Star Trek: The Original Series

Years: 1966 - 1969
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 79 (Or were there 72? Or 73?)
Created By: Gene Roddenberry (and uncredited others)

Main Cast:

William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk
Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock
DeForest Kelley as Leonard “Bones” McCoy
James Doohan as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott
Nichelle Nichols as Uhura
George Takei as Sulu
Walter Koenig as Chekov
Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel

Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) is to canceled TV shows what Hebrew is to dying languages: the One Example that brings hope, since both were brought back from the dead and eventually flourished (though in different ways, obviously). It almost seems pointless to recap the phenomenal story of how Trek was resurrected, but the keypoints boil down to the following:

Star Trek was pretty much on the verge of cancelation from the get-go.
It was saved for another season by intense fan interest and letter writing campaigns.
When the show was finally yanked off the air, it became a huge success through syndication.
This success led to eleven films, five additional TV series, countless novels, games, and other tie-ins, as well as becoming such a part of pop culture that everyone knows what “beaming up” means and what a Vulcan’s ears look like.

The plot of the show is simple enough: A group of explorers (mainly human but with an alien aboard) led by the fearless Captain James T. Kirk travel the galaxy, hopping from planet to planet looking for unknown life forms. Every single time they find new life, and even times when they don’t, disaster strikes and the crew of the Starship Enterprise must defeat the alien menace or solve the problem. That’s pretty much it. The alien on the crew is Mr. Spock, a half human/half Vulcan with pointy ears who prides himself on his lack of emotion and dependence on logic. This leads to the exceedingly annoying part of the show where various members of the crew (especially the ship’s doctor, Leonard “Bones” McCoy) bitch him out for not letting his emotions dictate life or death situations. Also aboard is Chief Engineer and Scottish stereotype Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, glamorized secretary and token hot black girl Uhura, Helmsmen and token hot Asian Hikaru Sulu, and navigator with a shitty wig and embarrassing fake Russian accent Pavel Chekov. Another cast member is Nurse Chapel, notable because her credentials for getting aboard the Enterprise consist of her getting her Tribble pounded by Trek-creator Gene Roddenberry, and that’s about it.

Though Captain Kirk is now synonymous with Star Trek, in the original pilot there was a different captain named Christopher Pike. The pilot was titled The Cage and involved Pike getting kidnapped by some androgynous aliens with gigantic veiny heads called The Talosians. Apparently the networked bitched about the pilot being “too cerebral,” but they liked the idea enough to order a second pilot. This pilot, called Where No Man Has Gone Before, took care of many of the issues the network had with The Cage. It had more action, Spock fixed that fucked-up hairstyle he used to have, and Pike was replaced with Kirk. In a delicious bit of recycling, The Cage was chopped up and turned into a two-parter called The Menagerie, which accomplished the impossible by turning this blatant example of penny-pinching into a classic sci fi story.

Because of the nerd stigma surrounding all things Trek, I didn’t know how to approach this show. I decided to watch them in order, wrongly assuming that there was a ton of information that would slowly be revealed over the course of the show that would make watching future episodes a more rewarding experience. As it turns out, you can randomly watch any episode of TOS and not worry about having missed some crucial bit of information. In fact, it almost seems like the show goes out of it’s way to tell you what you need to know in every episode. I mentioned how the crew frequently bitches Spock out for relying on logic over emotion. This is annoying, but it makes it easy for a first-time viewer to tune in and understand that this character operates differently from others. You don’t need to know about his half human status, the rituals of his home planet, or his previous relationships. Because TOS had no season-long story arcs, every episode starts from scratch. A forced cease-fire between the Federation and the Klingons (who at this point were just a bunch of angry black guys with goatees) is promptly ignored in future episodes when the Klingons start up their shit again. As someone who loves story arcs, this aspect of TOS makes it somewhat less great than its reputation suggests.

