Writer Ronald Moore was a Star Trek fanboy long before he joined Star Trek: The Next Generation, just as the television show found its interstellar footing during its third season. A few dozen sloppy episodes had left the impression that the show was nothing more than a sad clone of the groundbreaking ’60s sci-fi series.
“There was definitely a sense that The Next Generation was the Star Trek stepchild that nobody liked,” the Emmy-winning Moore told Wired by phone in a warp-9 interview about the series’ highlights and lowlights. “I’d go to conventions and see bumper stickers, T-shirts and paraphernalia basically saying that there was only one true Star Trek, and it wasn’t us.”
By 1994 — when The Next Generation capped seven seasons with the poignant, Hugo-winning series finale “All Good Things …” — the show had become the Star Trek franchise’s shining light, a critical and commercial television success.
With The Next Generation celebrating its 25th anniversary Friday, Wired talked with Moore about working with franchise creator Gene Roddenberry, how Trek movies differ from Trek TV shows, and why TNG would probably get airlocked today.
Wired: Reflecting on The Next Generation, how has the series affected you personally and professionally?
Ronald Moore: It’s really an amazing thing to look back on. There are personally a lot of different resonances. I was very young when I started on the show. It was where I learned my craft, and where I was introduced to the business of television production. It was where I learned to work with senior writers, and watch them come and go with the show’s politics. Those first few years held a big learning curve for me.
Looking back now on our workload, I just shake my head at our pace. Star Trek: The Next Generation was my first series, so I didn’t know anything about that when I started. I just assumed it was normal to make 26 episodes a year on a seven-day shooting schedule. Sometimes we’d do a show in six days, and it wasn’t uncommon for there to be days on the set where we shot nine or 10 pages. That was just our routine, but now I look back on it with horror. Doing that now would make me nauseous, especially since shooting for eight days is the norm out there today.
‘I’m touched and amazed to see the longevity of the show, and how many lives it has affected.’
Wired: For fewer episodes.
Moore: Thirteen episodes is a good comfortable number now. It was difficult doing 22 episodes of Battlestar Galactica. In fact, it was a marathon. I don’t know how in the hell we did 26 a year for The Next Generation. I do remember being exhausted at the end of every season, when we got two weeks off, which we had to beg Rick Berman for. The writers were always the first back in, and it was nonstop. But more than that, I’m touched and amazed to see the longevity of the show, and how many lives it has affected. I’m running into new and old fans in various parts of the business and in my personal life, because its characters in many ways have become as much a part of pop culture as the characters from the original series.
Meet the New Trek, Strong as the Old Trek
Wired: How easy was it for The Next Generation to win over fans of the original series?
Moore: That took a while. It wasn’t until the end of the third season — when the summer buzz over Michael Piller’s “Best of Both Worlds” two-parter had people wondering what happened with Picard and the Borg — that the show’s popularity started to exponentially grow. After that, suddenly we were Star Trek. We were true bearers of the torch. So it’s really gratifying to see that, this many years later, there is real affection for what we did.
Wired: You’re still carrying the Star Trek torch, as far as television is concerned. The Next Generation is the longest-running Star Trek TV series, which gives fans who didn’t grow up on the original series far more points of entry.
Moore: Yeah, we got the biggest run. I mean, with the original series, it’s three and out, and the third season is pretty shaky! [Laughs] When it comes down to it, there are really only two-and-a-half seasons of the original series, as the true fans will tell you. And the reverse sort of happened with The Next Generation: Its first two years were its rockiest. The show really found its footing and took off after that.
Wired: I remember that it felt like a literal passing of the torch, as Gene Roddenberry passed a couple years after The Next Generation finally found its rhythm and place.
Moore: I was there when he was still on the show, and even worked with him on a couple of episodes. He didn’t pass away until, I think, the fifth season. When I came in during the middle of the third season, he was still coming into the office every day, throwing out scripts, insisting on changes and being the boss. Gene was the great bird, and we all respected that, but his health declined in subsequent years.
I only had one real story meeting with him, on the Season 4 episode “Family,” which he didn’t like at all. In fact, he wanted to can it. We were in a meeting in Gene’s office with Rick Berman and Michael Piller, and he basically felt that in the 24th century, the quarreling Picard brothers would not have this kind of conflict. He thought it meant they had bad parents, and that humanity in the 24th century was just better than that. He thought it said something wrong about Earth and its people, and that Picard’s family wouldn’t stand for petty bickering. He just didn’t buy the concept.
We all argued about it, and he was pretty adamant. I was pretty shell-shocked when we all walked out of the room, thinking, “OK, now what?” But Rick and Michael just kind of looked at each other in the hallway, as something passed between them, and then told me to just go write my script and they’d take care of it. Which is what happened. I have no idea what they did! [Laughs]
Optimistic Futurism: Where No Series Has Ventured Since
Wired: It’s funny you argued at all, because the benevolent optimism about our universe, much less our planet, that Roddenberry envisioned for Star Trek and our future is hard to find in today’s sci-fi.
