Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969) Review
6-8/10
Seventy-nine episodes across three seasons, made for a network that canceled it twice and a studio board that didn’t want to pay for it. A five-year mission that lasted three years and then became the most consequential piece of American television science fiction ever produced. The 6 to 8 is a range because the show won’t hold a single number. The production values are 1960s network television, the acting conventions belong to that decade, the sets are plywood and colored light, and none of that is a secret to anybody watching it now. What survives is what the show was willing to put on screen. Moral ambiguity, an argument in most episodes instead of a threat, and a captain who would act when the situation required somebody to act.
This show wins me over, plywood and all. The sets make me smile, Kirk’s way with visiting women makes me wince, and then an episode stops to argue about war or tyranny and I forget what I’m looking at. The 6 to 8 is affection and embarrassment pulling on the same hour, and in the best episodes the embarrassment has nowhere to stand.
Watch it by going back to 1966 and staying there. Don’t drag it forward. Accept the era, accept the budget, and much of it holds up very well. Refuse to, and the corniness is all that’s left.
It Is 1966 and You Have to Meet It There
The dating is the first thing anybody notices and it’s four separate problems.
The production is cheap in ways that are visible in every episode. Planets are a cyclorama and colored gel, corridors repeat because there’s one corridor, and the same rock formation at Vasquez Rocks stands in for most of the galaxy.
The acting conventions are theatrical by modern standards, because in 1966 people trained in theater and radio made television, and it played to a small screen with poor resolution. Shatner in particular is doing something that reads as mannered now and read as forceful then. The gender politics are the hardest part to watch and the film can’t be argued out of them. Uniform skirts, yeoman roles, Kirk’s habit with visiting women, and a great many lines that were unremarkable in 1966 and play badly now. What the era gave in exchange is a writing culture that took ideas seriously. Network science fiction was cheap enough to be left alone. That meant a story about a war conducted by computer or a planet that had bureaucratized its own atrocities could get made without anybody asking whether it tested well.
The corniness and the substance are also the same property. That’s the thing most modern viewers get wrong. A show that will stage a philosophical argument in a plywood corridor is a show that’s decided ideas matter more than surfaces, and the plywood is the price.
Watch it as a document and it works. Watch it expecting a contemporary production and the first ten minutes will end the experiment.
A work made under real constraint puts its resources where its argument is. This show spent nothing on planets and everything on scripts, and the ratio is legible in every episode. The reverse is the modern failure. Enormous resources and no position. That this page documents repeatedly in film. Judge a period work by what it was willing to say, not by what it could build. The second is a budget and the first is a choice.
If you want your work to survive its own era, put the value in the argument. Surfaces date on a fixed schedule and positions don’t.
Kirk Would Act
The captain is the reason the show still works as drama and the comparison with what followed is unavoidable.
Kirk is reckless, impulsive, frequently wrong, and will make a decision. He violates the Prime Directive when he judges it necessary, argues with Starfleet, takes a landing party into situations he doesn’t understand, and accepts the consequences afterward. That willingness is a structural asset instead of a character trait. A protagonist who acts generates plot, and a protagonist who deliberates generates discussion, and an hour of television needs the first more than it needs the second. The triangle is the other half of it. Spock argues the logical position, McCoy argues the human one, and Kirk decides. That gives the show a debate structure that works in any story regardless of what the planet of the week is doing.
That arrangement does something almost no ensemble manages: it makes the argument the format. The three of them can disagree about anything and the scene will hold, because the disagreement is the show, and I think it’s the smartest structural idea the series ever had.
Shatner’s performance is also better than its reputation once you account for the tone. The pauses that became a joke are doing real work in several episodes, and he plays the moments where Kirk is frightened without any of the bluster the impression rests on. The contrast with Picard is the one I’d draw hardest, and it’s covered in the Next Generation review on this site. A philosopher in a command chair is an interesting character and a problem for a series that needs somebody to give an order.
Where It Came From
Nothing about the show is original and the borrowings are worth knowing, because they explain what it was trying to be.
Forbidden Planet is the direct ancestor and the debt is enormous. A starship crew, a captain and a ship’s doctor, a landing party, a mission of investigation, an artificial intelligence, and a visual grammar the series adopted more or less whole.
