A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

“Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season One” In the fall of 1986, following the success of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”,  Paramount Pictures’ television division convinced  Gene Roddenberry to create a new Star Trek series. Roddenberry agreed after the studio agreed to give him creative control of the series, a condition he set because Paramount had placed Harve Bennett in charge of the post-”Star Trek: The Motion Picture” feature films several years before. The veteran “Star Trek” creator  reunited most of the Original Series’ brain trust, including D.C. Fontana, Robert H. Justman, Edward Milkis, and David Gerrold, and came up with a new concept built on the foundation of the 1966-1969 TV series and its movie spin-offs and yet stood on its own storytelling merits.     The new show was set almost 100 years after Captain James T. Kirk’s original five-year mission and featured a new Starship Enterprise. Given the Starfleet registry number NCC-1701-D, the   Galaxy- cla

One of the neat things about channel surfing on a hot, hazy and unusually lazy weekend afternoon is that sometimes infrequent TV watchers such as me can sometimes find new channels which have been added to the Expanded Basic lineup. Such was the case when, a few years ago I – purely by chance, mind you – was flipping through the channels on my family room television set when I noticed that Comcast (my cable provider) had added BBC America to the channel package I subscribe to.  This was a surprise to me – I don’t often scrutinize my bill for any lineup changes, and I don’t have the time to watch as much TV as I used to –  and I was kind of pleased even though at first I didn’t think it’d be too relevant to my TV-viewing tastes. That is, until I perused the then-current issue of  TV Guide  and noticed that BBC America supplanted Spike TV (the former TNN channel) as the go-to place to watch reruns of  Star Trek: The Next Generation,  the made-for-syndication sequel series to what is