Uncle John’s Facts to Go Where’d that Come From?

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WHERE NO SHOW
HAS GONE BEFORE

As Star Trek approaches 50 (Earth) years old, let’s take a look back at the groundbreaking sci-fi show’s humble beginnings.

MACHO MAN

Gene Roddenberry was Captain Kirk. As a brash teenager in the 1930s, he wanted to be a cop and even volunteered for the FBI. In World War II, he became a decorated bomber pilot who completed 89 missions in the Pacific. After the war, Captain Roddenberry was piloting a Pan Am passenger jet over the Syrian desert when the plane lost an engine and crashed. He fought off looting nomads to keep his passengers safe until help arrived.

One day in the mid-1950s, Roddenberry, now a motorcycle cop, walked into a Hollywood restaurant and interrupted a group of TV producers at a lunch meeting. He dropped one of his scripts on the table and said, “You’ll want to read this.” It was an unconventional, swaggering way to get his foot in the door…and it worked.

WAGON TREK

By 1964, Roddenberry was a successful TV writer, having written dozens of scripts for hit TV Westerns (Have Gun—Will Travel) and police dramas (Highway Patrol). But his goal was to get a show that he created on the air. He already had the first piece of the puzzle—a great idea. From his official pitch:

Star Trek is a new kind of television science fiction series. The format will be “Wagon Train to the Stars”—built around characters who travel to other worlds and meet the jeopardy and adventure which become our stories.

Studio after studio said no. “Too risky,” one executive said, “too smart. And way too expensive to produce every week.” In the 1960s, TV sci-fi was more fantasy than science-fiction; there was little attempt at realism—with either the science or the story lines. Combining a space adventure with serious drama was unheard of.

But Roddenberry knew there was an audience for it.

GENE LOVES LUCY

Having been rejected by the major TV studios, Roddenberry turned to a smaller one, Desilu. Although Herbert Solow, Desilu’s vice president, wasn’t completely sold on the Star Trek idea, he thought Roddenberry had great promise as a writer/producer and convinced his boss, Oscar Katz, to sign him to a three-year deal.

The studio needed a hit—its only show in production at that time was The Lucy Show. Lucille Ball herself (Desilu’s president) convinced Katz to allow Roddenberry to pitch Star Trek to the network. “There aren’t smart shows on TV,” said Ball. So Roddenberry went to CBS, home of The Lucy Show. After an impassioned, two-hour presentation, network president James Aubrey Jr. thanked Roddenberry for his time, but he turned down Star Trek because the network was already developing a similar show: Lost in Space. A meeting with ABC also ended in rejection. The only stop left: NBC.

This time, Roddenberry got the go-ahead. Mort Werner, NBC’s vice president of programming, shelled out $500,000 to produce a pilot. Called “The Cage,” it starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike and Majel Barrett as his female second-in-command. (There was also an excitable alien character with pointy ears played by Leonard Nimoy.) Werner was impressed by the storytelling, the drama, the acting, and the attention to detail…but still said no to a series, using the same “too smart” and “too expensive” logic that Roddenberry had heard so many times before.

But there was a glimmer of hope. Werner allowed Roddenberry to film a second pilot—with a few changes: 1) Find a younger, better-looking actor to play the captain, 2) demote the woman, and 3) get rid of the “pointy-eared guy.”

A REFLECTION OF THE TIMES

Roddenberry was dismayed about the changes but elated about having a second chance, so he compromised. William Shatner came in as Captain Kirk (replacing Pike), and Barrett was recast as Nurse Chapel. But Roddenberry refused to relinquish the “Vulcan” character. And he made one other change without informing NBC: He added a female African American officer to the bridge.

Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to reflect American society as a modern, progressive culture. Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, became TV’s first black female character in a position of authority during the civil rights movement. Racism, militarism, pacifism— few topics were taboo for the original Star Trek. And it was an intelligent show, thanks to some of the day’s best sci-fi writers, including Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and David Gerrold (who would become best known for writing the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”). Whereas other space shows (like Lost in Space) featured mindless monsters, Star Trek aired an episode about a “Horta”—a rocklike thing that turned out to be a mother protecting her young.

STARDATE 1513.1

Star Trek premiered on September 8, 1966, and a whopping 40 percent of American homes tuned in. The size of the audience may have been due to the fact that NBC launched their fall season a week before the other networks; CBS and ABC were airing reruns. When competitors put new shows against Star Trek, ratings dropped. By the end of the season, it ranked a disappointing #52.

Desilu’s Katz wanted to cancel it, but again Lucille Ball exerted her power to keep it in production for another year. At the end of the second season, NBC was all set to cancel the show, no matter what Ball said—it was losing badly to CBS’s Gomer Pyle USMC— but Trek’s small, rabid fan base mounted a massive letter-writing campaign to keep it on the air. The show was saved again.

Ratings, however, did not improve. NBC never knew quite how to market Star Trek, or to whom—it was too grown-up for the Monkees audience and too far-out for the Gunsmoke crowd. Plus, Roddenberry constantly battled NBC and later Paramount, which bought out Desilu, over everything from budgets to story lines to hemlines.

Even the actors were fighting with each other (Shatner frequently stole lines from his castmates) and with Roddenberry (over scheduling and appearance fees). By the third season, the budget was severely cut and the show’s quality suffered. NBC was ready to let it go. The network put Star Trek in the time slot where shows go to die: Friday night at 10 p.m. The final episode aired on June 3, 1969, a month and a half before the Moon landing.