Star Trek and American Television 9780520959200

Citation preview

Star Trek and American Television

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Star Trek and American Television roberta pearson and máire messenger davies With a foreword by Sir Patrick Stewart

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearson, Roberta E. Star trek and American television/Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies; with a foreword by Sir Patrick Stewart. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0-520-27621-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978–0-520-27622-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978–0-520-95920-0 (ebook) 1. Star trek (television program) 2. Television series—United States—History and criticism. i. Davies, Máire Messenger. ii. Title. pn1992.77.s73p42 2014 791.45′72—dc23 2013050776 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30 percent postconsumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To Dalia and Laura—“the Next Generation”

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Foreword by Sir Patrick Stewart

xiii

introduction: “it’s a television show”

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1. star trek and american television history

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2. art, commerce, and creative autonomy

55

3. the craft-workshop mode of production

86

4. actors: the public face of star trek

106

5. world building

126

6. character building

149

conclusion: “it’s not a television show”

185

Appendix: List of Interviewees Quoted

193

Notes

195

References

221

Index

231

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a labor of love over many years, starting with our youthful interest in Star Trek, the television show, and continuing through our adult university careers, teaching about and researching American television. Many people have influenced the book’s development over the time it has taken to produce it. But the book would never have come to fruition in its present form without the help and encouragement of one person in particular: Sir Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was extremely generous with his own time, in granting us two extended interviews. And it was through Sir Patrick’s introductions that we were able to meet so many other people working on Star Trek during our research trip to Hollywood in 2002, people whose interviews form a central component of the book. Sir Patrick has continued to be supportive of, and interested in, the project in the several years since then. His assistant at the time, Jackie Edwards, helped us to set up interviews and appointments—a special thank you to her. We also want to thank most warmly all the interviewees who gave us their time and the benefit of their expertise; they are listed in the appendix. Further thanks are due to the British Academy for providing a small grant, which helped to fund the research in 2002. Thanks also to Cardiff University and the University of Nottingham for providing periods of study leave to work on early drafts of the book. Many of our academic colleagues have acted as sounding boards and interlocutors over the years in which this book has been in preparation. But particular thanks are due to Professor Paul McDonald at the University of Nottingham for generous advice on the creative-industries literature. Very particular thanks are due to John Davies, husband of Máire. He is a professional copy editor, and he has patiently read and queried and ix

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commented and suggested corrections for each chapter as it was eventually produced. We honor and appreciate his Rick Berman–like eye for detail. Special thanks are also due to Karen Backstein who provided support at a crucial stage in the researching of the book and who has continued to take an interest in it throughout its development. Sad to say, in the years since our visit to Hollywood, some of our interviewees from the Star Trek “family” have died, and we wish to acknowledge our regret at their loss and express our sympathies to their families, friends, and colleagues. They are Robert Justman, Michael Piller, Jim Mees, and Winrich Kolbe—RIP.

Abbreviations

DS9 TNG TOS

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Star Trek: The Next Generation Star Trek (the original series)

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Foreword

At Paramount Studios, around 1:30 a.m. on an April morning twenty years ago, Adele Simmons, the Assistant Director on Star Trek: The Next Generation, announced to the weary crew and actors, “And that’s a wrap, folks.” Yes, it was. A wrap on seven years’ work and 178 episodes of a hugely successful TV show. There was little celebration, no champagne, no “Auld Lang Syne”—just warm hugs and kisses and “See you soon, get some rest” and “Home safely.” It was a touch disappointing that nobody showed up to cheer and mark the conclusion of all that work, fun, and dedication, but I should not have been surprised. The days of shooting that final episode, “All Good Things,” had been punctuated by visits from Paramount executives and visiting VIPs. There had been times when, looking past the camera, it was like the sidelines at a football game. Crowds of people wanting to be there at the end, though not willing to be there at 1:30 a.m. when it all actually ended. No Paramount representatives, no producers, no writers, no VIPs, just cast and crew. Of course, fans might think the final day of shooting must have been of the final scene, “The Poker Game,” but in fact, that had been shot days earlier. Rarely is the opening scene shot on the first day or the final scene on the last day. It would have been nice though, as we were all in the “The Poker Game” scene, and as my final line (actually written by Brent Spiner, echoing a line he’d uttered earlier), “Five card stud—nothing wild, and the sky’s the limit,” would have been an appropriate conclusion to the night’s filming. As it was, it was just me and John de Lancie (who played Q). We were not even on one of our regular stages but on Stage 18, where Deep Space Nine was shot, in a scene representing the Earth “three and a half billion years ago,” according to Q. The last line I spoke that night was: “Is there a point to all this?” xiii

