Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre

I first became aware of specific writers for television when Deep Space Nine was airing, and became steadily more interested in what they were doing as I rewatched each episode in light of the thoroughly fascinating (and at times rather candid) Deep Space Companion. It was compiled as the series progressed and featured a writing staff comprised largely of individuals in a state of reaction to the previous show on which many of them had worked (Star Trek: The Next Generation). As such it contained a lot of details on how limited they'd felt in the episodic format and the kind of stories and themes that TNG and DS9 were good and bad at approaching. There was a lot of material on their sometimes fraught relationship with the series actors and about how many times the cast inspired changes in the direction of the stories and scripts from the manner in which they approached their performances. The show also accepted scripts from anyone, anywhere, and so there's a number of interviews with writers who are trying to get their break and what they thought of how their pitch is developed. The pressures of deadlines, Paramount's stance on the franchise and attempting serialisation when Star Trek wasn't previously set up for that kind of story telling are all discussed in detail, and throughout all of it Ira Behr, Robert Wolfe, Ron Moore and others all emerged as thoroughly likeable people, always the first to criticise their own work and take the piss out of themselves.

Since then I've become fans of a number of other writers, mainly for television (which seems much more of a writers medium that film in the States). What with the US writers strike having as-yet unknowable effects on America's output of television and film, I thought it would be nice to start a thread in which we talk up some of our favourite writers, our favourite material of theirs, what's so good about them and how they fit into the whole entertainment machine as a whole.

In Praise of the Writer