Michael Piller - Star Trek

Star Trek

In 1989 a call to Maurice Hurley, a friend who had led the writing staff of Star Trek: The Next Generation through its second year, led to Piller co-writing an episode with Michael Wagner called "Evolution". After Wagner dropped out of leading the writing staff for the show's third year, Piller was invited to assume the lead position from the fifth episode of the third season, "The Bonding". During the first two years of the series, the writing staff had been plagued with conflicts, with the staff continually changing as different writers came and went; within a year, Piller had managed to form a strong writing team, something that had eluded previous executives. He also moved the direction of stories away from "alien of the week" or "situation of the week" to stories about the characters, which many point to as the turning point for the series. Piller also implemented an open door policy for scripts, that let anyone submit their story ideas and led to some of the most popular episodes, including "Yesterday's Enterprise". The Next Generation ran for seven years, receiving a number of awards including an Emmy Award nomination in its final year for Outstanding Drama Series. He received credit for a number of popular episodes, including "The Best of Both Worlds", Part 1 & 2, which are frequently identified as the best episodes of The Next Generation, and the two-part fifth season "Unification", which saw the appearance of Spock.

In late 1991, when The Next Generation executive producer Rick Berman was asked by Paramount Pictures to create a new Star Trek series, he turned to Piller to help him create the new show. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debuted in January 1993 with a pilot script written by Piller, "Emissary", to the highest-ever ratings for a syndicated series premiere, and like The Next Generation, it ran for seven years. Again in 1994, Berman was asked to create another new Star Trek series for Paramount's new UPN television network and approached Piller to work with him in developing Star Trek: Voyager along with Jeri Taylor.

At the same time, Piller developed another series for UPN called Legend. However the series was cancelled after only 12 episodes. Meanwhile, Piller continued as a creative consultant on Deep Space Nine and Voyager, sending in notes on scripts as they were being prepared for production.

In 1993, Piller had been approached to write one of two prospective scripts for the first Next Generation feature film, with the other written by The Next Generation staff writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga. He declined. In 1997, he was approached again to write a Next Generation feature film, collaborating with Rick Berman to write Star Trek: Insurrection. While writing the treatment for this film, he documented the entire process in the book Fade In, though it remained unpublished.