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Perhaps the lack of celebration was due to the fact that a few days later we would all be reassembling to start shooting our first movie, Star Trek: Generations. Even so, there was a quite different atmosphere about all the movies we made that separated the TV series from the films. This is not the place for me to begin an analysis of what TNG and its companion series TOS, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise achieved and how. That is brilliantly done in the following pages by Máire and Roberta, and congratulations to them both. I find that I simply want to record that those seven years at Paramount Pictures were the most eventful years of my career to date. And the reason that I began by writing about the night we wrapped is because when I started thinking about writing this foreword, I quickly realized that every aspect of this work was deeply affected by emotions: helpless laughter, comradeship, fury, frustration, exhaustion, and love. I celebrate that all of my colleagues, Marina, Gates, Michael, Brent, Jonathan, LeVar, Wil, Denise, Whoopi, and John, are well and still closely linked to my life. As is Rick Berman. I mourn the passing of Trek colleagues Corey Allen, Winrich “Rick” Kolbe, Michael Piller, Robert “Bob” Justman, and Jim Mees, and I remember them all with gratitude and deep affection. This book acknowledges their talents and the creativity and commitment of the Star Trek production team, and I wish it well. Sir Patrick Stewart Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation New York City January 2014

Introduction “It’s a Television Show”

Star Trek has become common cultural currency in its almost five decades of existence. It’s a well-known reference point that permeates popular culture, frequently invoked on television programs such as The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present) and The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007–present) and in catchphrases such as “beam me up,” “the final frontier,” “to boldly go,” and “resistance is futile.” Star Trek is also an intellectual property at the heart of a vast global franchise consisting of television series, films, books, merchandise, websites, and games—all contributing significantly to the bottom line of its corporate owners and their numerous licensees. An international network of organized and informal fandom surrounds the profitable franchise, generating fan productions ranging from stories to costumes to new episodes of the television series. The critical and box-office success of the rebooted film series (Star Trek [J. J. Abrams, 2009] and Star Trek: Into Darkness [J. J. Abrams, 2013]) has boosted Star Trek’s cultural currency, added to the value of the brand and the franchise, and attracted new fans. Star Trek provides an excellent case study for those wishing to investigate the workings of popular culture, of multimedia conglomerates, or of fandom. But this book is not about Star Trek as cultural phenomenon, money-spinning franchise, or locus of fan activity; it’s about Star Trek and American television. For Star Trek is also an excellent case study for investigating the workings of the American television industry—a topic almost entirely absent from the scholarly literature on the program. In his book on the making of the original Star Trek series, executive in charge of production Herbert F. Solow said: “It’s important to understand that . . . Star Trek was not created or developed as a critical study of truth, life’s fundamental principles, or concepts of reasoned doctrines. We just wanted a hit series.”1 Solow, his studio (Desilu Productions), and the 1

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network NBC (National Broadcasting Company) didn’t get a hit series. The original series (henceforth TOS) premiered in 1966, but in 1969, after three years of poor ratings, NBC pulled the plug. It would have ended then, but for TOS’s surprising success in off-network syndication. That is, some local television stations in the United States (of which there were, and are, hundreds) began rerunning episodes five days a week outside of prime time (those evening hours when advertising rates are highest) and attracted significant audiences. This led first to the launching of the feature-film series with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979) and then to the revival of Star Trek television with Star Trek: The Next Generation (henceforth TNG) in 1987. Gulf + Western had acquired Desilu in 1967 at the same time that it acquired Paramount Pictures and renamed Desilu as Paramount Television; it was Paramount Television that produced TNG for broadcast in first-run syndication. That is, it was not broadcast on one of the established commercial networks—which were, at that point, ABC (American Broadcasting Company), CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), NBC, and the Fox Broadcasting Company, more commonly referred to as the Fox Network. Instead, it was sold directly to local stations. Despite continued strong ratings, TNG ceased production in 1994 so that the cast could take over the feature-film series from the cast of TOS. Paramount also premiered the next series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (henceforth DS9), in first-run syndication in 1993, when TNG was still on the air. Like its predecessor, DS9 had a seven-year run that ended in 1999. The next two series, Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001) and Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–5), ran on Paramount’s own network, the United Paramount Network (UPN).2 The cancellation of Enterprise marked the demise of Star Trek television to date. Fans hope that CBS, which now owns the rights to Star Trek television as a result of the complicated corporate restructuring of Paramount-Viacom in 2005, may one day broadcast a sixth Star Trek series. CBS certainly appreciates the value of the brand that it has acquired. A story on the network’s website marked Star Trek’s forty-fifth anniversary in 2011: On Sept. 8, 1966, television watchers went on their very first trek with Captain Kirk and his crew. Some 45 years later, the “Star Trek” franchise is still cruising at warp speed, with a rebooted movie series off to a successful start at the box office, and all the various old television series still airing widely in syndication. Overall, the “Star Trek” franchise looks set to warm the hearts of Trekkies for years to come, with a new movie slated for next year and fan fervor still strong. As Spock might say, “Star Trek” will continue to live long and prosper.3

