Michael Piller (May 30, 1948 – November 1, 2005) was an American television scriptwriter and producer, who was best known for his contributions to the Star Trek franchise. Early life and career Piller was born to a Jewish family in Port Chester, New York. With parents who were both involved in writing; Gene Piller, his father, was a Hollywood screenwriter and his mother, Ruth Roberts, was a songwriter. He planned to be a scriptwriter from an early age, but a college lecturer discouraged him, and Piller started out in television working as an Emmy Award-winning journalist for CBS News in New York, WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina, and WBBM-TV in Chicago, Illinois. However, he then moved to Los Angeles, California and the entertainment side of television in the late 1970s, working as a censor and then a programming executive for CBS. While at the network, he became director of dramas based on fact and program practices. He began writing scripts for television, and after selling a script to Cagney & Lacey and another to Simon & Simon, he was offered a staff writing position on Simon & Simon, where he stayed for three years, becoming a producer. Piller attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He married Sandra in 1981; they had three children. In 1987, together with Van Gordon Sauter, he developed a reality/medical series for MGM/UA Television called The Doctor's Office. He later teamed with him again in the following year on Hotline, a game-show designed to have interactive elements with the home audience. Star Trek In 1989, a call to Maurice Hurley, a friend who had led the writing staff of Star Trek: The Next Generation through its second year, led to Piller co-writing an episode with Michael Wagner called "Evolution". When Wagner dropped out of leading the writing staff for the show's third year, Piller was invited to assume the showrunner position, reporting to executive producer Rick Berman, as of the fifth episode of the third season, "The Bonding". During the first two years of the series, the writing staff had been plagued by conflicts, with the staff continually changing as different writers came and went. Within a year, Piller had formed a strong writing team, something that had eluded previous executives. He also moved the focus away from "alien-of-the-week" or "situation-of-the-week" stories