“Deep Space Nine” would premiere in January of 1993, and Micahel Piller was writing the pilot “Emissary” when the riots broke out. Piller admitted in the book that he was often criticized for being a very negative person. He and co-creator Rick Berman had completed their first draft, and Berman was fine with it. Piller, however, insisted on a rewrite to make the tone darker. Deep Space Nine, the fictional station itself, was meant to be a social center as well as the site of hard labor and military oversight. According to Piller, the studio execs wanted the station’s Promenade to look like the Beverly Center, a posh mall in Beverly Hills. The first shot needed to be a shot of people gambling and having a good time.
Piller and Berman did adhere to the studio mandate. When violence broke out outside their own windows, however, they realized that they needed something more profound. Some more, well, “Star Trek.” Piller said:
“I wrote it that way, and I realized it didn’t work. Sadly, though, while I was going through this agonizing process, we had the riots in Los Angeles, and both Rick and I wanted to somehow say something in our show about humanity coexisting and coming together. And we wanted to build this into the alien interaction that we had in the second hour of the script.”
Piller also noted that the “nice mall” vibe was all wrong for the show. Deep Space Nine was meant to be broken, a place where violence happened, a place that was ruined and run down. It needed to be a hard, even undesirable job for Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks), the show’s lead character.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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