That’s not to say the show is bad. The first two seasons are full of great sci fi stories that still work. The slow, talky aspect of the show makes the decisions more important, and it goes a long way towards giving the show an environment that feels real to the viewer. When compared to the even slower and more cerebral The Next Generation, TOS sometimes feels like a Michael Bay production, but it is still a fantastic show with a lot of heavy-handed philosophy and social commentary, which I always enjoy in a show. And when they come, the action scenes are a lot of fun. There are fewer things more enjoyable that Kirk getting into a fight by diving at the enemy doing his ridiculous two-handed punch, and randomly doing a roll on the ground while trying to dodge an enemy’s phaser. Plus, even though the cast absolutely detested Shatner, there’s still a real sense of camaraderie and friendship among the crew. That makes all the technobabble about warp drives and matter/antimatter and whatnot go down a lot easier.

So we have a well-written original sci fi show with a great cast and interesting characters. The only thing it was missing was viewers. The ratings for the first season were average at best, even though it was the number one color program on TV. The financial concerns led to the threat of dropping one of the most popular characters from the show: Mr. Spock. He wanted an increase in pay due to the popularity of his character, and since the show was barely getting by as it was, this lead the producers to consider replacing the character, possibly with another Vulcan. However, the network demanded that Spock stayed on the show, since nearly half of the fan mail that they received was for that character. Women loved him, and nerds wanted to be him.



However, the ratings for the second season didn’t improve, and the network began doubting the commercial viability of letting nerds dictate their programing. In a fantastically effective move by Roddenberry, he got in touch with a couple of fans and secretly began a letter-writing campaign to save the show. The silent minority of geeks began flooding the network with mail, and it worked. Trek was renewed for a third season, and the world shown the surprising power of nerd outrage. That victory came at a cost, though. Three things happened with the third season that finally got Trek out of NBC’s hair for good:

First, the show was moved to the Friday night death slot, which is the TV equivalent to driving a pet dog you no longer want into a far away place and kicking it out of your car. The people who would want to watch this show, teens and college students, were out of the house actually doing things, leaving it up to the die-hards to tune in every night to keep the ratings up.

Second, the budget was slashed, causing a bunch of the episodes to look shitty. The “strange new worlds” explored by the enterprise were reduced to a bunch of styrofoam rocks that got more airtime than Sulu, and variously-colored backgrounds. The difference between each planet was even less significant than Clark Kent yanking off his glasses and adding some bass to his voice. Also, even basic things started looking “off.” The most egregious was Spock’s ears, which by season three started to look like something a kid would pay a dime for at the toy store.

Third, because of the show being moved to the death slot, Roddenberry pulled the ultimate douche move and decided to ditch the show, basically telling the dedicated fan base that busted it’s ass to save his show to go fuck themselves. Possibly as a result of this, the quality control of the new episodes seemed “lax,” to put it nicely. To put it less nicely, the show turned into a retarded fucking joke, pumping out a shocking amount of horrible bullshit that made the show even harder for the fans to defend. The opening to each episode became increasingly ridiculous, always ending with the same idiotic “dramatic” music before the title credits began. The plots focused more and more on planets that have environments “remarkably similar to our own!” Further, the writers didn’t even seem to be trying anymore. The biggest example of this is the embarrassing Spock’s Brain episode, where aliens steal Spock’s brain, which is then somehow able to talk to Captain Kirk and his crew, while a brainless Zombie Spock shuffles around looking like he’s about to say “time for go to bed!” at any minute. Mercifully, TOS was finally canceled after the third season, preventing it from getting even worse.

This is one of the times where getting canceled was a blessing for a show. Season three was the shark-jumping season, and the absolute best time for it to die. If it stayed on the air, the only thing that would have allowed it to rise to its previous heights would be pumping the budget back up for each episode and putting it back on a time slot where people would be home to see it. Roddenberry would then scoop the sand out of his vagina and get back to work, and we’d potentially have some more classic episodes. As it happened, viewers got to see classic episodes in syndication, and the injustice of it being canceled helped fuel the mystique behind the show. The fan base steadily began growing, conventions started popping up, and it all culminated in a film franchise, which was successful enough to spawn spin-offs which took the promise of TOS and made it even better than it ever was before. There has never been a more successful failure in the history of television.

Recommended for: Sci Fi fans, people who really like heavy-handed social commentary and philosophy, closet nerds, regular nerds, fans of bad stunt-doubles, women who masturbate to emotionally distant men.