A Brief Guide to Star Trek

movies and TV series had led to the work on
Star Trek: Phase II
resulting in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
and the successful 1980s series of
Star Trek
films. The early 1980s saw a TV mini-series adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles
, followed by a surprisingly successful blockbuster alien invasion TV series:
V
. The 1983 mini-series led to a 1984 sequel dubbed
V: The Final Battle
. The battle wasn’t all that final, though, as a short-lived regular episodic series followed in the 1984–5 season.
Battlestar Galactica
producer Glen A. Larson was tapping a then-unserved appetite for fantasy adventure with series like
Knight Rider
(1982–6),
Manimal
(1983) and
Automan
(1983–4), but none was particularly accomplished. It was into this environment that the new
Star Trek
TV series would debut.
    Since
The Motion Picture
Gene Roddenberry had been sidelined from any significant creative input into the ongoing
Star Trek
movie series, and he (initially at least) apparently had little interest in producing a weekly television series again. He recalled the negative effect that producing the original
Star Trek
had had on his life, at a time when his two young daughters were growing up. He was not prepared to make that kind of exhausting commitment of time and creative effort again. However, the temptation to reclaim
Star Trek
for himself, and this time ‘get it right’ was overwhelming. The $1-million bonus (plus ongoing salary) offered for simply signing the contract with Paramount to create and creatively guide the series was perhaps another factor in Roddenberry’s decision to board the
Enterprise
once more. ‘When Paramount came to me and said, “Would you like to do a new
Star Trek
?” I said no’, Roddenberry claimed on a 1988 radio show. ‘I wanted no part of it.’ He had previously likened producing a new weekly television series as being the equivalent of turning out ‘half a motion picture’ every week. ‘Television is twelve hours a day, miserably hard work’, he told an audience at an event at New York’s Museum of Broadcasting in March 1986, just months before signing on to
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. ‘I wouldn’t produce a television series again myself.’
    Did Paramount need Roddenberry for
Star Trek
, or did Roddenberry himself need
Star Trek
more? The studio’s experience with the maverick producer during the course of the four (to that date)
Star Trek
motion pictures had not been great and although the studio executive team had changed, most knew of the problems laid at Roddenberry’s feet during the creation of
The Motion Picture
. However, there was a danger fans and general audiences alike would somehow regard a new
Star Trek
without Roddenberry’s approval as somehow illegitimate – and there was the further danger that if he was not involved, Roddenberry would be free to criticise the project from outside, as had been feared at the time of
The Wrath of Khan
. It was a risk Paramount was not willing to take, although they would not put Roddenberry in sole charge of a twenty-four-episode series where each episode was projected to cost around $1.2 million.
    Roddenberry’s involvement became a central point of theoriginal announcement of the return of the show: ‘Although this is a new starship
Enterprise
, with a new cast and new stories, the man at the helm is still the same: the creator of
Star Trek
, Gene Roddenberry. And we’re going to have him once again supervising all aspects of production’, said Mark Harris, then President of Paramount Television.
    Paramount had in fact begun the project entirely without Roddenberry, hiring writer–producer Gregory Strangis to develop a new take on their old
Star Trek
property. Strangis was a supervising producer on the glossy evening soap opera
Falcon Crest
, hired to work out characters and situations for a show set 100 years after
The Original Series
– among the new characters Strangis developed was a Klingon officer working within Starfleet. Also approached, given his creative work on the
Star Trek
movie series, was Leonard Nimoy. The actor turned the project down, citing his reluctance to get involved in the production of a weekly TV series just at a time when his non-
Star Trek
feature film directing career was taking off.
    Already worried that a new
Star Trek
without Kirk, Spock and McCoy might have difficulty attracting an audience, talks were reluctantly started between Paramount and Roddenberry. It