"Woke" writing treats diversity as an endpoint instead of a starting point

If you’re not interested in people, you have no business writing a drama series.

(Image credit: StarTrek.com)

I’ve noticed that a lot of people who complain about “woke” TV writing struggle to articulate why it’s bad, or don’t realize that it often isn’t the wokeness itself that’s the problem - it’s that media properties increasingly use a sprinkling of identity politics as window dressing to cover up for the lack of absolutely anything else (like good plotting, characterization, logic, originality, compelling stakes…). It’s this absence of substance, this loss of craft compared to the great workaday TV writers of yore, that is at the heart of bad “woke” writing.

A decade ago at a Star Trek convention in Germany, I was in the audience for an interview with Ira Steven Behr, who started out as a writer and producer for various 1980s drama series on NBC, ABC and CBS before becoming the showrunner of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from 1995-1999, then CBS’s The 4400 from 2004-2007. In the 2010s, he worked on Outlander and co-produced Harry Dean Stanton’s final film Lucky, which also stars David Lynch and Beth Grant. There are many reasons why he’s a good writer and showrunner, but a central one is that he’s a voracious reader, with a home library of 5000 books that takes up a whole room of his house: full bookshelves lining every wall from floor to ceiling.

Today’s young TV writers don’t read - at least not widely or deeply, or anything of any substance - and it shows. One generation on from the Trek franchise’s 1990s heyday, millennial and Gen Z writers on shows like Discovery and Picard instead take their plotting cues from video games and their thematic cues from social media. Literary allusions and devices are either wholly absent or extremely surface-level. The science is similarly brain-dead. Characterization is barely there and can flip on a dime. Exposition is extraordinarily clunky. Violence and gore are frequent and aim to titillate, not horrify. Scenes strain to go viral but never do. Scripts are so sloppy that episodes regularly forget or directly contradict key plot points from the previous episode. Story arcs built around mystery-box writing are abandoned or rejigged halfway through and make no sense once complete. The future of humanity, and the fate of the galaxy-slash-universe, are always, always at stake - and thus never at stake - whereas 1990s Star Trek spent some of its finest hours on small-scale character dramas with purely personal stakes, like Nog dealing with PTSD after losing a limb in combat, Data creating a daughter, Sisko and his son bonding over a hobby, or Seven Of Nine learning to date. To write those kinds of stories, you have to have a human focus. You have to let the characters be people, not snarky action figures, viewer surrogates or vectors for didactic political soundbites: identitarian avatars forced to bear such a burden of Representation on their shoulders that they’re not allowed to be simply a person the way, say, Chekov, Geordi La Forge or Julian Bashir were. In a nutshell, the problem with many younger TV writers today is they’re not interested in people. And if you’re not interested in people, you have no business writing a drama series.

Diversity and representation have always been an important and welcome part of the Star Trek franchise, and part of why so many people find hope in it – seeing a positive future that you can imagine yourself being a part of is a big deal when you're growing up as a minority or feel marginalized or outcast in other ways. The problem is that with the rise of social media and the elevation of certain identity axes to a kind of priest caste loaded with cultural cachet, diversity and representation have been placed on a pedestal to the point that many writers and creatives increasingly don't think beyond them: they think representation alone is enough, that as long as you tick all the right boxes, people will automatically be happy at seeing a member of their identity group on-screen and will enjoy the show or movie merely on that basis - to see themselves represented - so you don't have to bother with decent dialog, plot construction and world-building, or to properly flesh your characters out and give them depth, relatability and compelling motivations. From its 1960s inception through to the millennium, diversity was baked into the fabric of Star Trek, and every series up to Voyager understood that diversity was just a starting point, a necessary tool for good storytelling. Now, writers throughout the industry seem to think it's an end point, an achievement in and of itself. This is one of the many problems not just with contemporary Star Trek but with a lot of U.S. shows and movies from about 2017 onwards. It's both patronizing and lazy to throw the audience a fish every five minutes by going "Look, an LGBTQ+ person!" or “Look, an ethnic minority!” and expect them to clap like sea lions in response if you're then not going to give that character any other attributes at all. For instance, what can you tell me about the daughter in Everything Everywhere All At Once, other than the fact she’s a lesbian? She’s one of the most underwritten characters I’ve ever seen, and as a result, her conflict with her mother is similarly one-dimensional.

Season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery, as well as copying about half-a-dozen better shows, presents us with two human villains: one an Asian woman, one a white male with a Southern U.S. accent who is revealed as a bad guy in a late twist. Their malevolence and ideology is near-indistinguishable, yet the show condemns and swiftly dispatches the white male - essentially profiling him as a MAGA surrogate - while treating the female villain as sassy, cool and badass even as she murders countless innocents. The subtext is that because this character is (in the modern parlance) a woman of color, her pantomime evil of the type we were supposed to abhor in the Southern white male villain is translated into awesomeness and empoweredness.

