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Shows That Beat Star Trek in the Nielsen Ratings
Throughout its original network run, Star Trek fought a tooth-and-nail battle for survival against lukewarm (at best) Nielsen ratings. In retrospect, it’s clear that Star Trek’s Nielsen performance didn’t tell the whole story. Until the early 1970s, the Nielsen ratings—developed by pioneering media researcher Arthur Nielsen—were a blunt instrument. Selected viewers (known as “Nielsen families”) simply logged the shows they watched in special notebooks that, at the conclusion of each ratings period, were returned to be tallied. The ratings reflected only the raw percentages of viewers who watched each program (its share of the audience). Beginning a few years after Star Trek left the air, the Nielsen numbers would include more fine-tuned demographic data about viewers’ age, gender, and economic background. Had such information been available sooner, it would have revealed that Star Trek attracted mostly young, relatively affluent viewers—a highly desirable, difficult-to-reach demographic. In the ’70s, advertisers began paying a premium for airtime on shows that appealed to that audience. If NBC had realized this at the time, Star Trek might have run significantly longer than its three seasons.
Based on the data available in the late 1960s, however, NBC could discern only two things about Star Trek’s audience: It was fiercely loyal (the show’s ratings were steady, without major spikes or valleys, at least during its first two seasons) but too small to generate the ratings numbers and, in turn, advertising revenue that NBC desired, especially from a show with an unusually high per-episode cost (about $192,000– over $1.2 million in inflation-adjusted figures—per installment). In an era when the three networks’ prime-time schedules included fewer than eighty programs on any given week, Star Trek never managed to crack the Top 50. For its first and best-rated season, it finished number 52.
During those halcyon, precable, pre-DVR days of network television, a series’ ratings fate was determined in large part by its time slot. This could be a critical factor for new programs, since a show’s place on the schedule also dictated what its competition would be, and new series seldom fare well against established hits. From the outset, creator-producer Gene Roddenberry lobbied NBC to run Star Trek at 7:30, then the earliest prime-time slot, preferably on Mondays or Tuesdays. He reasoned this would be the most advantageous showtime for a program with appeal to young viewers. But NBC was reluctant to lead an evening schedule with a new series, especially one as offbeat as Star Trek. Conventional wisdom dictated that networks open their nightly lineups with a proven hit, since many viewers would simply stick with the same network for the entire evening rather than leave their seats to change channels. (Remote controls wouldn’t gain wide use until the development of infrared signal technology in the 1980s.) Consequently, NBC slated Star Trek for Thursdays from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Star Trek’s ratings began promisingly. The show’s debut broadcast, on September 8, 1966, finished first in its time slot with a solid 20.7 share of the audience. But it did so with a great deal of help. NBC promoted the series’ debut with a full-page advertisement in TV Guide, along with prominent ads in scores of local newspapers. The numbers for Star Trek’s premiere were also inflated by lack of competition, since CBS didn’t launch its fall lineup until the following week. Once the playing field was leveled, Star Trek’s ratings declined. The show’s Nielsen fate was inexorably linked to those of the shows around it on the schedule. Here’s a rundown of the competition Star Trek faced for viewers and how it fared against each rival program.
Season One: 1966–67
During its inaugural season, Star Trek ran on NBC from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. At that hour, ABC ran a pair of situation comedies, one established and one new. Over on CBS, Star Trek ran opposite another sitcom at 8:30 and the first half-hour of The CBS Thursday Movies, which started at 9 p.m. These movies were usually broadcasts of recent theatrical feature films rather than made-for-TV pictures. Although ratings varied widely from week to week, depending on the film shown, these broadcasts were very popular and often outperformed Star Trek. During the 1960s, without benefit of home video or cable movie channels, TV showings offered a rare chance for viewers to catch a big-screen picture they had missed or rewatch one they had previously enjoyed. Rather than going out to the cinema, many viewers simply waited for films to turn up on TV. While Star Trek was on the air, all three networks ran movies multiple nights of the week—ABC on Sunday and Wednesday, CBS on Thursday and Friday, and NBC on Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday. One or more of these broadcasts often ranked among the most-watched programs in any given ratings period.
