A Brief Guide to Star Trek

one or two episodes for each series and never secured a staff-writing job. In 1962 he wrote instalments of some of American TV’s top-rated shows, including
Dr Kildare
,
Naked City
and
The Virginian
.
    Roddenberry tried several times to get his own programmeoff the ground. He’d written a pilot script in 1959 called
Night Stick
about a Greenwich Village cop, while his 1960 episode of
Alcoa Goodyear Theatre
called ‘333 Montgomery Street’, about a criminal defence attorney, was intended as a possible series pilot. It at least aired (unlike
Night Stick
), but didn’t go to series. His third pilot script –
APO 923
, a drama about three Army servicemen stationed on an island – was made but not seen except by network executives and ad agencies. Finally,
Defiance County
was written but never made.
    Now aged forty-two, Roddenberry was keen to make a break from run-of-the-mill episodic TV writing. Pitching a series to
Dr Kildare
producer Norman Felton, he fell back on his days in the service and came up with an idea about the work of a professional soldier during peacetime. Through Felton’s industry connections Roddenberry secured a pilot deal with funding from MGM and a commitment that allowed him to produce the series, if it was commissioned. The writer believed that becoming a producer was the vital next step in his TV career: that was where the power lay in the business and to achieve that he had to secure a show he’d created. Realising this new project through Felton’s independent Arena Productions meant that the resulting show could be pitched to all three broadcast networks. The downside of this freedom was that as none of the networks had a funding commitment to the pilot, it was much easier for them to reject the show.
    The Lieutenant
was built around the leading character of William Tiberius Rice, a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps. In his mid-twenties and a recent graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy, Rice is sent to investigate an alleged assault by a private against a corporal. Fearing he’ll miss out on a plum posting in the meantime, Rice resists but falls in with an attractive young woman named Lane Bishop. Through her, Rice discovers the private had good reason for attacking the corporal – he was having an affair with the private’s wife – but refuses, due to the potential embarrassment, to reveal these mitigating circumstances. The script, ‘A Very Private Affair’,was circulated within Arena Productions in January 1963 with a view to producing it that spring.
    Roddenberry’s troubled private life may have informed his teleplay. Although still married to Rexroat, Roddenberry had begun an affair with a young aspiring actress named Majel Barrett, only the latest in a long series of extra-marital affairs he’d pursued. As his twenty-year marriage slowly disintegrated, Roddenberry found himself out of his depth on the set of
The Lieutenant
pilot, contributing to delays on the already complicated location shoot at Camp Pendleton, where the military were lending their cooperation. The episode was finished just in time to be presented to the network executives who’d decide which new shows they’d commission for the fall TV season.
    Despite the problems, which included tensions between Roddenberry and the episode’s director, the very experienced Buzz Kulik, and between Roddenberry and executive producer Felton, the resulting show was good enough for NBC to commit to a full series. After almost a decade in the TV writing business, Gene Roddenberry had successfully made the switch from episodic writer to series producer.
    His euphoria was short-lived, however. Almost immediately,
The Lieutenant
ran into trouble. In order to secure the continued involvement of the Marines and the Department of Defense – the show would not be half as effective without it – the producers had to abide by a lengthy list of prohibitions from the military. Given that the core of drama is conflict, the requirement that
The Lieutenant
should portray military life positively severely restricted the new series’ storytelling possibilities – oddly, an approach Roddenberry himself would later take in his vision of the future on
Star Trek
. Roddenberry also ran up against his own creative limitations. As ‘showrunner’ it was down to him to determine the tone and direction of the series, but beyond making a version of
Dr Kildare
set in the Army, he was at a loss for a way to distinctively define