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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 8, 1966
United States
60 years ago
Star Trek, the science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry, which premiered on NBC on September 8, 1966, with the episode The Man Trap.
On the evening of September 8, 1966, NBC broadcast the first episode of a new science fiction series called Star Trek. The episode was The Man Trap, a story about a shape-shifting creature that drains salt from its victims, chosen ahead of others because network executives thought it was the most conventionally frightening. The series had already been unusual in its development. NBC had rejected the original pilot as too cerebral and then, in a highly irregular move, commissioned a second one.
The premise was straightforward and enormously flexible. A starship, the Enterprise, travels the galaxy on a five-year mission of exploration with a crew drawn from across Earth and beyond. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, had pitched it in Hollywood shorthand as a western in space, but his actual ambition was closer to a moral fable. Because the stories took place on invented planets, they could examine race, war, ideology, and authority in ways that contemporary drama in 1966 could not easily manage.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Science fiction television, the genre that Star Trek helped legitimize and reshape, and which the series' many successors have continued to dominate for six decades.
The bridge crew was deliberately international and, for American television in 1966, deliberately diverse. Nichelle Nichols played Lieutenant Uhura, a Black woman serving as a senior officer, at a time when Black actors were rarely cast in such roles. Nichols considered leaving after the first season and later recounted that Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded her to stay, telling her that the role mattered. George Takei played Sulu and Walter Koenig played Chekov, a Russian officer on American television at the height of the Cold War.
Ratings were mediocre and the show was expensive. NBC cancelled it after the second season, reversed the decision after an organized letter-writing campaign by fans, moved it to a bad time slot, cut its budget, and cancelled it for good after the third. Seventy-nine episodes had been made. By the ordinary measures of network television it had failed.
Then it went into syndication, and something unusual happened. Repeated daily across local stations through the 1970s, it found the audience it had never had in prime time. Fan conventions began in 1972 and grew rapidly. An animated series followed, then a feature film in 1979, then eleven more films and a succession of television series that has continued into the present. The franchise's imagery has influenced real technology, from flip phones to tablet computers to voice-controlled assistants. NASA named a test shuttle Enterprise after a fan campaign. A cancelled show with disappointing ratings became one of the most durable and widely referenced creations in modern culture.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It used invented worlds to say things contemporary drama could not. Setting stories on other planets let the series examine racism, war, colonialism, and authority in the 1960s in ways a show set in the present would have struggled to get on air.
Its casting broke ground on American television. A bridge crew including a Black woman as a senior officer, a Japanese American helmsman, and a Russian navigator during the Cold War was a deliberate statement about the future, and it mattered to viewers who had never seen themselves in those roles.
It showed that syndication and fandom could resurrect a failed show. Cancelled after three seasons, the series found its audience in reruns and built a convention culture that turned it into a franchise. The pattern of an organized fanbase sustaining a property has been repeated ever since.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Star Trek premiered on September 8, 1966, drew unremarkable ratings, and was cancelled after three seasons and seventy-nine episodes. In reruns it found the audience it had missed, spawned conventions, thirteen films, a dozen series, and a vocabulary that people who have never watched it still use.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“Space, the final frontier.”
— The opening narration of Star Trek, first broadcast in 1966
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the premiere of Star Trek, the rejected first pilot, the casting choices that broke ground, its cancellation, and the franchise that grew out of reruns?