My Three Sons (CBS, 8:30 p.m.)—Throughout its three-season run, Star Trek’s toughest competition came from family-friendly sitcoms like this one. One of television’s greatest situation comedy warhorses, My Three Sons ran twelve seasons, from 1960 to 1965 in black and white on ABC and from 1965 to 1972 in color on CBS. The show finished outside the Nielsen Top 30 only twice. One of those two seasons was this one, yet My Three Sons still outdrew Star Trek. The show starred Fred MacMurray as Steve Douglas, a widower raising three boys in a chaotic, all-male, multigenerational household that also included his late wife’s father (William Frawley), a character replaced by Steve’s Uncle Charlie (William Demarest) when the show moved to CBS. The program was modeled after the 1959 Walt Disney comedy The Shaggy Dog (Tim Considine played MacMurray’s son in both the film and the series, and TV’s Douglas family kept a pet sheepdog). My Three Sons ran longer than any family sitcom in television history except The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which ran fourteen seasons from 1952 to 1966. It was the television equivalent of comfort food. Star Trek appealed to viewers with a more exotic palate.
The Tammy Grimes Show (ABC, 8:30 p.m.)—One of the few shows Star Trek outperformed in the ratings was this short-lived sitcom—cancelled after only four episodes—about a daffy, spendthrift heiress (Grimes) and her tight-fisted uncle. Tammy Grimes was a singer and actress then best known for her Tony-winning performance in the title role of the Broadway musical smash The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Two years earlier, Grimes had signed on to play the lead role in television’s Bewitched but was released from her contract to star in Noel Coward’s High Spirits, a Broadway musical adaptation of Coward’s earlier hit, Blithe Spirit. Elizabeth Montgomery took over the lead of the TV series. Coincidentally, the cast of The Tammy Grimes Show also included Dick Sargent, who would later replace Montgomery’s costar, Dick York, on Bewitched. The speedy demise of The Tammy Grimes Show didn’t seriously damage the career of its star. Grimes starred in many more plays (winning a second Tony in 1970 for Coward’s Private Lives), appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, and recorded three albums. She also married actor Christopher Plummer and is the mother of actress Amanda Plummer. In 2003, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. While Grimes didn’t represent major competition for Star Trek, the show she once spurned certainly did.
Shatner and Nimoy did their part to promote Star Trek’s Season Two shift from Thursday to Friday nights. NBC hoped the move would help the series widen its audience.
Bewitched (ABC, 9 p.m.)—Star Trek struggled not only to attract viewers at 8:30 but to hold them at 9 o’clock against the ratings magic of Bewitched. During the 1966–67 season, the show’s first in color, Bewitched placed No. 8 in the Nielsen ratings, its third consecutive Top-10 finish. This supernatural sitcom starred Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, a witch who swears off magic after taking a mortal husband, advertising executive Darrin Stephens. This arrangement doesn’t sit well with Samantha’s family, including her meddling mother, Endora (Agnes Moorehead), whose magical machinations often created headaches for her son-in-law. Darrin was portrayed by Dick York until the actor suffered a debilitating back injury during the program’s sixth season, when Dick Sargent took over the role. Bewitched lasted eight seasons, from 1964 to 1972, but its popularity sagged after Sargent replaced York. Montgomery was the only cast member to appear in all of the show’s 254 episodes. The series, whose cinematic antecedents included I Married a Witch (1942) and Bell, Book and Candle (1958), spawned two spin-offs, a 1972 Saturday morning cartoon and a 1977 prime-time series, both of which centered on Darrin and Samantha’s daughter Tabitha. In 2005, Will Farrell and Nicole Kidman costarred in a disastrous big-screen remake of Bewitched. Despite its far-out premise, many cultural historians consider Bewitched as one of television’s most socially conservative (perhaps even chauvinistic) series. It is, after all, the story of a woman who literally disempowers herself to take on the traditional, subservient role of homemaker and mother. The worldview of Bewitched seemed to stand in bold contrast to the progressive ideology espoused by Star Trek.
