Lavar Burton is a goddamn treasure of a man. When you yanks rip down another one of those confederate statues, do me a solid and put up one of Lavar Burton in its place.
The TNG/DS9/VOY era was pretty famous for “Star Trek Director’s School” for the actors. Most main cast folks tried their hand at directing at least once or twice. (It’s fun when you notice it for the first time. Their characters usually have bit parts in the first episode they direct.) Jonathan Frakes (Riker) directed episodes have become known for their top-down “god shots” in a lot of episodes like Cause and Effect. observer.com/…/jonathan-frakes-on-his-journey-fro…
Roxane Dawson (B’elanna Torres on VOY) went on to a pretty good directorial career as well. A couple examples off the top of my head include episodes of Foundation and House of Cards.
Lots of cast members ended up directing over the years. 90’s Trek had a reputation for being a factory for directorial debuts. It’s really neat, it brought a lot of variety and personality to the episodes.
“Some”? 29 episodes across TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT. That’s even one more TV episode than Jonathan Frakes directed. (although Frakes also directed two movies)
Come to think of it: Star Trek had a bunch of actors directing episodes every now and then. I don’t think that many other TV shows did that, didn’t they?
I remember a few long running TV shows with cast writing and directing episodes.
Duchovny directed a few XFiles episodes.
Two of the leads directed episodes og SG-1, antihero wrote at least one episode.
Those two are just off the top of my head, but I remember noticing cast doing extra stuff regularly. Probably not too common in the early seasons, but it is a great way for them to branch out.
So I was curious and went to look up actors who directed episodes of their shows and guess who showed up on the list (not in a Star Trek number but still) … Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
Yeah it’s pretty cool! Star Trek had been a bit of a directors boot camp for a while, I know several members from TNG, DS9, and Voyager went on into directing.
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