Rick Berman

About this episode

Rick Berman says there were three strikes against the job: it was science fiction at a time when nobody made science fiction for television, it was a sequel, and it was going out in syndication instead of on a network. He and his wife Liz talked it over and, by his own count, it took about six minutes to decide to go for it. That decision gave us Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and the films, and it all traces back to an eye roll in a Paramount meeting that got him invited to lunch with Gene Roddenberry. On Dropping Names, Rick tells Brent and Jonny how Bob Justman came back from a reading at UCLA insisting Roddenberry meet an English actor named Patrick Stewart, how Gene declared that no bald Englishman was going to be his next captain, and how Rick decided that was not actually the end of the conversation. Along the way Brent admits he nearly walked out of his own audition rather than play Data as a machine, Jonathan confesses to wearing the same unwashed shirt through seven auditions for Riker, and Rick explains the rule that whoever said a name first set the pronunciation for the whole series, which is how Data became Data. There is also