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Star Trek and American Television
By Roberta Pearson, Máire Messenger Davies UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95920-0
CHAPTER 1
Star Trek and American Television History
In 1966, the original Star Trek series was just another television show, as subject to the established institutional practices of the television industry as all the other shows made by Desilu Productions and broadcast by the NBC network. By 2005, when Star Trek: Enterprise ceased production, Star Trek and its spin-off series had become an unprecedented television phenomenon and a major asset for Paramount and its United Paramount Network (UPN). This chapter tells the story of how Star Trek went from failure during the classic network era to astonishing success in the multichannel era. We begin by arguing that, despite the subsequent renown of the original series (hereafter referred to as TOS) and its creator, Gene Roddenberry, the program emerged from and typified the standard business practices and assumptions of the classic network era. Yet from its inception, Star Trek also atypically diverged in several ways from these practices and in doing so looked forward to the multichannel era. This chapter's second section examines three significant divergences from the classic network era's standard practices and assumptions: Roddenberry's construction of a producer brand; TOS's appeal to niche audiences; and Star Trek's role in the decline of the three-network oligopoly and the transition to the multichannel environment. The chapter focuses primarily upon TOS and upon the broad economic strategies of the television industry in the classic network and multichannel eras. The following three chapters continue the story of Star Trek during the multichannel era by examining the day-to-day production practices of the post-TOS series.
STAR TREK AND THE CLASSIC NETWORK ERA
Understanding Star Trek's initial conditions of production and distribution requires an understanding of the basic operations of the classic network era: that period, from roughly 1960 to 1980, in which the oligopoly constituted by the big three networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—secured control of production, distribution, and exhibition through what Michele Hilmes calls a "tight vertical integration, similar to that of the movie studios before 1947." In terms of production, by 1965 the networks owned or had an interest in 91 percent of the prime-time programs made for them by the Hollywood studios or independent producers. Despite the fact that a "variety of players" produced these programs, the networks' oligopolistic control of distribution and exhibition mandated that producers conform to a narrow range of accepted practices in originating new programs. In terms of distribution and exhibition, the networks had rapidly expanded their market penetration, purchasing stations in the largest metropolitan areas while at the same time signing up 80 percent of independently owned stations as network affiliates. These affiliates, with contractual agreements to broadcast network programming in return for a percentage of the advertising revenues that underpinned the entire system, were persuaded to devote ever-larger proportions of airtime to the network feed. These tactics expanded the audience for network programming to over 90 percent of American households, making television a very attractive medium for advertisers. Such exhibition practices, asserts Hilmes, militated against artistry and originality: "With a system that attracted a national audience and a market so neatly divided between the nets, few openings existed for creative, innovative productions that challenged the bland, formulaic network patterns."
Fundamental to these bland, formulaic network patterns was the networks' consensual interpretation of the mass audience's viewing habits, best expressed by Paul Klein, NBC's vice president for audience measurement, in his theory of "least objectionable programming." A least objectionable program was one that would not cause viewers to switch to a rival network and ensured that each of the three networks would get the largest possible share of the national audience in each half-hour slot. Although not using the term, Klein articulated the concept of "flow" in the pages of the popular publication TV Guide two years before Raymond Williams did so in the scholarly Television and Cultural Form. In a 1972 book chapter based on his TV Guide article, Klein explained that "the single most important thing to know about the American television audience" was that it stayed the same size (about 36 million TV sets) irrespective of the quality of the programming. Klein believed that, during prime time—the most valuable time of day in the United States in terms of advertising revenues, generally from 7 P.M. to 10 P.M.—audiences switched on their sets to watch television rather than to tune in to individual programs. Wanting to stay tuned in no matter what was on offer, viewers chose the program that "can be endured with the least amount of pain and suffering." Network programmers operated on the assumption that a program didn't have to be good but only "less objectionable than whatever the hell the other guys throw against it." The "least objectionable program" strategy, aiming to ensure that viewers stayed with a network's prime-time schedule throughout the evening rather than switching over to the opposition, dictated program commissioning, production, and scheduling.
