Jeri Taylor - Star Trek Screenwriting

Star Trek Screenwriting

Having previously written scripts for television series like Little House on the Prairie and The Incredible Hulk, and served as a producer and director on Quincy, M.E. and Jake and the Fatman, Jeri was recommended to the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation by Lee Sheldon, with whom she had worked on Quincy.

Jeri joined The Next Generation staff at the beginning of the fourth season as a supervising producer, co-writing the second episode to go into production "Suddenly Human" (which actually aired fourth). After two years, Jeri became co-executive producer with Rick Berman and Michael Piller and served as an executive producer for the final seventh season of The Next Generation. During this time she received credit on a number of episodes including Wil Wheaton's final episode as a regular character ("Final Mission"), the episode that introduced the Cardassian race, which featured heavily in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ("The Wounded"), and the first part of the two-parter that featured Spock ("Unification").

During the last year of The Next Generation, Jeri worked with Rick Berman and Michael Piller to develop the fourth Star Trek series, Star Trek: Voyager. When The Next Generation production ended, Jeri transferred over to the Voyager production staff and served as executive producer with Rick Berman during the first four years. At the beginning of the second season, when Piller moved to a reduced creative consultant role, Jeri became head of the writing staff and stayed in that role until the end of the fourth season, when she retired and handed over control of the writing staff to Brannon Braga.

During her time on The Next Generation and Voyager, Jeri wrote three Star Trek novels for Pocket Books: a novelization of "Unification" that she wrote at the same time she was scripting the first part, and two Voyager novels that expanded on the background of the characters she had helped create for the series. In Pathways, for example, she uses a fix-up presentation to describe several characters' childhood and early adult experiences leading to joining the Voyager crew.