Season Two: 1967–68
For anxious months, as the show’s first season drew to a close, NBC kept Star Trek’s cast, crew, and fans in suspense, withholding an announcement on whether or not the series would be renewed. To force the issue, Roddenberry orchestrated and, out of the Star Trek promotional budget, helped fund a massive letter-writing campaign led by his friends in the science fiction literary community, including celebrated author Harlan Ellison (who was still rewriting “The City on the Edge of Forever” at the time). NBC was soon overwhelmed with letters and phone calls in support of the show. A special Nielsen survey conducted in late 1966 may have played an equally powerful role in NBC’s eventual decision to renew Star Trek. The survey, taken by Nielsen Media Research at the request of NBC (which that season became the first network to broadcast an all-color prime-time lineup), compared the ratings of full-color series to those of black-and-white programs and determined the most popular color shows. Surprisingly, respondents named Star Trek their favorite full-color program. This result may have been especially important to NBC because the network was then owned by RCA, a leading manufacturer of color television sets. On March 9, 1967, as the end credits rolled for the episode “Devil in the Dark,” NBC announced to the audience through voice-over narration that Star Trek would return in the fall. It would not return on Thursday nights, however. NBC moved the show to Fridays at 8:30, despite protests from Roddenberry, who worried that most of the show’s youthful viewers would go out on Friday nights rather than stay home to watch TV. His fears were validated when Trek’s ratings declined rather than improved during its second season. That year the show ran against a smash sitcom and the first half hour of the Friday Night Movies on CBS, and opposite a forgettable Western drama on ABC.
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (CBS, 8:30)—Captain Kirk and his crew vanquished the merciless Klingons, the inscrutable Romulans, and the superhuman Khan Noonien Singh. But they didn’t stand a chance against Private Gomer Pyle. NBC hoped moving Star Trek from Thursdays to Fridays would help the struggling program find an audience. It also believed that the appeal of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. might be fading, since the show had slipped eight spots to No. 10 for the 1966–67 season. But against Star Trek, Gomer Pyle regained its ratings muscle and climbed back to Number 3. A spin-off from The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle chronicled the comic misadventures of its title character (played by Jim Nabors), a naïve but good-hearted former Mayberry gas station attendant who seemingly enlisted in the Marine Corps for the sole purpose of flummoxing his commanding officer, Sgt. Carter (Frank Sutton), on a weekly basis. Pyle’s homespun affability and unflagging confidence in the inner goodness of all people made the character a forerunner of Forrest Gump. Despite its military setting, Gomer Pyle, which ran from 1964 to 1969, carefully avoided references to the war in Vietnam or political commentary of any sort. Instead, it offered scenarios where the well-intentioned Pyle accidentally broke the rules or created a problem for another soldier (often Sgt. Carter), which the private would ultimately resolve in a manner that validated his simple values of honesty and compassion. This approach could not be more dissimilar to the socially conscious attitude of Star Trek. Yet the Gomer Pyle formula worked like a charm. The series finished outside the top three only once during its five-season run. The show’s resurgent performance during this, its penultimate season, was one of the factors that darkened NBC’s assessment of Star Trek’s ongoing viability. Coincidentally, Gomer Pyle’s outdoor scenes were shot in Trek’s backyard at Desilu Productions, on the same back lot where The Andy Griffith Show was filmed.