Reluctance to innovate stemmed from network executives' belief that the mass audience would immediately reject any show departing from the lowest-common-denominator norm by tuning to a rival network's offering. According to Muriel Cantor, in her book The Hollywood TV Producer, most producers shared the networks' assessment of their viewers, seeing them as "a mass audience, rather than a segmented one" and having a "low opinion of their audience's intelligence, urbanity, and discrimination." Said one producer: "We try not to do anything controversial. Nor do we try to reach people of high intellect. Because of this we are a success.... The formulas work for television and will continue to work." But some of Cantor's interviewees believed that the networks' conservatism was "losing a valuable group of viewers" who might watch "higher-level television shows." One producer said, "I know the audience is smarter, more intelligent that they [the networks] think it is. One of the reasons so many shows fail is that the networks and others underestimate the IQ of the audience. How many of the same kinds of shows can be on the air? There should be shows with more character and originality that tap the more intelligent audience."
Many years later, Robert Justman, an associate producer of TOS, retrospectively aligned himself with these minority voices when speaking of NBC's reaction to the first Star Trek pilot: "They [the network executives] mentioned things like our concepts were 'too intricate for the normal television human mind.' I thought it wasn't that way at all. I felt that we could barely keep up with people." Even in the classic network era, some began to pay attention to the niche audiences that became key drivers of the multichannel era. We return to this point below.
When Gene Roddenberry first conceived of Star Trek in 1963, he needed a studio and a network to realize his idea for the series; acquiring that studio and persuading that network would require compliance with the industry's dominant assumptions and practices. Roddenberry, however, was a marginal player within the industry's power structures, having come to television relatively late after previous careers as a US Army Air Force and Pan Am pilot and then as a Los Angeles policeman. Roddenberry was a minor writer-producer who had begun his television career as a freelance writer for such shows as Highway Patrol (ZIV Television Programs, 1955–59), West Point (ZIV Television Programs, 1956–58), and Have Gun Will Travel (CBS Television, 1957–63) and had just graduated to producing his first series, the US Marine Corps dramaThe Lieutenant (1963–64), made by MGM for ABC. Roddenberry first offered Star Trek to MGM, in the person of executive producer Norman Felton, who oversaw production of The Lieutenant. When Felton expressed no interest, Roddenberry's agent suggested going to Desilu Productions.
Cofounded in 1950 by Lucille Ball and her husband at the time, Desi Arnaz, Desilu had built on the wild success of I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–57) to become a significant figure among the independent studios supplying programs to the networks in the early 1960s. The term "independent" served to distinguish Desilu and similar enterprises devoted solely to television production from the television units of the major studios such as Warner Bros., but as Michele Hilmes put it, these so-called independents were "dependent on network investment to stay afloat; they had essentially become production arms of the networks." The independents had come to dominate television production during the 1960s, accounting for nearly 70 percent of prime-time fiction shows by 1963. Desilu was a member of that tightly closed circle of networks and their executives, and studios and their producers, that made the mostly bland and formulaic programs of the classical network era. But even this tightly closed circle permitted some limited degree of innovation; as Mark Alvey put it, "[P]roducers and networks are involved in a constant process of redefinition, attempting to strike the right balance of entertainment and ideas, familiarity and innovation, continuity and flexibility." Alvey dubs this balance "regulated innovation." Desilu had already achieved success and even some degree of notoriety with the innovative crime drama The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63), noted for its fast-paced action, over-the-top violence, and noirish visual style; there was a probability that the studio would be willing to reformulate another established genre—science fiction—that had up to that time been associated primarily with a children's audience.
