Idk much about him, but I keep reading here and there that he was terrible. How did he manage to write Star Trek episodes if he was those things?
You can be brilliant in some ways while being useless or a POS in other ways.
Steve Jobs was an excellent salesman and marketer. He was an awful father and thought that a fruit-only diet would cure pancreatic cancer. Then, when he realised his curable cancer became incurable because of inaction, he jumped the organ donor queue (because apparently in the US money lets you do that), which not only didn’t help him, but also likely killed someone else who it could’ve saved.
Richard Stallman is an excellent steward of open source software and user freedom in software, and he has been very prescient of the shit that would ultimately come from proprietary software. But he is also a major creep to women and a staunch defender of paedophilia and bestiality.
Someone I knew, before she passed away, was enormously selfless. Gave everything she had to others, fostered a lot of children who all grew up to be great people. Lived with almost no money because she preferred to spend it helping other people, was a big pusher of LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s, helped run a centre that helped HIV victims, never spoke up about the good she was doing because she preferred to keep it a secret… was (astounding to me) enormously racist.
People are complicated.
That last one speaks to how some people try and redeem themselves despite their flaws. We’re not all cut and dry. You can still be a good person, even if you’re flawed, provided the good you do outweighs the the bad. I would also throw a caveat in there, in that you’re actively trying to address your faults, too. Doesn’t do much good if you’re burning crosses and houses to the ground, and then taking in the resulting foster children lol.
None of us is wholly good, none wholly bad, but all of us can strive to be better, to be kinder, to improve.
Kill your heroes. Not because everyone is evil, and not because there is nobody worth following, but because nobody is worth following blindly. Nobody deserves to be idolized. Strive to be better, look to others as inspiration, look to the past as inspiration even, but remember that just because you do or don’t see someone’s flaws doesn’t mean they don’t have any or that they don’t have anything but those flaws
Berman wasn’t the one writing or directing, he was the executive producer. which means he also wasn’t producing, he was the one who signed off on other people’s work. Read: he vetoed a lot of good ideas out of fear it would anger the studio. As progressive and intelligent as Star Trek was, he kept it from being so much better.
The writers and the lower producers did what they could. Sometimes sneaking around behind his back to make sure something was shown or said.
For example, Roddenberry wanted an LGBT character as far back as TOS, but it got vetoed by Berman. That would have been incredible for 1960.
I think he also did it when Frakes wanted the non-binary alien he flirted with in one episode to have a male actor instead of a female one, but that also got vetoed.
This comment confused me because Berman didn’t work on Star Trek until The Next Generation. He couldn’t have vetoed anything on the Original Series.
The main source of pushback during the 60s was the NBC executives (despite Lucille Ball and her DesiLu production company championing the series). Star Trek was constantly threatened with cancellation, then moved to a graveyard time slot for season 3, then was finally cancelled due to “ratings.”
As an aside, perhaps that speaks to just how great Gene Rodenberry was to have created the show in the first place? Here’s an awesome comic about him.
He survived THREE plane crashes? I don’t know if he’s the luckiest or unluckiest guy ever.
