping that the nay-sayers would be won over, would be seduced. In very short order we had all the fans loving it, and we got great response from the press. The series did remarkably well, even though it was a sequel, even though it was in syndication, and even though it was science fiction.