When your ego is so huge that it doesn’t even occur to you that the person you’re lying about will almost certainly see and publicly expose your lie.
Queerphobic, misogynistic asshole. I’m glad she called him out.
Idk much about him, but I keep reading here and there that he was terrible. How did he manage to write Star Trek episodes if he was those things?
You can be brilliant in some ways while being useless or a POS in other ways.
Steve Jobs was an excellent salesman and marketer. He was an awful father and thought that a fruit-only diet would cure pancreatic cancer. Then, when he realised his curable cancer became incurable because of inaction, he jumped the organ donor queue (because apparently in the US money lets you do that), which not only didn’t help him, but also likely killed someone else who it could’ve saved.
Richard Stallman is an excellent steward of open source software and user freedom in software, and he has been very prescient of the shit that would ultimately come from proprietary software. But he is also a major creep to women and a staunch defender of paedophilia and bestiality.
Someone I knew, before she passed away, was enormously selfless. Gave everything she had to others, fostered a lot of children who all grew up to be great people. Lived with almost no money because she preferred to spend it helping other people, was a big pusher of LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s, helped run a centre that helped HIV victims, never spoke up about the good she was doing because she preferred to keep it a secret… was (astounding to me) enormously racist.
People are complicated.
None of us is wholly good, none wholly bad, but all of us can strive to be better, to be kinder, to improve.
Kill your heroes. Not because everyone is evil, and not because there is nobody worth following, but because nobody is worth following blindly. Nobody deserves to be idolized. Strive to be better, look to others as inspiration, look to the past as inspiration even, but remember that just because you do or don’t see someone’s flaws doesn’t mean they don’t have any or that they don’t have anything but those flaws
That last one speaks to how some people try and redeem themselves despite their flaws. We’re not all cut and dry. You can still be a good person, even if you’re flawed, provided the good you do outweighs the the bad. I would also throw a caveat in there, in that you’re actively trying to address your faults, too. Doesn’t do much good if you’re burning crosses and houses to the ground, and then taking in the resulting foster children lol.
Berman wasn’t the one writing or directing, he was the executive producer. which means he also wasn’t producing, he was the one who signed off on other people’s work. Read: he vetoed a lot of good ideas out of fear it would anger the studio. As progressive and intelligent as Star Trek was, he kept it from being so much better.
The writers and the lower producers did what they could. Sometimes sneaking around behind his back to make sure something was shown or said.
For example, Roddenberry wanted an LGBT character as far back as TOS, but it got vetoed by Berman. That would have been incredible for 1960.
I think he also did it when Frakes wanted the non-binary alien he flirted with in one episode to have a male actor instead of a female one, but that also got vetoed.
This comment confused me because Berman didn’t work on Star Trek until The Next Generation. He couldn’t have vetoed anything on the Original Series.
The main source of pushback during the 60s was the NBC executives (despite Lucille Ball and her DesiLu production company championing the series). Star Trek was constantly threatened with cancellation, then moved to a graveyard time slot for season 3, then was finally cancelled due to “ratings.”
As an aside, perhaps that speaks to just how great Gene Rodenberry was to have created the show in the first place? Here’s an awesome comic about him.
He survived THREE plane crashes? I don’t know if he’s the luckiest or unluckiest guy ever.
Ikr, like did he work for Boeing or…? :-P
He definitely had “character” though, as someone who faced death, multiple times, and had to stare at it and let it change him, to focus his efforts on stuff that really matters in life. (anti-capitalistic principles I guess?:-D)
Or The Oatmeal is making shit up again. That comic is bullshit.
Thanks, I never knew that
Because every time he changed an episode’s script to “berman it up a little” he’d give himself a writers credit.
People contain multitudes.
Multitudes of what?
Water, mostly.
That’s several water!
Ugly bags.
I only have, like, four waters right now. Am I ok?
You should get a couple more just in case.
Stuff, duh!
Star stuff
And my axe!
And my ex!
He just gets shittier and shittier jesus
Rick Berman, still a piece of shit.
Fuck you Rick Berman. Wait, what is it with Ricks?
who’s the other Rick thats a POS?
Santorum
Rick, as in Rick & Morty, maybe?
Set phasers to burrrrrrrrn.
I wouldn’t use any setting … I’d just use the phaser pistol as a blunt object and beat him with it
Let’s invent a real agony booth and stick Rick Berman in it.
Good news everyone, we’ve finally invented the Agony Booth from the classic sci-fi “Please for the love of fuck don’t invent the Agony Booth”!
Can’t we make just one for Rick Berman?
It’s okay to have a little Agony Booth for Rick Berman, as a treat
Coral Gables Florida already exists.
The more I learn about this guy the less I like him
I don’t know shit about him, fill me in?
Sexist piece of shit who liked to step all over anyone he perceived as “beneath” him (everyone) and if you’ve ever thought to yourself “given the rest of the show, why would THAT be a thing? It feels gross and entire groups of people would feel marginalized by this” while watching it, it was probably a Berman Special. Like Seven’s… “uniform”…
Also from what I understand, racist. Like the ferengi.
