Well yeah, to be fair, TNG had a lot of problems, particularly in the first two seasons. The first season was a near-disaster really, between Wesley's horribly

Well yeah, to be fair, TNG had a lot of problems, particularly in the first two seasons. The first season was a near-disaster really, between Wesley's horribly annoying character, Q, Data, a whole lot of wooden acting all around, and really awful scripts like anything with "the traveler". Season 2 was pretty bad too with Dr. Pulaski trying to ape McCoy vis-à-vis Spock in her interactions with Data and failing miserably. Basically, the problem was the Gene Roddenberry was too hands-on at the time; the guy was just like Lucas: he had some great ideas, but really sucked at execution, and things went much, much better when he sat back and let other people do all the nitty-gritty work of writing, direction, etc. After he got less involved and his drinking buddy Maurice Hurley left the show, and they brought back Crusher (who Hurley had forced out) and put Rick Berman in charge, that's when we got all the greatest episodes, at least until the writers ran out of ideas in seasons 6-7.