Roddenberry’s pitch was reportedly Wagon Train to the stars. That’s exactly what the format is. An episodic anthology with a traveling regular cast, a new situation each week, and a structure borrowed from the Western and not from science fiction.
The Day the Earth Stood Still supplied the moral posture. A visitor who’s more reasonable than the people receiving him, a warning delivered instead of a threat carried out, and the idea that the interesting question is how humans respond. The written science fiction of the period is the other source and the series hired from it directly. Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad and Jerome Bixby all wrote episodes. That’s why the best hours read like short stories instead of like television.
That hiring decision is the single most consequential thing the production did. A network drama that goes to working science fiction writers for scripts gets science fiction, and one that goes to television writers gets a Western with rubber masks. The Twilight Zone is the model it’s closest to in ambition, and the difference is the regular cast. Serling’s anthology could end anywhere and this show had to return the same people to the same bridge. That’s a harder constraint and produced a different kind of story.
Hire from the form you’re trying to write in. People who published science fiction wrote the best episodes here, and it’s audible in the first two minutes of each of them. The failure mode is hiring generalists and hoping the setting supplies the genre. It never does.
A pitch that names a familiar format gets a show made. Wagon Train to the stars told a network exactly what it was buying, and the science fiction arrived inside a structure they already understood.
Know your ancestors. Forbidden Planet isn’t an influence on this show, it’s the template, and being clear about that is more useful than claiming originality.
The Essential Episodes
The range from 6 to 8 isn’t hedging. The gap between the best and worst hours here’s larger than almost any series since, so the useful thing is a list instead of an average.
The Trouble with Tribbles is the best episode of the original series and it’s a hundred percent better than anything else in it. A space station, a shipment of grain, a trader with a sack of small furry animals that do nothing but eat and reproduce, and a Klingon plot that the tribbles expose by disliking the right person.
It works because the comedy is entirely structural. Nothing in it is a joke. The animals behave consistently, every character responds to them in character, and the escalation is arithmetic. That’s why it’s still funny sixty years later while almost no other television comedy of 1967 is.
Tribbles is the episode I’d hand to anybody who thinks they hate this show. It makes me laugh out loud, and it never once winks at the camera to do it. A Klingon plot exposed by small furry animals with good taste in people is about as much fun as sixties television offers.
David Gerrold wrote it at twenty-three, three credits short of a degree at Cal State Northridge, and it was his first professional sale. He got the writing assignment partly because he was quick and partly because he was cheap, and then sat on a ladder watching his own words being shot.
It was nominated for a Hugo, which was the first time anybody’s first professional sale had been nominated, and it lost by six votes to The City on the Edge of Forever. Two episodes of the same season taking the top two places is the strongest single fact about what that writing staff was doing.
Gerrold then wrote a book about it. The Trouble with Tribbles, published in 1973 and reprinted repeatedly since, is a complete account of one episode from outline through sale to the shooting stage, and it’s one of the few useful books about writing for television that exists. Anybody on this site should read it.
He became a considerable force in the franchise afterward. Roddenberry brought him back in October 1986, alongside Robert Justman, Edward Milkis and D.C. Fontana, as the production nucleus for The Next Generation, and Gerrold wrote much of that show’s writers’ bible before leaving near the end of its first season in a dispute with Roddenberry.
The Doomsday Machine is second and is the planet-killer episode. An automated weapon the size of a moon is eating its way through a star system, the Enterprise finds a wrecked sister ship, and the surviving commodore takes over Kirk’s bridge to hunt the thing that killed his crew.
The Berserker resemblance most people notice is real and it didn’t come from the writer. Norman Spinrad has said his source was Moby-Dick, that his novelette The Planet Eater predated Fred Saberhagen’s stories, and that what he wrote was an organism. The production turned it into a machine, and the machine version is what looks like a Berserker. The Star Trek Concordance calls it exactly that.
The City on the Edge of Forever is the third and is usually ranked first outright. Harlan Ellison’s script, heavily rewritten and the subject of his complaints for thirty years, puts Kirk in 1930s New York and requires him to let somebody die to restore history.
Balance of Terror is a submarine film with a Romulan commander who’s the most sympathetic antagonist in the series. Mirror, Mirror invented the parallel-universe device the franchise has run on for sixty years. The Devil in the Dark inverts its own monster and Kirk ends up negotiating with it. Amok Time takes Spock out of control of himself.