Moore: It was one of the defining characteristics of Gene’s vision of the Star Trek franchise. I’d argue that in the last few decades in America, when people are asked what they hope the future will look like, they still turn to Star Trek. They hope we put aside our differences and come together as humanity, that we rise above war, poverty, racism and other problems that have beset us. They hope that there’s a future where we set off into the galaxy to have peaceful relations with other worlds. They hope that technology is positive, that we break the speed of light, that we solve disease.
That’s really Roddenberry’s view of the future, and it really does stand alone. There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of. Certainly, not one that has penetrated pop culture awareness in the way Star Trek has.
Wired: Do you think Star Trek: The Next Generation would have a chance of getting the green light in today’s environment?
Moore: That’s hard to say. Because even back in the mid-’80s, The Next Generation didn’t go the network route. Paramount made the decision to put it in first-run syndication, which was an emerging market at the time, so The Next Generation kind of created first-run syndication market for scripted programming. You had shows like Cops and even a few first-run syndicated programs, but really nothing with the budget and weight behind it like The Next Generation.
So right from the get-go, Paramount just decided that they were going to foot the bill on their own and then sell it to individual syndicated stations across the country, and that’s what made it work. If they had to go to a traditional network, the development process probably would have killed it, or it would have gotten to pilot but would have been hanging on ratings every week. It was just a unique economic situation that allowed Paramount to put Star Trek: The Next Generation into the marketplace. And it succeeded wildly: The ratings were great and Paramount was making money hand over fist, although I’m sure they’ll deny that to this day. [Laughs]
Wired: There’s always more money to be made!
Moore: [Laughs] Whoever has a piece of the profits has yet to see a piece of the profits. But yeah, it did very, very well in syndication, although that market is not the same today as it was back then. If you were trying to make Star Trek: The Next Generation now, if you’re Paramount you’d be looking at pay-per-view, or streaming through Netflix, Amazon or someplace where it wouldn’t have to deal with network politics. They were wise enough to know that Star Trek had an enormous fan base and market, but that going the traditional market route just wasn’t wise. I mean, you could argue that the original series failed at the network level.
Rebooting Star Trek Television Isn’t the Movies
Wired: I know J.J. Abrams successfully rebooted Star Trek on film, and has a sequel in development, but it still stuns me that we have no new Star Trek series on television. What do you think it would take to make that happen?
Moore: People have to understand that the Star Trek films are a different animal. And that goes for the original series’ movies, as well as those from The Next Generation, and from J.J. By their nature, the Star Trek films are much more action-oriented, with space battles, big villains, lots of running and jumping. The stakes for Earth and the universe are always enormous.
‘To create Star Trek in the form that people are familiar with requires another television series, and I think it will be successful again in that medium.’
But the lifeblood of Star Trek’s television shows is its morality plays and social commentary. It’s sci-fi that provides a prism on human society and culture. The movies are never really going to do what the episodes do, like split Picard into two in a transporter beam and then talk philosophically about the nature of humanity, which parts of our strength come from good and which from evil. The movies are never going to do that. Star Trek: The Next Generation was about those moral issues, about how societies grow and are differently affected. None of these are topics that the movies are going to tackle.
To create Star Trek in the form that people are familiar with requires another television series, and I think it will be successful again in that medium. You have to spend some time talking about its form and structure, and how to update it again for a new audience. You still want the “boldly go where no one has gone before” part with a ship, crew and ongoing mission. That’s part and parcel of the franchise.
But you have to be able to tackle big ideas, which are larger than chasing the villain of the week. That’s really not what the series was very good at. I mean, you could look back at the original Star Trek series or The Next Generation and find some cool action-adventure episodes with space battles, but the show is about so much more than that. If you were trying to do that flavor of Star Trek on television every week, it would just fail.
Moore’s Law: The Best and Worst of Star Trek: The Next Generation (and Its Treknobabble)
Wired: Speaking of, let’s talk about some of your favorite episodes.
Moore: In terms of the episodes I worked on, “Tapestry” stands out as one that is very personal to me, because it had a lot of commonalities with my life. It talked about how we adults beat ourselves up over the many mistakes we made when we were younger, because we think they’re horrible transgressions. But with perspective, we see that those past mistakes are what made our present lives possible, and grow from it. “Tapestry” was really important to me. I loved that episode.
“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is another great one that I worked on. All of the pieces came together and it was a lot of fun. It was dark and interesting, and everyone had a ball making it. The Klingon episodes like “Sins of the Father” allowed me to explore another culture for the first time, and dig into how politics, religion and social mores would work in an alien culture, which was really a kick for me.
In terms of episodes from other writers, I really loved “Ship in a Bottle,” which was our second Sherlock Holmes episode with Moriarty. I really thought that one was clever and interesting. I thought that “Frame of Mind” was interesting in how it used a play as a bridge to drive Riker between reality and madness. I thought it was great fun, with an interesting story structure.
