All credit goes to the amazing Luna over on Tenforward.social.
Seriously. A fucking awesome person with an even better taste in memes. Also great at giving hugs and a thousand times funnier than I am.
PNG template for the ‘This Guy Sucks’ part can be found here as provided by the equally epic and truly wonderful Maurice over on Tenforward.social, although originally created by ‘ihaveaweirdidea’ over on Tumblr.
So happy that I’ve been able to spend my time lately around two people who are so kind, generous, and incredible. You could do a lot worse than following them on Mastodon. Just saying.
For those who don’t know how much Rick Berman sucks:
“He’d comment on your bra size not being voluptuous. His secretary had a 36C or something like that, and he would say something about ‘Well, you’re just, like, flat. Look at Christine over there. She has the perfect breasts right there.’ That’s the kind of conversation he would have in front of you. I had to have fittings for Dax to have larger breasts. I think it was double-D or something. I went to see a woman who fits bras for women who need mastectomies; I had to have that fitting. And then I had to go into his office.”
– Terry Farrel
“Apparently someone had told Whoopi that we had written the episode, so she came over and started asking us if she could change one of her lines. And we were like ‘Oh you have to talk to Rick Berman. That’s Rick Berman’s domain. Only Rick Berman can go through and change the dialogue.’ There are some shows where actors just ad lib their lines, then there’s Star Trek where you have to say exactly what’s on the paper. So, I as a courtesy said I would let the production office know that she had a question about the script… Rick’s response was ‘Why the hell was Whoopi Goldberg talking to Eric Stillwell? What was he doing on the set?’ The next thing I know, I’m banned from the set. Just for passing on a message… and it was humiliating, on my episode, that I’m banned from the set.”
– Trek writer Eric Stillwell
https://heavy.com/entertainment/star-trek/eric-stillwell-working-with-rick-berman/
Unfortunately, the article also says Brent Spiner is a big defender of Berman.
Don’t forget the fact that he was aggressively homophobic and refused Gene’s wishes to depict the HIV/AIDS crisis in multiple episodes or even have a gay character on the show, including blacklisting a script about the crisis titled Blood and Fire. Not to mention shooting down the Garak/Bashir connection that both actors actively wanted and refusing to allow Malcom in Enterprise to be gay despite his actor also specifically playing him as gay.
Then there’s the fact that he aggressively tore Denise Crosby’s badge off of her shirt on her last day then lied about it on Twitter saying that she ‘gave it to him’. Or the fact that he’s the SOLE reason that Tasha Yar’s legacy is being forced into sexual slavery for a high ranking Romulan. Or that he constantly fought with Marina Sirtis about her contract as well. Or that he forced himself on a ton of writing credits just on the off chance that someone might potentially sue him. Or the fact that he was micromanaging everything to do with DS9 and only got worse with Enterprise. Or the fact that he fucking breathed this morning.
Fuck him.
Unfortunately, the article also says Brent Spiner is a big defender of Berman.
Data wasn’t perfect. Why should Brent Spiner be. That being said, that’s a hell of a character flaw…
Don’t forget the fact that he was aggressively homophobic and refused Gene’s wishes to depict the HIV/AIDS crisis in multiple episodes or even have a gay character on the show, including blacklisting a script about the crisis titled Blood and Fire. Not to mention shooting down the Garak/Bashir connection that both actors actively wanted and refusing to allow Malcom in Enterprise to be gay despite his actor also specifically playing him as gay.
There was also the push to have a male actor play the main androgynous alien in The Outcast that Riker falls for. Frakes was all for it. Berman nixed it.
I meant to add that and it just passed over my head in the fit of rage I was having while typing that.
I can’t blame you for that. There’s just so many things to say when it comes to what a horrible person Berman is.
I try not to hate people anymore. It’s just too exhausting. I did before, a lot of people, and I’m just so tired.
But that man?
I could be on my deathbed and would still put on a Grandpa Joe type display if I found out that scum-covered amalgamation of used condoms had finally fucking died.
That’s a hell of an epthitet. Well said. Damn.
