A Brief Guide to Star Trek

ratings meant that
Star Trek
scraped through to a third year on air, but only after another vociferous fan campaign which this time included student demonstrations outside NBC’s headquarters in Los Angeles. A letter-writing campaign resulted in a steady flow of
Star Trek
mail to NBC. According to Roddenberry his show had actually been cancelled by the end of its second season in 1967, only for it to be renewed thanks to the volume of mail the broadcaster received.
    Like the previous campaign, Roddenberry himself had been heavily involved in coordinating things from behind the scenes, but NBC were never to know that. They actually investigated the legitimacy of the letter-writing campaign and established to their satisfaction that the more than one million letters that arrived at NBC were representative of a genuine outpouring from real
Star Trek
fans.
    By the end of the second season
Star Trek
had produced fifty-five episodes, not enough for NBC to run the show in syndication and thus maximise its returns on the series through daily reruns. With a third season of episodes, the series total would rise to enough for a decent syndication package (even though the usually preferred number of episodes was around 100) and a chance at generating a profit. The decision to renew may have been more of a sensible business move on the part of NBC than a response to any fan campaign (and in later years NBC claimed the number of letters received was actually less than 150,000). The decision to grant the series a third year would give
Star Trek
the chance to achieve serious longevity.
    The show was back on, but despite his role in rescuing
Star Trek
from oblivion after its second year, Gene Roddenberry was to be even less involved in the production than ever before. Writing to author Isaac Asimov, Roddenberry addressed the changes behind the scenes of the third season and his hopes for
Star Trek
’s future. ‘This year I am pulling back from . . . the showand will try to operate now as a real executive producer. I had offered to NBC to line produce it myself if they gave us a good hour on a good weeknight, but you know what happened there. I decided it was simply not worth the crippling expenditure of time and energy if I could not have a night and an hour which gave us at least a fair chance of reaching a mass audience and staying on the air. It is always at least possible that Friday night at 10 p.m. may work, or we might get a mid-season shift to a good time slot. I hope it works. I hope I can supervise the new team in keeping the quality of the show up, I hope
Star Trek
stays on for five or ten years. I’ve done my damnedest for the show.’
    Like any successful TV producer, Roddenberry was always on the lookout for a way to advance to the next project, to a higher earning bracket or even into motion pictures. A third year of
Star Trek
was just another way for him to further that goal of advancing his own career. The new time slot helped Roddenberry to step back from the show he’d created: he’d promised hands-on involvement if NBC would return
Star Trek
to its previous successful early-evening slot early in the week, when younger viewers and students could watch. The Friday late-night slot was a blow, but it did help Roddenberry detach himself from his creation more easily. As far as he was concerned, cancellation after the third year was all but inevitable now, fan campaign or no fan campaign.
    For its third year, producing duties on
Star Trek
fell to Fred Freiberger, an experienced TV producer hired by Roddenberry (he’d written for many of the same shows as Roddenberry, including
Highway Patrol
and
West Point
). In fact, Freiberger had initially been interviewed in 1966 for the producer role taken by Gene Coon. However, in the eyes of
Star Trek
’s fans, he would carry the responsibility for the reduction in quality of the episodes in the series’ third season. This had as much to do with a huge reduction in budget as it had with a lack of creative ideas. Even so, a number of the later episodes of the third year continued to prove that when
Star Trek
’s producers applied their minds, their stories could still challenge audiences.
    Halfway through transmission of the third season in January 1969, Roddenberry confided in a letter to a friend his fears about cancellation. ‘I have grave doubts that we will be picked up for a fourth season. The Friday night at 10 p.m. slot is an almost impossible one for a show