At the last Star Trek convention in Las Vegas (where William Shatner was a featured guest) my sister and I went to one of the sales booths and bought the DVD that Shatner did on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “Chaos on the Bridge.” Shatner both wrote and directed this documentary, which runs an hour long, so one may wish to take it with some grains of salt. For the most part, he lets his subjects, the producers, writers and stars of TNG, do the talking. But Shatner, as he does, comes up with his own arc on a subject, and he sees the development of The Next Generation under original series creator Gene Roddenberry as a study in “the struggle for power.”
Paramount Studios, which owns Star Trek, had wanted to do a new series in that universe, while Roddenberry was in many respects out in the wilderness, not just because of the failure of his post-Trek projects in the early ’70s, but because of the “epic disaster” of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the original cast. As original series writer David Gerrold puts it, “they gave him this Emeritus status, and he was a has-been.” At the same time, the various executives at Paramount who wanted the new series were simultaneously at odds with Roddenberry and convinced that they needed him to guide the new project. There are a lot of poker metaphors around this process of gamesmanship, which is also a recurring element in Next Generation.
While Shatner doesn’t really go into his Captain Kirk persona, fans of the first series will know that Roddenberry often placed Kirk as a symbol for himself, doing scripts where Kirk was split into his good and evil selves, artificially aged and otherwise forced to deal with internal challenges to his power and command. (Ironic, given that Trek fandom also gave us the phrase ‘Mary Sue.’) There’s a brief bit where someone points out that in his prime, Roddenberry saw himself as a womanizing, man-of-action type, and so made Kirk out to be that figure, but in the late 80s, when Next Generation was made, he saw himself more as the wise guide to his staff, and so made Captain Picard more in that role, the traditional executive who dispatched orders to the away team. This less active tone was a huge challenge to the writing staff in TNG’s first two seasons, as numerous people have pointed out, because without character tensions between flawed human beings (which were a huge feature of the Original Series) there wasn’t much to go on, especially since the violence of the original series was also de-emphasized. Maurice Hurley was brought in from the action-TV genre as a de facto showrunner, and he found Roddenberry’s utopian concept of the new Federation “wackadoodle” but nevertheless saw his job as trying to maintain the show’s loyalty to that vision. It was only when the show started to lean against that formula, and take up character-focused episodes under Rick Berman and Michael Piller, that the quality really started to pick up.
To simply make TNG in the first place, Paramount had to produce it in first-run syndication, which prior to cable and Netflix was the best option for a series independent of the networks. As a result it didn’t get a lot of respect, and a lot of things, and people, fell by the wayside. Denise Crosby has talked about how she ended up quitting the show out of frustration (after negotiations that Patrick Stewart likens to the Israeli-Palestinian talks), but she also amusingly points out that the support staff was so meager that “I used to go steal food off the set of Cheers.” What I didn’t know was that similar conflicts had led to the temporary removal of Gates McFadden as the ship’s doctor and her one-season replacement by Diana Muldaur. But producers pointed out that things didn’t gell with her on the set, and Muldaur, who had been on the original show, tells Shatner, “when I worked with you, we had scenes, it was all actors… by the time you got to Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was a vast technical world that had some characters placed in it.”
Such observations make this a fascinating piece to watch. However, while Shatner confines his study to the first three years of Next Generation, he doesn’t always do so in the most organized manner, and while the one-hour length means that there isn’t too much to process, it also may not be enough in some cases. For instance, Shatner really seems to hit it off with Jonathan Frakes, but he doesn’t appear in the documentary that much. Moreover, the theme of internal power struggle is often suggested but never really elaborated, perhaps because a lot of the participants are alive and agreed to talk. However while they are not explicit, the writers and other collaborators of Gene Roddenberry are quite clear that he was suffering both physical and mental decline in his final years, and prior to Next Generation needed to kick alcohol and other recreational drugs. In this respect, it’s sort of like Shatner’s opinions of other people that he’s worked with in the past and who are no longer here to tell their side of the story.
However, most of the principals of Star Trek: The Next Generation are still here, and their story is still well worth telling. Chaos on the Bridge presents a second act for both Gene Roddenberry and the universe he created, and the drama of the piece is that, with all the things that could have happened differently, it’s amazing that it happened at all.