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Oh no I get what you mean, it’s clarification. I wasn’t super clear there. I didn’t mean the actor was gay but that the actor had definitely played the character as gay.
Also: “Since the early 2000’s, several writers of Star Trek material, such as David Gerrold[10][11] and Andy Mangels,[12] have criticized Berman’s participation in removing and minimizing LGBT themes from multiple Star Trek series, including The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.[13] Berman has responded by saying that he took full responsibility for the lack of such characters and that he had been working with other producers on including gay characters,[14] telling Kate Mulgrew that such a character would be included “in due time”, though no such characters would be included during his time as producer.[15]”
Didn’t really know who this guy was before but what a fucking creep.
Holy shit. Dudes a scumbag.
There are some shows where actors just ad lib their lines, then there’s Star Trek where you have to say exactly what’s on the paper.
Sorry, neither!
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As much as I hate him, I also hate actors who change and ad lib lines. Someone went through this work to phrase or develop a conversation or monologue, stayed up to make it the way they want, then an actor comes and changes it. I realized that while watching the making of Sopranos and David Chase explaining how disrespectful it is to to writer. But yeah Berman sucks.
Maybe, just maybe the actor is more invested in their particular character than the writer. Or maybe the line suits the actor better.
It’s disrespectful for the writers to expect actors to play their characters without putting anything of themselves into the act.
It should absolutely be a collaboration, and not one side dictating to the other, with no feedback allowed.
But I’m not going to downvote a contribution to the conversation just because I disagree.
Like David Chase once said to Tony Sirico when Sirico said “my character wouldn’t say that”
“Your character?? This is MY character mother fucker, I wrote him”
Everyone needs to stick to their job and not fuck with the jobs of others. Collaboration is ok, but not on most shows, as most scripts are written just the way they’re meant to be said
But it’s not there character any longer, they gave them away. The writer isn’t going to be able to, much less should they dictate every little detail about a performance. Those details are so important to a charter, you can’t say a charter is solely the writers creation.
Sometimes the actors know their characters a lot better than the writers. For example, in the empire strikes back, the original script had Han saying something else, whereas Ford came up with the ‘I know’, which fits much better with his character.
Kershner: (Tries it out) “I love you.” And you say, “Just remember that, Leia, because I’ll be back.” You’ve got to say, “I’ll be back.” You must. It’s almost contractual!
Ford: If she says “I love you,” and I say “I know,” that’s beautiful and acceptable and funny.
Kershner: Right, right.
Or Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner.
One of the most influential science fiction monologues was ad libbed, and it’s so much better than the original script.
Original script:
“I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium… I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments… they’ll be gone.”
Hauer’s monologue:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”
Huh. I always assumed Rutger Hauer came up with the ‘Tannhäuser Gate’ part.
I’ve worked in all sorts of performance disciplines. Comedia dell’arte, High clown, low clown / children’s ents, improv, film, theatre in pros-arch, round…, puppet , Grotowskian devised theatre, Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed…
Only one small subset of that work demands word-perfect adherence. Performance is much more than post-Stanivlaskian Aristotlean drama.
Even Beckett, who was completely, insanely anal about everything from the design of the tree in Waiting for Godot, to the size of the spotlight in Not I, to the length and timing of the tapes in Krapps Last Tape, still made on-set changes right up to the performance.
Not to mention, often on set the script supervisor will sometimes give you last minute changes between takes.
Then, no script is ever perfect. I did Glengarry Glen Ross (which is suuuper tight in terms of interruptions, e.g.
A: “And a man has to shiver in his…”
B: “…shoes…”
A: “…boots…”
B: “…shoes… boots…”
A: “…And for what?” )
But one night the cop missed his cue during one of the sections where people are coming in and out of the office to be interviewed, and I’m (as Roma) trying to put the screws on the guy from the Chinese restaurant so I have to keep vamping on convincing him not to call his wife until the cop remembers to come out and confuses him for Shelly Levene.
It’s so much better for the audience for me to vamp than it is for us to stop the play and go and tell the actor he missed his cue. The show must go on.
It’s crazy to think how much better an already awesome show could have been without this fuckwit in charge.
Fuck this guy forever.