Space Seed, Arena, A Taste of Armageddon and The Enterprise Incident round out the dozen worth showing anybody. That’s the show at its rating of 8 and above.
At the bottom is Spock’s Brain. It’s a 1 with no defense available. Somebody steals Spock’s brain, the crew fit his body with a remote control, and the hour proceeds as though none of that is ridiculous. The Alternative Factor, And the Children Shall Lead and The Way to Eden sit beside it, all third season, made with a cut budget on a Friday night by a production that knew it was finished.
Spock’s Brain is more insulting than funny. The same show that let Ellison and Sturgeon write for it put this on the air with a straight face, and too much of the third season feels like a crew punching a clock. Watching the best writing staff on television get starved into this is the part of the franchise I’d most like to forget.
That third season collapse has a documented cause instead of a creative one. The budget was cut, Gene L. Coon had left, Roddenberry had stepped back to a nominal role, and Fred Freiberger inherited a show with less money and a worse night than either of his predecessors had to work with.
Comedy that comes from structure outlasts comedy that comes from jokes. Nothing in The Trouble with Tribbles is a gag. The animals behave consistently, everybody reacts in character, and the escalation is arithmetic. That’s why it plays now and why almost no other television comedy of 1967 does.
A body of work with real variance is better served by a list than by an average. Twelve titles tells somebody what to do and a single number tells them nothing. Name the floor as well, because a recommendation that admits what’s unwatchable is more trustworthy than one that doesn’t.
What the production does to your work can change what it resembles. Spinrad wrote an organism, the art department built a machine, and sixty years of viewers have attributed an influence he denies.
Read Gerrold’s book if you write for any medium with a buyer in it. One episode, followed from outline through sale to the stage, by somebody who was twenty-three and kept notes.
It Exists Because of Lucille Ball
The production history is better than most of the plots and the central fact isn’t widely enough known. Desilu made Star Trek, and Desilu was Lucille Ball’s company. She’d bought out Desi Arnaz’s stake in 1962 and was running the studio when Roddenberry brought the project in around 1964. CBS passed on it. NBC commissioned a pilot.
The Cage was rejected, reportedly as too cerebral, with Jeffrey Hunter as Pike and Majel Barrett as Number One. That’s normally where a project dies. Instead NBC ordered a second pilot, which Desilu executive Herbert Solow described as enormously rare, because networks didn’t give failed pilots another attempt.
Ball overruled her own board to fund both of them. The directors didn’t want to carry the cost, the show was expensive for its era, and she pushed it through anyway. By several accounts she didn’t entirely understand what she was backing and thought it involved traveling entertainers.
This is my favorite piece of television history. A comedian who by several accounts thought she was paying for traveling entertainers overruled her own board and bankrolled two pilots, and I’d put up a statue to her before I’d put one up to anybody on that bridge.
The second piece is the audience. When NBC moved to cancel after the second season, Bjo and John Trimble organized a letter-writing campaign, and the network renewed for a third year, on Friday nights with less money.
That third season is the whole franchise. Seventy-nine episodes is enough to strip daily in syndication and two seasons isn’t, and syndication through the seventies is where the audience really formed, long after the show was off the air.
So the sequence is a comedian overruling a board, a network giving a second chance it didn’t usually give, and viewers writing letters to buy a season nobody at the network wanted. Remove any one of those and there’s no franchise to have opinions about.
A work’s survival is frequently a matter of distribution mechanics instead of merit. Seventy-nine episodes clears the syndication threshold and seventy-eight doesn’t, and the entire franchise turns on that arithmetic.
Nothing in that is about quality. It’s about whether enough of the thing exists to be sold in the format that found its audience.
An audience that organizes can change a commercial decision, and it happened here before anybody had a mechanism for it. Remember that when somebody tells you nothing can be done. Somebody with standing has to spend it. Ball funded two pilots against her own board, and almost every work that exists against the odds has a version of that person behind it.
Should you watch Star Trek: The Original Series?
Yes, and go back to 1966 to do it. The sets are cheap, the corny stretches are corny and the dated parts are badly dated, and I still get more out of this show than a lot of what came after it, because it hired working science fiction writers and let them argue about something in a plywood corridor. Start with The Trouble with Tribbles, then The Doomsday Machine, and skip Spock’s Brain entirely. The range is the budget and the decade dragging on a show whose best hours sit at 8 and above.
