Star Trek: 10 Controversies Behind Discovery’s Troubled Early Seasons

Even after Star Trek: Discovery overcame its rough pre-production phase and premiered to glowing reviews and respectable viewership on CBS All Access, the series continued to struggle behind-the-scenes.

Previously hired by Bryan Fuller after collaborating on Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls, Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts were promoted to showrunners following Fuller's dismissal by CBS. Successfully leading Discovery's writers room for the duration of season one, Berg and Harberts followed the same path as their former collaborater five episodes into season two, when they too were suddenly fired by CBS.

According to a June 14, 2018 article in The Hollywood Reporter, Berg and Harberts allowed the budget for Discovery's second season premiere "Brother" to balloon out of control, adversely affecting the production of subsequent episodes. Worse, Discovery's writing staff complained that both Berg and Harberts had become "increasingly abusive", leading to several writers threatening to quit.

The toxic environment behind-the-scenes apparently included an incident in which Harberts "leaned across the writers room table while shouting an expletive at a member of the show's staff." Harberts later allegedly threatened the writers (unsuccessfully) to stop them from escalating their concerns with CBS management.

Following Berg and Harberts' departure from the series, executive producer Alex Kurtzman stepped in as showrunner (alongside Michelle Paradise) for the duration of season two. Unfortunately, the issues in the writers room didn't stop there.

According to The Hollywood Reporter in September of 2019, author Walter Mosley quit the Star Trek: Discovery writers room "after he was 'chastised' by human resources for using the N-word on the job." Mosely, African American himself, later elaborated in an op-ed for the New York Times:

I’d been in the new room for a few weeks when I got the call from human resources. A pleasant-sounding young man said, "Mr. Mosley, it has been reported that you used the n-word in the writers’ room..." I replied, "I am the N-word in the writers' room."