Hondo (ABC, 8:30)—Here’s another rare show that Star Trek vanquished in the ratings. Based on the 1953 Western of the same name, Hondo starred Ralph Taeger (in a role originated by John Wayne) as Hondo Lane, a part-Indian U.S. Cavalry scout who strove to settle disputes between the army and the Comanche, and helped track down outlaws of various stripes. Noah Beery Jr. (perhaps best remembered as Jim Garner’s dad on The Rockford Files) costarred as Hondo’s sidekick, Buffalo Baker, a role played by Ward Bond in the movie. Based on a short story by Louis L’Amour and shot in 3-D, the big-screen Hondo scored a minor box-office success, but the small-screen version never caught on and was cancelled in mid-season after seventeen episodes.
The Enterprise crew defeated the Klingons and Romulans, but they were no match for Sergeant Carter (Frank Sutton, left) and Private Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors).
Season Three: 1968–69
As its second season drew to a close, Star Trek once again faced an uncertain future. Roddenberry surreptitiously pulled together a second and far more vehement “Save Star Trek” effort, this time led by “superfans” such as Bobbie Jo “Bjo” Trimble, Joan Winston, and Wanda Kendall, who Roddenberry flew from Los Angeles to New York to agitate on the series’ behalf. For the second year in a row, NBC was inundated with cards and letters praising the show and pleading for its return, and this time hundreds of protestors with homemade signs picketed the network’s West Coast offices in Burbank, California. Even though many executives were embarrassed by the demonstrations, NBC again relented under public pressure, announcing over the end credits of “The Omega Glory” on March 1, 1968, that Star Trek would be renewed for a third season.
Throughout Season Two, Roddenberry lobbied forcefully for a better time slot for his show. After initially indicating Star Trek would move to Monday night at 7:30, which would have been ideal, NBC programmers suddenly changed course and stuck the show in the Friday 10 p.m. “graveyard slot”—a virtual kiss of death for any program reliant on young viewers. It’s unclear why NBC reneged on its promise to shift Trek to the Monday lead-off slot. One, possibly apocryphal, story is that the move was rebuffed by the producers of the highly rated Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which had debuted as a midseason replacement in January 1968 and gone on to win three Emmy Awards. Because Laugh-In was also dependent on young viewers, producers Ed Friendly and George Schlatter refused to surrender the show’s Monday 8 p.m. slot. Laugh-In became the most watched show on television for the 1968–69 and ’69–70 seasons. Some insiders claim that NBC executives moved Star Trek to Fridays at 10 because they were miffed about the show’s letter-writing campaigns and protests. These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Whatever the reason, the result was the same. In its new time slot, the show’s ratings plummeted to new lows. For the week ending October 8, 1968, Star Trek finished in seventy-sixth place. By the end of its third season, there weren’t enough cards and letters in the world to save Star Trek.
Judd for the Defense (ABC, 10 p.m.)—Aside from the second hour of the CBS Friday Night Movies, Star Trek’s only competition in its final season was this critically acclaimed but little-remembered legal drama. The program featured Carl Betz, the then-popular ex-costar of The Donna Reed Show, as attorney Clinton Judd, a character based (perhaps too closely) on prominent lawyers like F. Lee Bailey and Percy Foreman. Judd for the Defense earned accolades for its willingness to tackle hot-button political issues. Its ripped-from-the-headlines teleplays included stories involving civil rights, Vietnam War protests, homosexuality, and the exploitation of illegal immigrant laborers, among other contemporary topics. Foreman threatened to sue the show for “appropriating for commercial purposes my career as a lawyer” but ultimately took no legal action. While far from a hit in this, its debut season, Judd for the Defense at least managed to get renewed, which is more than Star Trek could accomplish in this time slot. Judd for the Defense was cancelled a season later, but Betz won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his work, and screenwriter Robert Lewin earned a Writers Guild award for his script “To Kill a Madman.”
Even though Star Trek’s final season officially ended in the spring of 1969, NBC reran episodes of the show as summer replacement programming, scheduling it Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. from June through early September. Ironically, this was the early-week, early-evening time slot Roddenberry had long coveted. Since only seventy-nine episodes of Trek had been produced (less than the one hundred generally deemed necessary for syndication), the Star Trek story appeared to be over as the 1970s dawned. But instead, a new chapter was beginning.