30 years ago, Deep Space Nine placed an African-American family from New Orleans at its core and explored aspects of the black American experience in rich and nuanced ways in a future science-fiction context, while never falling into didacticism, resorting to stereotypes or reducing characters to their race - despite the fact that the core writing team for the show was 9 white guys*. Sisko’s blackness and Creole cultural background are rarely directly relevant, but are integral to the character and performance and form part of the show’s tapestry. Very few episodes directly touch on racial issues, but those that do do so dexterously and even-handedly. By contrast, Star Trek: Picard - which concluded a year ago - made its only original African-American main character an embittered drug addict living in a trailer; Star Trek: Discovery’s black lead is appallingly unprofessional and constantly crying; while the two reboot films helmed by J.J. Abrams reduced Uhura to a love interest for Spock. That’s not because the writers are racist: it’s because they can’t write convincingly about people and relationships because they’re not interested in people and relationships.

The same logic applies across the board. Contemporary Star Trek scribes can't write good female characters not because they’re sexist but because they can't write people. (What is a woman, anyway?) And if you’re going to go the jeopardy route where “all sentient life in the galaxy” is threatened on a weekly basis, you better make sure you have a compelling villain - yet once again, writers are repeatedly unable to create rounded, interesting antagonists of a caliber of the Trek villains of old. Here, there’s a very evident lack of interest in getting inside the villain’s head or depicting a villain as having anything other than crude motives, something that has seeped from real-world social justice politics into fiction. Why would you want to understand your enemy, be interested in how they think and what motivates them? They’re just evil. We’re the good guys. Aren’t we?

As well as nu-Trek writers not being interested in people, they also have no ideas. These series are not about anything, and any topics they do address are either terribly handled or are so barely developed that they're essentially there for decoration, something to go in the show’s press release. Related to this, there’s a lack of understanding that Star Trek is a workplace show. These kinds of series, focused around a team of professionals doing their job week-in week-out, have never been the coolest or most critically acclaimed, but remain the most popular with viewers - from the days of St. Elsewhere and Hill Street Blues through to ER, CSI, NCIS and countless other procedurals. As a viewer, you feel like a proxy part of the team, and this is a big part of why the first two Star Trek series in particular were able to break into the mainstream. Turns out we like spending time with smart, professional people and seeing them work together to solve problems, support each other and do their job well.

Another key to Star Trek’s long 20th-century reign is that it isn’t a fixed format or genre but a conceptual category - from one week to the next, and even from one movie to the next, Star Trek could be a screwball comedy, courtroom drama, philosophical meditation, murder mystery, study of religion, domestic/relationship drama, psychological horror, comedy of manners, metafiction, exploration of loss and trauma... almost any type of story, any genre can be set in the show’s universe and most have been. That's a significant part of what's gone missing. (Strange New Worlds has tried to rectify this, but it’s undercut by the lightweight tone, ramshackle writing and the crew’s unprofessionalism.) Discovery and Picard are “ride” shows, in which the viewer perspective is locked onto a single point-of-view character (Burnham/Picard) who essentially becomes an avatar for the viewer as they're whisked from one set of outlandish and shocking circumstances to the next, with lots of rollercoaster-style twists and turns along the way. This approach mostly doesn't leave room for characterization, thoughtful tackling of ideas, quiet day-to-day moments, and the variety of tones and genres that always made Trek what it was.

The solution to bad “woke” writing (other than “don’t hire them”)? Here’s my prescription for anyone who wants to put pen to paper and tell good stories:

1. Read books - read more, read better, read older, and read foreign literature in translation. Someone who does not enjoy reading or does not read thoughtfully and critically yet aspires to be a writer is setting themselves up for failure.

2. Be interested in people, their inner lives, their motivations, their beliefs, their flaws, and how they relate to others.

3. Members of an identity group do not spend all day thinking about being members of an identity group. Write them with equality, as full people, not mouthpieces or symbols.

4. Crap in, crap out. If you’re a writer who fills their brain with video games and social media, you will produce garbage.

5. The more closely you base your script on something that’s currently in the news cycle, the less allegorical and more literal your take on it, and the less experience you have in the topic in question and in addressing weighty issues in general, the more it will age like milk.

6. Assume your audience is intelligent.

7. Your characters do not have to be likable, but they do have to be interesting.

8. Your story does not have to be entertaining, but it does have to be compelling.

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*Ira Behr, Ron Moore, Hans Beimler, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Rene Echevarria, Bradley Thompson & David Weddle, Michael Taylor, and Peter Allan Fields.