Richard Keith Berman (born December 25, 1945) is an American producer and writer, best known for his 18-year-long association with the Star Trek franchise. He was credited for co-creating Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.
Berman began his career as a production assistant during the first season of Cheers, and soon worked his way up the ranks at Paramount, eventually ending up as a supervising producer on the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Later in that season, Gene Roddenberry's increasingly fragile health and mental state, together with many other producers having quickly dropped out of working on the show, caused Berman and fellow producer Maurice Hurley to make the step up to co-executive producers, with Hurley overseeing the writer's room, and Berman handling most of the day-to-day aspects of production. At the end of the second season, Hurley departed the series, while Roddenberry was essentially Kicked Upstairs after his health took a serious turn for the worse, leaving Berman as the de facto man in charge of Star Trek; a position he would continue to hold until the end of the fourth and final season of Enterprise.
Berman's time in charge of the franchise saw it scale some of its greatest highs in the public consciousness, but also descend to some of its worst lows, with the success and widespread popularity of The Next Generation and its second film spin-off, Star Trek: First Contact contrasted by gradually worsening viewing figures throughout the runs of Deep Space Nine and Voyager (albeit both of those shows would enjoy a major turn-around in popularity after their runs ended), ultimately culminating in consistently poor viewing figures for Enterprise, and the fourth and final Next Generation film, Star Trek: Nemesis, being a massive failure at the box-office. Following the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005, Berman hung around for another year in an attempt to get an interquel film called Star Trek: The Beginning off the ground, but was ultimately let go in favor of J. J. Abrams, who successfully rebooted the franchise with Star Trek (2009) — albeit the TV side of the franchise wouldn't return until Star Trek: Discovery in 2017.
Much like Roddenberry before him, Berman's time in charge of the franchise left a long and complicated legacy, with his supporters typically commending his faithfulness to Roddenberry's vision for the franchise and the overall level of consistency of Trek in his era (with a small handful of exceptions, even the worst Berman-era episodes and films are typically regarded as more mediocre and forgettable rather than outright bad). His detractors, on the other hand, typically criticize the creative stagnation that was felt by many to have set in during the runs of Voyager and Enterprise, as well as various behind-the-scenes issues including hostility between Berman and various cast members (most infamously Terry Farrell, which resulted in her quitting at the end of the second-last season of Deep Space Nine), his strict enforcement of Hide Your Gays well into a time period where even most sitcoms had positive depictions of LGBTQ+ characters, and the incredibly controversial finale of Enterprise.
He can be compared to another famous sci-fi writer and producer, George Lucas, in that he was someone who was controversial during their time in charge of the franchise, as well as a frequent target of internet derision during the late 1990s all the way up to the early 2010s, but whom some fans have since warmed up to in the wake of the franchise passing to newer, sometimes even more controversial creative teams.