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We went to Hollywood in 2002 to conduct interviews with Star Trek personnel, past and present, among whom was William Shatner (Captain Kirk).4 Shatner evinced a pragmatic attitude to the program that had turned him into an enduring cultural icon: “It’s a television show.”5 This assertion is our guiding principle; this book is about Star Trek as a television show. The book contextualizes Star Trek within the standard practices of American television production and the standard conventions of American television storytelling. Chapter 1 locates Star Trek in the broad context of American television history, from the development of TOS in the early 1960s through to the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine the day-to-day production patterns of the post-TOS series, paying particular attention to the role of the individual within the collaborative production process. The next two chapters discuss Star Trek’s storytelling, chapter 5 looking at the construction of the storyworld and chapter 6 at the construction of the characters who inhabit the storyworld. Three overarching themes link the chapters, the first two germane to television and the third more broadly relevant to the creative industries in general. The first, not surprisingly, is Star Trek as television; in other words, throughout the book we consider Star Trek in terms of the specific characteristics of the television medium. Second, we assess Star Trek’s typicality or atypicality, its conformance to or divergence from the dominant production practices and narrative structures of the respective historical periods during which the different series emerged. Third, we consider the agency and contributions of those individuals who made Star Trek, from the wellknown actors William Shatner and Patrick Stewart (TNG’s Captain Picard) to the little-known Tom Arp (construction coordinator on the post-TOS series) and Winrich Kolbe (director of forty-eight episodes of those series). We now elaborate upon each of the three key themes structuring this book.

1. characteristics of the medium No medium has transhistorical or transnational essential characteristics that absolutely distinguish it from other media. Current debates in the field concerning the putative end of the television medium in an age of industrial and technological convergence reveal that television is and has been many things: technologies; different modes of production, distribution, and reception; programs and other content; public-service broadcasting; commercial broadcasting; a “vast wasteland”; and, as Homer Simpson put it, “teacher, mother, secret lover”—in other words, a much-loved presence in hundreds of millions of households around the globe.6 But all media have

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historically and geographically specific modes of production, distribution, and representation that characterize them during specific times and in specific places and distinguish them from other media operating in the same times and places. This book concerns the modes of production and distribution and the storytelling conventions that characterized American television in the years from the development of TOS in the 1960s to the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005. Some characteristics remained stable during these years. For example, over those four decades television was a commercial medium ultimately dependent upon profits from advertising revenues. Other characteristics changed. For example, as we discuss in chapter 1, TOS sought to attract advertisers by targeting a mass audience, while the postTOS series did so by targeting smaller, niche audiences especially desirable to advertisers.

2. star trek’ s typicality/atypicality in historical context The Star Trek series both corresponded to and deviated from the dominant production modes and representational conventions of their periods. For example, as we discuss in chapter 5, the individual episodes of TOS and the subsequent series adhered to the typical narrative conventions of their times in terms of their connection or lack thereof to other episodes. Collectively, however, the episodes constructed an atypically vast and complex storyworld that spanned four centuries and four quadrants of the galaxy and made Star Trek television a model for producers seeking not only to make a hit television show but to construct a successful franchise around it. Star Trek’s combination of typicality and atypicality renders it a perfect case study for illuminating the operations of American television during the years in which the television series were in production. Horace Newcomb says that “every media industry study is a case study.” Initially, for studies centered on “specific individuals, examples, policies and so on, the emphasis will likely . . . be on distinction rather than similarity.” But the “analysis must remain open to those similarities . . . to see that the specific ‘case’ may . . . be an ‘example’ of larger patterns, tendencies or modes of standardization.”7 Star Trek fits these criteria: similar enough to exemplify patterns, tendencies, and modes of standardization; and distinct enough, by virtue of its longevity, to show how these transformed over the years. Jonathan Bignell makes a similar point to Newcomb’s about selecting case studies: [E]xamples are necessarily both representative and also exceptional. Each is there to represent a larger context and history, and thus