At this point, enter another key figure in the birth of Star Trek: Herb Solow, Desilu's vice president in charge of production. While many equate Star Trek solely with Roddenberry, Solow himself claims a great deal of the credit: "I ran the studio. I was the one who dealt with Gene, who developed the concept with Gene and worked with Gene on the script, who sold the script to NBC, sold the pilot, sold the series to NBC and supervised it." Solow may not be a completely reliable source. His public pronouncements indicate resentment of the godlike status bestowed upon Roddenberry within Star Trek fandom, and he has for years sought recognition for his part in Star Trek's origins, most prominently in his book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, coauthored with TOS associate producer Robert Justman (a work that we recommend to the reader for a full account of Star Trek's development and production and on which we draw in this chapter). While his accounts of Star Trek's early days, and particularly of Roddenberry's role in them, are for this reason subject to a degree of skepticism, we try to assess Solow's claims in light of our understanding of the operations of the classic network era. From this perspective, we conclude that, although the idea for Star Trek indubitably originated in the mind of Gene Roddenberry, it required Herb Solow, or someone like him, to bring that idea to the television screen.
Solow first met Roddenberry in 1964 when the writer-producer came to the Desilu lot to pitch his new series. Roddenberry did not make an initial favorable impression on the executive, who reports telling him, "It must be good because you sure as hell can't sell it. You're not a good salesman." Despite his reservations about Roddenberry and about some elements of the Star Trek concept, Solow offered him a script-development deal. Soon thereafter, Oscar Katz, Desilu president, took Roddenberry to CBS to do another pitch; the network passed, ostensibly because Star Trek too closely resembled their already commissioned Lost in Space (1965–68). Contra this, Solow suggests that the failure stemmed from a lack of conformity to the classic network era's dominant practices: the concept was as yet insufficiently developed to take to a network, and Roddenberry was "probably the most ineffective pitchman for a series ... that [Solow] had ever met in the television business." While Roddenberry was disappointed at CBS's rebuff, Solow, who had just recently moved from NBC to Desilu, saw an opportunity: "It was actually a happy day for me as I was able to offer it and sell it to ... my ... friends and former associates at NBC." Among these friends was "Grant Tinker who later became the CEO of NBC, but at that time was the Vice President of Programs on the West Coast. So I could call Grant and I could say, which I did, 'I have something that I think would be good for you guys.'"
Unlike Roddenberry, Solow was a consummate insider among the handful of networks and studios that originated the vast majority of American television programs: "I was fortunate in going from college to working in a talent agency mailroom, the William Morris Agency in New York, and learning that world, and then going into syndicated television programs at NBC and then into daytime programs at NBC and CBS, and on to ... Desilu." Solow's characterization of his relationship with his friends at NBC resonates with Todd Gitlin's analysis of an "industry dominated by a small world of executives, suppliers, producers, and agents spinning through revolving doors," in which "[network] executives with passable records and good contacts slide through the revolving door and get good jobs as suppliers and studio executives." The revolving door functioned as one of the networks' risk-reduction strategies, as Gitlin explains: "Since the networks don't know how to read popular moods and therefore listen to established suppliers, an established supplier is in a stronger position than a producer off the street to devise a fresh show and sell it." Solow, having revolved from network executive to studio executive at established supplier Desilu, was in a much stronger position than Roddenberry, "a producer off the street," to sell a fresh show, while his insider status and proven track record mitigated the risk posed by Star Trek's more innovative elements. As Gitlin says, "Market power eventually rests on a record of continued success, but it can also be used ... as a license to break the rules from time to time." In other words, there was in the classic network era, to use Alvey's formulation, a balance between regulation and innovation—a balance that Star Trek typifies.
By the time Roddenberry and Solow took their first meeting with Tinker and Jerome Stanley, NBC's director of current programs, they had refined the Star Trek concept, putting it into the "language of television" and foregrounding regulation in order to sanction innovation. A few decades later, William Shatner told us that this, rather than the "Roddenberry vision" of a utopian future, attested to the producer's skill: "It takes a certain genius to do that, to sell a series, to come up with a commercial enough theme, and a kind of concept that speaks to these network executives." A few years after we spoke with Shatner, Catherine Johnson echoed his words, saying that while there has been a "mythologisation of Gene Roddenberry as [Star Trek's] maverick creator who used the 'cloak' of science fiction to disguise the treatment of contemporary socio-cultural issues," TOS should not be understood "as a uniquely innovative programme enabled by Roddenberry's ingenious use of science fiction" but rather as a response to the "needs of commercial US television."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Star Trek and American Television by Roberta Pearson, Máire Messenger Davies. Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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