“friend”, I think some of that sarcasm dripped out of my phone while I was reading this
Perhaps that’s the skin of evil trying to escape
tosses you some paper towels
Careful, I hear it stains pretty badly.
Whoa whoa he dribbled a bit on his phone, he didn’t get struck by a hurricaine, Mr. Moneybags.
There’s a frood!
You know, with how great and progressive Star Trek is… Uh… The older Trek, mind you… I often wonder how anyone like Berman could even make something like that.
How could Star Trek continue under Berman and still be Star Trek?
Never meet your heroes. Joss Whedon, JK Rowling, Orson Scott Card… all the horrible people making super influencial content that so essentially stands in opposition to their horrid real life behavior. I just don’t get it either…
This is a long watch, but this video explains how Harry Potter is essentially a story about the virtues of bland centrism, and shows that the breadcrumb trail to Rowling’s bigotry was there all along. The scales fell from my eyes while listening to this.
I was going to ask for a TLDL, but I think I’ll actually listen to the whole thing (at x1.5).
Look closer and you’ll find that Berman’s run wasn’t as progressive as you might remember. He repeatedly vetoed attempts to write stories about homosexuality, continued Roddenberry’s thing about putting women in skimpy outfits, and so on. TOS was very progressive for the '60s, but TNG, VOY, and ENT were significantly less progressive for their time.
continued Roddenberry’s thing about putting women in skimpy outfits
No. Female officers wearing short dresses was requested by the women on set at the time, not by Roddenberry.
Initially men and women were going to wear the same uniforms, which was criticised by feminists.
Remember that at this time, women were rebelling against having to cover up their bodies for modesty sake. It was at around the time of “free the nipple” and women burning their bras. Short skirts and dresses were popular at the time because it’s what women wanted to wear.
Women dressing “skimpy” on TOS was an act of female empowerment. Youre looking at this through a prudish 2024 lense and assuming seeing womens legs is down to sexism.
Based old-school feminism.
You’re correct about the uniforms, but outfits like this were the result of Roddenberry, according to others who worked on the show.
Bob Justman: I watched resignedly as Gene, up to his old tricks, kept costume designer Bill Theiss busy, taking a tuck here and a trim there… just before [Teri Garr]'s first scene on stage, Gene went to work on her costume again. He kneeled down, gathered up her already scant skirt, and told Bill Theiss, ‘It’s too long, Bill.’ Teri rolled her eyes.
My issue with Berman isn’t the occasional sexy, skimpy woman on screen. I don’t mind that one bit.
No, my issue is with all the behind the scenes problems they were having with women. Gates McFadden was really disrespected, as just one example.
TOS was very progressive for the '60s, but TNG, VOY, and ENT were significantly less progressive for their time.
It’e also been a trend that’s unfortunately carried over into the newer treks. They barely push the boundaries at all.
DS9 probably only got away with as much as they did because Voyager was commanding most of the attention at the time.
That’s why I really cringe each time Kurtzman and Co are giving themselves golden stars and patting themselves on the back about things that were either already done in Star Trek before, or are already socially accepted.
And, moreover, all this so-called progresivism they’re doing is an incredibly thin veil wrapped around a ball of generic action sci-fi writing.
His story smells like self-aggrandizing bullshit. If he got close enough to any actress to remove something from her costume, someone should have hit him with the cake. That’s not your job, so don’t touch the talent, asshole.
Two reminders
1:it’s pronounced “Rick FUCKING Berman”,
B- FUCK RICK FUCKING BERMAN.
I always preferred Rick “Everything He Touches Turns to Shit” Berman. He has the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches spontaneously transforms into human feces.
The Mierdas Touch
chef kiss
Section 31’s ability to insist that they didn’t “plant” a commander into the Romulan empire even decades later is rather impressive.
Even when there’s documented evidence proving otherwise.
Believe it, but does anyone have links?
Amazing.
She’s great, he’s a dick.
It’s going to be hard to verify every detail about a personal interaction on set, but we can say Bermann’s version doesn’t match what is verifiable. The shows were shot out of order from how they were aired. Crosby’s chronologically shot final scene was in Symbiosis, where she’s seen waving goodbye in the cargo bay.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Symbiosis_(episode)#Cast_and_characters
I mean, it seems pretty reasonable that he might have remembered the wrong episode, 30 years later
Remembering the wrong episode would be one thing, although even that dampens his tone of a “cherished memory.”
He completely invented that she gave it to him, instead of him taking it from her. That also drastically shifts the tone.
The story changes from “a dear friend gave me a gift on her onscreen death that I cherished for decades” to “I took a one of a kind memento from someone on their last day at work on something iconic and kept it for myself. I stared at it for years.”
Yeah, that is the part that matters.
Came to thank me, brought a cake, ceremoniously?
It doesn’t sound that bad…
This was what I was thinking. If she put quotes around “thank” and used unceremoniously instead, the post would read closer to what it sounds like she intended.
Edit: I only just noticed a couple of things: first, this post is five years old. Second, she responded with full-throated support of Rick. So despite the fact that he is pretty well understood as a POS around most Trek communities these days, Denise doesn’t seem to want to be lumped in with that.
I think people, including Tasha, are forgetting that she’s the one who chose to leave the show.