And then of course “All Good Things….” The final episode turned out beautifully, and it had no right to! [Laughs] Brannon Braga and I didn’t write it until the end, because we were really busy slaving away for a full year on the film Star Trek: Generations, trying to make that thing work. We didn’t write “All Good Things…” until a month before it was shot, and only for a couple of weeks. We just banged it out, and it worked 10 times better than the movie did! [Laughs] It’s such a wonderful end to the series. It just flowed. We didn’t have time to second-guess ourselves. We didn’t have time to go around and around about what it could be. It had to be good, and we had to get it right, and we did.
‘Endings are hard, especially for television, because expectations are so high.’
Wired: Which is another one of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s feats. There aren’t a lot of TV series whose last episodes offer lasting closure. I’m not naming names.
Moore: Endings are hard, especially for television, because expectations are so high. You’re trying to deliver an episode for people who have followed a show for years, who want to see resolutions for all of their characters and stories. And yet you’re also trying to tell a bigger and more interesting story than you have told before. We were able to bring all of that together for “All Good Things….”
Wired: Now let’s talk about some of your least-favorite episodes.
Moore: Oh sure. In terms of the ones I worked on, “Aquiel” was a low point for Brannon Braga and I. We thought we were going to do this intriguing murder mystery patterned after Otto Preminger’s film noir Laura, but it just misfired. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, when it got right down to it.
There were other stumbles, such as way too much Treknobabble overall in the series. It was always one of my chief criticisms, so much so that when I approached Battlestar Galactica I swore that I would never do endless scenes of technobabble to explain and resolve scenes. But yeah, there are definitely entire sequences that we could lose from the show and it would be much stronger.
Because we just had endless pages of Data and Geordi pressing buttons and speaking in gibberish. It was meaningless. I was just like, “What are they saying?” And of course I realize that what they are saying isn’t as important as they rhythm in which they’re saying it. Geordi says, “Set the deflectors to this,” and Data says, “No, that won’t work, Geordi, because the so-and-so polarity polaris won’t sync up.” So Geordi says, “Oh, but if we reverse polarity on the whos-it-whatsit, then maybe, just maybe, we might be able to push through the deflectors.” And Data says, “There is a theory that if you use the positronics….” And I’m just like, “What?”
Digging Into Data, Paragon Android
Wired: Speaking of Brent Spiner’s Data, he really stood out from beginning to end. Mostly because he, and not the other aliens and cultures of Star Trek: The Next Generation, was likely the closest any of the series’ viewers were going to get to its benevolent futurism.
Moore: He was a great way to examine the nature, soul, emotion and logic of humanity. To have a character so close to us, but still puzzled by things that we consider so basic. It was just a wonderful character, and a great piece of casting. It’s an example of great man and role, perfectly married.
Wired: It’s quite impressive that the original series gave us Spock, and then The Next Generation gave us Data, who together lord over quite a bit of sci-fi influence. Do you have any favorite Data episodes?
Moore: I worked on two of them that I really liked. One was “Data’s Day,” whose concept I loved. A day in the life of the Enterprise, told through Data’s eyes. I gave him a cat, and made him tap dance. I was really intrigued by the notion of what 24 hours on the Enterprise was like. I loved that episode.
Then I did one called “In Theory,” which was when Data gets a girlfriend. The truth about both Spock and Data is that they have huge female fan bases with massive crushes who fantasize about what it would be like to be these characters’ other halves. So we wanted to touch on that: What would happen to a woman that falls in love with Data on the Enterprise? Data would try to engage as best he could, but there might be limitations. I found “In Theory” to be a really interesting and bittersweet episode.
Wired: Speaking of interesting, I’m not sure what you’re working on right now, but if you can talk about it I’d really like to know.
Moore: I don’t have too much to tell you right now. I have a lot of irons in the fire, as they say, but nothing definitive. If I had something to say, I’d be happy to tell you!
Wired: I was interested in your reboot of the spy-fi Western The Wild Wild West. Or your detective Western Hangtown, but I wasn’t totally sure if that particular one rode off into the sunset.
Moore: Yeah, ABC decided not to go with it. That was very frustrating. They made a strategic decision that they didn’t want to do a Western, period. Because they said they loved the script and the characters, and said they bought three Westerns because they were so committed to it. But at some point, they just got cold feet and said they weren’t going to do Westerns after all, which was really disappointing.
Wired: I read that you were working on other shows in the romance and fantasy genres, but there is something about Westerns. “A Fistful of Datas” is one of The Next Generation’s coolest episodes. It’s a genre that I don’t think has been fully explored this century on television, although there have been some great merges like Firefly.
Moore: I completely agree. The Western is due for a renaissance. It’s almost because it’s not on television, and that it hasn’t been done well in a while, that now is the time to do it.
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