Hindsight being 20/20 and all, it’s hard to imagine a world where “The Next Generation” wasn’t a guaranteed hit. But when Gene Roddenberry first envisioned a follow-up show to “The Original Series,” it would take another ten years for “The Next Generation” to finally grace the airwaves — partly because of plans to give the original cast the big-screen treatment, but also because of then-contemporary concerns about the lack of success surrounding sequels (a foreign concept to us in the 21st Century, of course).
In an 2007 article celebrating what was at the time the 20th anniversary of the series, Entertainment Weekly published an oral history exploring how Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the Enterprise-D came to be in the first place. Amid a ton of fascinating tidbits from cast and crew, one detail concerned LeVar Burton admitting that his one condition to signing on the dotted line stemmed from his own passion for “Trek.” As he put it:
“Bob [Justman, producer on ‘The Original Series’ and supervising producer on ‘The Next Generation’] and I had done a TV movie in the early ’80s. I was such a fan of ‘Star Trek,’ we sat around on the set, and I just pumped him for stories about Shatner and Nimoy. So I got a call from Bob saying they were mounting a new ‘Star Trek’ series and would I be interested. My only question was, Is Gene involved?”
Naturally, Roddenberry had a hand in the series from the very beginning. As for Trekkies initially struggling to accept replacements for Kirk and Spock, Burton had a message for them, too: “I never bought the idea that genuine ‘Star Trek’ fans had no room in their hearts for a new incarnation. So there.”