THE GREATNESS OF PATRICK STEWART:

He was not an easy man, as he was happy to admit, and both his personal and professional lives were not free of conflict. But when he was on song, which he was often, there were few actors of his generation who could touch him.

Star Trek made him rich and famous, of course, and he dealt with the respect and adulation that his best-known role brought him with the good humor and self-effacement that many veteran actors who become successful late in life display. Even for those who were not natural sci-fi fans, his Picard – authoritative and charismatic, yes, but also winningly human – was a fine reason to watch the show, and Stewart, who reprised the role as recently as 2023, relished the opportunity to play an intergalactic version of Horatio Hornblower, and approached the part with swashbuckling zeal. It is hard to think of any actor who played a role of such longevity with such conviction and talent, and his enormous popularity at fan conventions was testament to how beloved he was.

But he never turned his back on his first love, the stage, and continued to perform well after his enviable bank balance would have led less committed actors to take it easier.

In his 1983 book Inside Prime Time, Todd Gitlin wrote:

In recent years many producers have been dismayed that the networks have not only usurped the casting of leads but have insisted that whole committees sit in on the casting of minor parts. “I think we should be involved in casting, it’s our money,” says NBC’s genial number-two programming executive, Perry Lafferty. He adds, “The key to every television program’s success—and this will get a lot of people mad, but it’s true—is casting,” Lafferty insists. “It’s who plays the lead. I can’t tell you any plots from The Rockford Files. I used to love it. I love James Garner. I loved Telly Savalas’s Kojak. That’s what the audience goes for. They go for the performer. They don’t remember the plots; you can’t write that good over a period of time. So it comes down to who do you put in there.”

Unlike most successful TV shows which start strong and slowly jump the shark, TNG was the opposite – its creation and first two years were a shambolic mess, a topic explored at length in the William Shatner-narrated 2014 documentary, Chaos on the Bridge. But for the third season, an aged and dissipated Gene Roddenberry stepped back (read: was pushed out), new writers were brought in, and the show quickly became what we remember as TNG for the rest of its run. But without Stewart’s charisma and crisp line readings, there’s no way TNG would have made it to its third season. For its first two years, he was the show.

Or as Sunny Bunch writes, “The Next Generation was always my show: It’s one of the first instances of must-see viewing I can remember, and the biggest reason was the bizarre magnetism of this wiry, bald Brit who, for some reason, had a French name. This, naturally, didn’t quite make sense (though he had a good explanation), but none of that mattered because Stewart was so damn commanding onscreen. This may have been the first time I really realized what ‘acting’ is: He just had a presence, an authority, one that transcended mere Starfleet rank. You could buy him as a leader because he had both forcefulness and empathy.”