I think Berman was a great fit for following up Gene Roddenberry when it came to producing Trek.
He had some interesting ideas, a somewhat positive outlook on the future, terrible misogynistic views, surprisingly conservative takes while preaching progressive space communism at the same time, awful antics behind the scenes, and was a difficult person to work with in general, just like Gene. I don’t think Berman had quite the “this backstory sounds absurd even for fiction” life before Trek that Roddenberry had, but they both sucked in similar ways when it came to Trek.
I find it somewhat interesting that many women in Trek have terrible stories about him, but Kate Mulgrew doesn’t seem to dislike him all that much. Perhaps it’s because Janeway is one of the few female characters with decent writing (poor Denise Crosby) that didn’t get overtly sexualised on the regular, or maybe it has to do with the shit she started when the studio brought in Jeri Ryan as the Tits’n’Ass character. There’s something complicated going on there for sure.
Who knows what would’ve happened if someone else had taken over the show? I bet actors wouldn’t have had to deal with the crazy hair obsession, but Berman did manage to turn a heavily criticised sequel (remember, everyone hated TNG when it first came out) into what I consider to be the golden age for Trek. I have to question if any nice, likeable person would’ve been able to please the networks and their execs to make all of that possible.
Discovery and Picard were free to develop independent of him, and they felt so very different. They’re so depressing and dark, down to the ship designs. With Picard they had the advantage of characters with a backstory and Discovery managed to make their characters interesting after a few seasons, but I would’ve taken more Berman-like work over either. I hope they keep up the SNW approach from now on, because their previous directing choices in the other two shows almost made me skip SNW.
It’s entirely possible that Mulgrew terrified berman.
Probable Kate is amazing
This is… troublesome and really demonstrates a massive lack of understanding of what happened behind the scenes. I think you need to watch this. It’ll lay out a lot of things that you don’t seem to be aware of. You’re giving Rick Berman a lot of credit for things he just simply never did.
He had some interesting ideas, a somewhat positive outlook on the future,
This outright false. Rick Berman said on numerous occasions that he didn’t believe that the future could be a utopia or anything like it but that when you’re making Star Trek you have to believe it. He did not have a positive outlook on the future.
I don’t think Berman had quite the “this backstory sounds absurd even for fiction” life before Trek that Roddenberry had, but they both sucked in similar ways when it came to Trek.
Berman had literally no life before Trek. The only thing he had done in TV was a childrens show. Also gonna need you to elaborate on how you think Gene sucked here because I see no similarities between that abhorrent pile of filth and Gene.
I find it somewhat interesting that many women in Trek have terrible stories about him, but Kate Mulgrew doesn’t seem to dislike him all that much.
Well, she did, but not as publicly. Why? That’s because Kate Mulgrew and Rick Berman are cut from the same cloth. Kate Mulgrew was bossing people around on the set of Voyager like she was the Queen of it. She was actively referred to as “The Queen of Voyager”. She tried to prevent Jeri Ryan from being able to use the bathroom while on set because “it takes too much time to get in and out of that catsuit.” Jeri Ryan herself commented numerous times on the active torture that she recieved on set from Mulgrew. That whole “Mulgrew liked him!” isn’t the strong take that you think it is when that woman was a fucking nightmare to her co-stars and just a fucking nightmare to people in general. Both Jeri Ryan and Garrett Wang have talked about how toxic she was to work with. Moreover, Kate Mulgrew had difficult times during negotiations herself. Rick Berman would also call to randomly say “You should eat something” because Kate was stressed on set and losing weight. So, once again, negotiations with a woman were an utter nightmare and Rick would call before scenes to taunt the actress.
Who knows what would’ve happened if someone else had taken over the show?
And that matters how? Why should we be happy with the mysognistic homophobic piece of human garbage that we got just because things might have been different?
Berman did manage to turn a heavily criticised sequel (remember, everyone hated TNG when it first came out) into what I consider to be the golden age for Trek.
No he didn’t and to say that is to absolutely ignore the work of everyone else on set and give far too much credit to a misogynistic piece of human filth.
