Brannon Braga

Brannon Braga
Role	Executive Producer Director Writer (Into the Fold, Nothing Left on Earth Excepting Fishes, Identity, Pt. 1, Shadow Realms, Gently Falling Rain, Midnight Blue, Domino)
Date of birth	August 14, 1965
Place of birth	Bozeman, Montana
External Links
Wikipedia

Directing The Orville was a galactic pain in the ass, and I loved every nanosecond of it.— Brannon Braga

Brannon Braga is an American executive producer, director and screenwriter on The Orville. He directed the episodes About a Girl, Into the Fold, and Firestorm; and wrote the scripts for Into the Fold, Nothing Left on Earth Excepting Fishes, Identity, Pt. 1, Shadow Realms, Gently Falling Rain, Midnight Blue and Domino with fellow producer André Bormanis.

Background

Braga is best-known for his work on the Star Trek franchise, writing and executive producing for The Next Generation, Voyager, Enterprise, and co-writing the films Generations and First Contact. He started as an intern on The Next Generation until he worked up to executive producer.

After the cancellation of Enterprise, Braga wrote and produced for Fox television series 24 and Terra Nova. He executive produced Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey alongside Seth MacFarlane, creator of The Orville, for which Braga won a Peabody Award, Critics Choice Award, and Producers Guild Award.

The Orville

Main article: The Orville § Development

For years leading up to The Orville, MacFarlane tinkered with the idea of an episodic science fiction television series, occasionally bouncing ideas off of Braga and David A. Goodman by phone. Braga personally missed the episodic stories he wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation, but also wanted to write a show like M*A*S*H that peppered comedy into a serious drama. Both Braga and MacFarlane felt those two aspects of storytelling had been absent from network television for almost two decades, and audiences were ready for a return.

"We had been chatting sporadically about doing this science fiction show together, and this particular idea, that there were certain elements he'd been mentioning to me for years," Braga later said to author Jeff Bond. "He gave me this script, and I kind of dread reading scripts, but this was hilarious and really original, but somehow familiar." Unbeknownst to the two, MacFarlane had sold the script for The Orville to Fox in April 2016, and, after finishing the two more episode scripts, enlisted Braga as an executive producer, director, and writer.

MacFarlane invited Braga to direct About a Girl: the first time Braga would direct a show with comedic elements. Braga recalled he was thrilled by the challenge because "it's hard to screw up a great script... It was my ship to wreck." Yet he soon found the show to be the most difficult of his career. Because The Orville fell into a hybrid genre that mixes comedy and drama, he was concerned about striking an appropriate balance between the two, settling on grounding the episode as a serious drama peppered with humor. Looking back on the season, Braga found directing was "a nightmare. There are a lot of moving parts: big set, ... big effects, and it's very intimidating."

Braga was tasked with writing the eighth episode - what became Into the Fold - with co-writer André Bormanis. However, he was inexperienced with comedy scripts and "terrified" that he could not write a suitably funny episode. It turned out that while he was responsible for adding jokes, most were removed by MacFarlane. Braga presented a draft to the writing team for a comedy pass, where the writers discussed the humor of the episode at length and helped peppering the script with humorous moments.

While Braga recalled it relatively easy to write for Claire Finn, his great "challenge" was writing for Isaac. Braga worried that a faceless, relatively nondescript android could undermine the emotions evoked in the episode's more sensitive scenes. Fortunately, he was very pleased with actor Mark Jackson's performance.

Trivia

• MacFarlane cites Braga's writing for The Next Generation as a major influence from his childhood.
• Braga has said, "We live in a dark time, and a lot of television's dark literally. Sometimes it's hard to see what you're watching, which is why I love Cosmos and The Orville. They're bright, welcoming futures."

External links

• Interview with the Planetary Union Network

See also

• "Directing the Orville:" Foreword by Braga in The World of the Orville, pages 6-7
• The World of the Orville, pages 11, 127, 129, 141, 157