A friend of mine recently bought a pile of Star Trek: The Magazine back-issues, and was kind enough to offer me a dozen or so that he was less interested in. Volume 1, Issue 24 immediately caught my eye because I was a fan of Gul Dukat; that interview was all well and good (his character really rose to prominence after I stopped watching the show, apparently), and I read a few more articles before coming to Creating the Bajorans.
While that article had some interesting points, I couldn’t help but note this growing annoyance in me as I worked my way through it. It wasn’t ’til I got to this quote by Ira Steven Behr, holder of the “creative reins” with his team of writers (according to the article), that I understood its source (my emphasis):
“When Winn became the Kai, it came as a total shock to us. It was one of those epiphanies that we had. It seemed so clear all of a sudden; what were we doing? We were moving in this one direction: Bareil must become the Kai. Then we think, “What the hell would we get from Bareil being the Kai? Just terms of drama, just in terms of a TV show that has to have 170-odd episodes, where does that help us?”
Now, I understand that authors can be surprised by the turns their stories take while they’re writing them, but could you imagine Joss Whedon or JMS saying that about a major twist in their shows while they were in production? This is at the heart of what I’ve called the ‘institution’ problem in television.
If you’ve been guaranteed a number of seasons (and I couldn’t have conceived that the number could be as high as 170 prior to reading this article) on nothing more than concepts, I would suggest your chances of producing greatness are considerably reduced. There’s little fear of the end; no fire under your seat, as it were. Plus, worst of all, you’re happy with open-ended story lines that wander ad infinitum as a fail-safe when the dramatic story arcs don’t come to you.
Oh well, no Star Trek series is on the air now, so one could say I’m railing against a problem that’s been solved. Really, I think I’m just lamenting the loss of Firefly, and the seven years’ worth of material in Whedon’s head.
