Star Trek: Enterprise Creator Admits Season 1's Writing Had One Major Problem

During its original airing, "Star Trek: Enterprise" was considered a franchise low point. The 22nd century-set prequel has its fans, of course, but the fact that "Enterprise" ran only four seasons before being canceled (after the last three "Trek" shows went to seven) really says it all. 

It wasn't just viewers who were feeling burned out, either. "Enterprise" co-creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had been working on "Star Trek" for over a decade by this point, having both started back on "The Next Generation." As Braga told Den of Geek in 2021, his exhaustion quickly set out when it came time to write "Enterprise" season 1.

"When we were shooting the pilot and it was time for me to start writing episodes, I had a lot of things that I wanted to do. But once the ship officially set sail, I felt constrained. I felt, 'Here we go again,' and I felt very challenged."

If you look at the writing credits for "Enterprise" season 1, you'll notice a few names who wrote one or two episodes and then never returned for later seasons. In the interview, Braga pointed to some ill-suited hiring decisions:

"It was the first time I wasn't working with people I'd worked with before. It was a large staff of ten people, and 'Star Trek' was notoriously difficult to find writers for, because it was a hard show to write. I don't even want to say hard; it's unique. It just had a specific voice, and I had this writing staff that was new to the genre. Out of ten people, I think just a couple survived that first year."

"Enterprise" season 1 writers who did come back, like Mike Sussman, Phyllis Strong, and André Bormanis, were "Trek" veterans like Braga himself. Director James L. Conway, who directed four "Enterprise" episodes (the pilot "Broken Bow," and then the mostly beloved episodes "Judgment," "Damage," and "In A Mirror Darkly") corroborated Braga's story to Den of Geek as well, saying:

"The pilot of 'Enterprise' was terrific. But then the first season was very repetitive and it felt like it was written by people who were burned out. And Brannon copped to this, saying he had made some bad choices in hiring staff and he was burned out from finishing up on 'Voyager.' So I think that first season suffered and it took him awhile to re-steer that ship."

Braga and Conway's words ring true, because season 1 is the worst that "Enterprise" ever got. The episodes were safe and unimaginative; even with the new for "Trek" setting, the show felt business as usual. There was no real sense of stakes, danger, or urgency, even though the whole premise was an untested crew making humanity's first voyage into the Final Frontier. The show's central arc, a "Temporal Cold War" of various time-traveling entities trying to rewrite history for their own benefit, was incongruous. "Enterprise" season 1 was a show that felt unsure of itself and burnt out. As series star Scott Bakula (who played Captain Jonathan Archer) has said, the pressure to produce 26 episodes a season didn't lend itself to quality over quantity either.

The current series "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" has hit a similar snag as early "Enterprise," where every episode feels like an echo of a "Star Trek" episode you've seen before. The big difference is that you can tell the "Strange New Worlds" cast and crew are having loads of fun making these episodes. There was no sense of playful homage on "Enterprise" like there is now on "Strange New Worlds," just a series running on fumes and locked into a network-demanded formula. 

After "Enterprise" ended in 2005, "Star Trek" went radio silent for a few years until the 2009 "Star Trek" movie directed by J.J. Abrams. Whatever you might think about that movie, it was definitely energetic and a new direction for the series. "Enterprise," too, might finally deliver a new angle 25 years too late.

How? You see, it is "Trek" canon that Archer turned from Starfleet to politics; he eventually became president of the Federation, serving eight years from 2184 to 2192. Bakula and Sussman have developed a pitch for a new "Star Trek" series about President Archer. Sussman likened the pitch to "Star Trek" + "The West Wing." This would be the early days of the Federation too, in a time period largely untouched by other "Trek" stories. Now, this pitch hasn't been picked up by Paramount yet, but Sussman and Bakula clearly want to make it happen. No TV show can succeed without passion from the people making it, as "Star Trek: Enterprise" demonstrated.