Writers and actors have said on numerous occasions that the success of Star Trek had nothing to do with Rick Berman and was in spite of him. This was demonstrated in Enterprise as he proceeded to have way more of control over it. He was the reason for the decontamination gel, for instance, as well as outright ignoring characters of color and highly sexualizing female stars.
I have to question if any nice, likeable person would’ve been able to please the networks and their execs to make all of that possible.
You wondering about what could potentially be is not a valid reason to accept all the abhorrent things that Rick Berman did while in control of Star Trek.
Discovery and Picard were free to develop independent of him, and they felt so very different.
Yeah. That’s the point. They’re not supposed to feel the same because Star Trek is not a homogenized set of shows like everyone wants to keep pretending they are. You wanna talk about dark? Then we’re going to need to go back to Deep Space 9. A show that was notorious in having to hide stuff like the Dominion war from Rick Berman so it could be shown on screen. That’s right. One of the most beloved arcs, and critically acclaimed arcs, was actively hidden from Rick Berman so he had no involvement. Why? Because the show runner of DS9 knew that Rick Berman would meddle far too much.
They’re so depressing and dark, down to the ship designs.
That is your opinion and I really do not appreciate you trying to inject that in like it’s fact. Discovery and Picard are both dark, sure, but calling the ship design depressing is just flagrant bias which is extremely repugnant when you’re trying to use your own personal opinion to, once again, justify the actions and behavior of an aggressive homophobe and sexist.
but I would’ve taken more Berman-like work over either.
And I prefer the ideals that Gene himself instilled which were darker tones that focused on more harrowing examples of humanity. Rick Berman sanitized the show and turned it into an episodic piece of television that had to struggle behind the scenes and find its own voice despite the immense pressure from an executive who not only hated the concept of Star Trek but also had zero experience in working in this form of television and did not understand what he was doing.
Rick Berman said on numerous occasions that he didn’t believe that the future could be a utopia or anything like it but that when you’re making Star Trek you have to believe it.
Well, I agree with him on that, I’d doubt we’ll ever see a future as Roddenberry predicted, but we can still at least try to move in that direction. But after watching that video you linked I do think Berman is more of a cunt than I realised.
When I think about the success Berman brought, I don’t think success as in “a good story” or even “a good show”, but “he kept the shows on the air so the real voices behind Trek could do their thing”.
Also gonna need you to elaborate on how you think Gene sucked here because I see no similarities between that abhorrent pile of filth and Gene.
Gene wasn’t a saint. Credit to him, he had updated and corrected his views over the years, but he was homophobic during the TOS as much as Berman was. He had a surprisingly creepy, misogynist streak as well, and had some questionable opinions about Jews. I many ways Berman was worse than Roddenberry, that’s for sure, but Roddenberry wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine.
As for Mulgrew: she was a professional actor and (like Avery Brooks) took her role very seriously, but her childish bullying was a direct result of adding 7 of Tits to the show she tried so hard to show a strong female lead on. Mulgrew misdirected her anger at Ryan rather than blaming the people in charge and fucked up production and Jeri Ryan’s (working) life.
I don’t think Mulgrew liked Berman though, I believe she said something like “he wasn’t misogynistic against me”. It’s an interesting tidbit that Berman was smart enough to keep himself in check around her.
Why should we be happy with the mysognistic homophobic piece of human garbage that we got just because things might have been different?
Because Paramount was (and still is) a terrible company with unfathomable ideas about what makes them successful. I don’t think a progressive voice, at least as progressive as Roddenberry, would’ve managed to keep TNG around for more than two seasons, simply because of the reality of who was running Paramount. They hated the progressiveness of TOS and they didn’t like the forward thinking episodes of TNG that slipped past Berman either.
No he didn’t and to say that is to absolutely ignore the work of everyone else on set and give far too much credit to a misogynistic piece of human filth
Perhaps I was overly positive about him, let me be clear: I don’t see Berman as any kind of artist, or visionary, or a good person in general. He’s a manager, like a kind of Steve Jobs without the creative vision or Bill Gates without technical know-how. The golden era of Trek was great because he was too incompetent to accomplish what he wanted to.
You wondering about what could potentially be is not a valid reason to accept all the abhorrent things that Rick Berman did while in control of Star Trek.
