Chaos on the writing staff

When I joined the writing staff of Next Generation, there was still a great deal of mail coming in from people saying, 'Well, yeah, it's good, and we like Picard, we like Data, but it's not the original.' A lot of comments saying it's just not as good as the original. I think, by the end of the third season, that changed.

Well, I think the third season was a breakthrough season in a lot of ways for Star Trek � The Next Generation. Because Rick Berman and I and Gene Roddenberry, found a very, very clear vision for what we wanted to do.

I think there was a great deal of conflict on the writing staff prior to my arrival. And I just basically said, 'We're not going to play politics.' They had a reputation of being one of the worst writing staffs to work on, not that it was turning out bad material, generally, but it was very, very contentious.

A lot of writers had a lot of problems dealing with Gene's universe, because, as everybody knows, Gene liked the idea of Humanity being far more perfect than they are today, no petty conflicts, no jealousies, the kind of emotional context we find in today's television story telling was not available.

So when I got there, I basically looked around and said, 'Look, this is Gene's world, how do we do what he wants us to do in a creative and successful way?' And it hit me, right from the beginning, with the very first story that we had to deal with. when I got there, we were in the third or fourth show of the season. There were no stories in development, there were no scripts in development, there was a great deal of chaos on the writing staff.