I like the shows, I don’t like the guy. I’m not particularly fond of Gene “women suck the marrow out of your bones” Roddenberry either. I see Berman’s involvement as a business transaction, nothing more. He clearly doesn’t care about Trek as anything more than a business model either.
They’re not supposed to feel the same because Star Trek is not a homogenized set of shows like everyone wants to keep pretending they are
Obviously. That doesn’t mean I can’t dislike the tone or major decisions, though. Mushroom warp was a stupid thing to center a whole show around and “let’s make Picard run around in the past again” was a disappointing plot that felt like it should’ve been a TNG two parter rather than an entire season. There was a lot of potential in those shows to be different in interesting ways. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being different, Prodigy is very different but I also think it’s very good.
but calling the ship design depressing is just flagrant bias
They made the floors and walls dark grey or even shiny black and put up LED strips so you could still see there was a ship there. Maybe I need some kind of expensive HDR TV to see what they want me to see, but the colour choices remind me of myself as a moody teenager.
The ship interiors in Discovery and Picard just feel like flying iPhones to me, all dark grey and black with little colour and a ton of bright light to provide contrast and show how dark grey everything is.
DS9 had plenty of dark, drab, depressing environments, but there were bars and living quarters to bring some light back into the episodes. Most of the “business” areas in DS9 are depressing as well. DS9 had the benefit that they cranked up the brightness in editing, added a yellowish blend into the grey, and put a bunch of coloured lights and architecture all over the place to keep the background somewhat interesting.
Compare that to the enterprise in SNW which provides a warmly lit space with even more colour than the original Enterprise.
were darker tones that focused on more harrowing examples of humanity
That’s the thing though, you can show humanity struggling (and failing) to do the right thing without taking the progress the Federation has made since the start of TOS and saying “actually humanity decided to go genociding and turning xenophobic again”. Roddenberry’s scripts confronted humanity with (an extreme of) its own behaviour by making “the normal people” on board of the Enterprise run into weird cultures. There was no “Kirk learns not to be racist against Sulu” episode because instead there were space monsters that Kirk could learn not to be racist against.
Even in DS9 (The One With All The Warcrimes) the negativity is entirely focused on specific characters doing things they either regret or learn to live with. Sisko betrays everyone’s trust in him to get done what needs to be done, rather than the other way around. The Federation doesn’t ask him to fulfil his war crime quota, he decides where and when to war crime and deals with the consequences several times. This changes when Section 31 is introduced but even then the Federation appears to be on Sisko’s side, treating S31 as a rogue unit operating against everyone’s wishes rather than as a government that tells Sisko to shut up and just play along.
What also helped was the fact that DS9 had the occasional “the Ferengi go on an adverture” or “let’s all go play baseball” episode to give the viewer a break from the depression parade. If the show had started out with the Dominion war, I’m sure it would’ve turned into a depression fest as well. And honestly, if Discovery had stepped back more often, it probably wouldn’t be such a depression fest.
That doesn’t mean I think the Dark Trek shows are all bad. We fucking finally got gay representation, and they even added human nonbinary character rather than “wow this alien species doesn’t do gender”. They even managed to introduce the gay couple as something other than “look at the GAYS being GAY at each other” to some extent, which I doubt Berman could’ve even imagined. I actually like most of the weird characters (unfortunately I can’t stand Michael and Jurati, and I guess old Picard but he’s intentionally written to be a bitter old man) and I don’t think they were used as well as they could’ve been.
Rick Berman sanitized the show and turned it into an episodic piece of television
He sanitised the hell out of it, but Star Trek had always been a “one problem per week” show when he came around. There were callbacks and two parters, but the long, overwhelming arcs were something that wasn’t there before him. The Dominion War had to be hidden from him because he stuck to Roddenberry’s format.
I think the way things ended up, with episode by episode plots while also doing long term plot in the background, works a lot better than what modern shows do, turning a season of 10 episodes into a 10 hour movie with just one single plot. I have the same problem with modern Star Wars, Doctor Who, and even modern South Park where everything has to be one giant story cut into little pieces.