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performs its function by being equivalent or exchangeable with other programmes that are similar to it. Yet each must also exceed the field it stands for, and be more than typical, just because it was chosen rather than an alternative. The selection of one example rather than another will always have a rationale, whether that is a pragmatic issue of its accessibility or familiarity, or a theoretical one relating to its formative role, subsequent influence, internal complexity or some other reason for privileging it.8

Star Trek is equivalent but more than typical. It’s familiar through its permeation of popular culture and accessible by virtue of Paramount’s and CBS’s continued exploitation of the brand and the back catalogue. As we will demonstrate, Star Trek was formative and influential in transformations in the American television industry, and, as we said above, Star Trek’s longevity renders its storyworld more internally complex than that of any other American television show.9 Newcomb’s and Bignell’s selection criteria, particularly their emphasis upon a case study’s being simultaneously typical and atypical, justify our choice of Star Trek as a lens through which to examine American television. But Star Trek’s typicality and atypicality can be demonstrated only by placing the television series within the context of the operations of the American television industry. To use Newcomb’s formulation, we need to account for the general patterns, tendencies, and modes of standardization that characterized television production, first during the 1960s and then from the 1980s to the early twentyfirst century. To delineate these patterns, we rely upon an approach to television historiography that has emerged in the last decade or so. As the field of television history matured around the end of the twentieth century, television scholars, like film scholars before them, sought a consensual periodization to distinguish historical differences in the industry’s modes of production and distribution, its technologies and its business models—that is, how it conceived of and appealed to its audiences. Like film scholars, television scholars have debated and continue to debate the appropriate demarcations between and the terms accorded to historical periods.10 Nonetheless, the field of American television studies has reached a rough consensus concerning the key periods in American television history if not the labels accorded them. Our periodization reflects this rough consensus, and our choice of labels emphasizes production and distribution rather than technologies, audiences, or other factors. TOS was made during what we call “the classic network era,” a period roughly between 1960 and 1980 in which an oligopoly of the “big three”

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networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—dominated production and distribution.11 The networks had “owned and operated” (usually abbreviated as “O and O”) stations in large urban centers, but they mostly comprised nonowned affiliates—television stations that chose to air the networks’ programs in exchange for a share of the national advertising revenues, and airing local advertising during network programs. While there were nonaffiliated stations, or independents, network programming reached the vast majority of American households. Michael Curtin says that “by the 1960s, each of the three major television networks regularly drew close to 25 per cent of all television households to their prime-time schedules.”12 Dependence upon advertisers and affiliates, both of whom feared anything that might offend viewers, caused the networks to adopt a conservative programming strategy aimed at a mass audience. TNG and the subsequent series were made during the multichannel era, a period from roughly the early 1980s to the late twentieth century, during which cable and subscription television undermined the networks’ oligopoly. The period also saw the number of networks double with the addition of the Fox Network, in 1986, and then with UPN and the WB Television Network (more commonly referred to as the WB, the letters standing for Warner Bros.), in 1995. As Michael Curtin puts it, “With the arrival of cable, [the] mass media logics [of the classic network era] were challenged, as the number of channels multiplied and the audience began to fragment.”13 The multichannel era was marked by a steady decline in the networks’ share of the audience and by a shift in the business model from broadcasting to a mass audience, largely undifferentiated by demographic markers, to “narrowcasting” to niche audiences defined in terms of their demographics, lifestyles, and tastes.14 As a result, programming generally became more diverse and innovative than it had been during the classic network era. The post-TOS series were a part of this diversification. Scholars have dubbed the successor to the multichannel era the postnetwork era. This period is marked by the increasing availability of technological innovations such as video on demand and digital video recorders, which permit audiences to evade the advertisements that had underpinned the commercial broadcasting system in the previous two eras. Network viewership continued to decline and audiences continued to fragment as these digital technologies began to have a significant impact upon the television industry around the beginning of the twenty-first century. These developments, however, did not have a significant impact upon Star Trek; the multichannel era’s modes of production and distribution as well as its narrative conventions structured Star Trek television from TNG to

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Enterprise in 2005. As Amanda Lotz argues, there was no precise demarcation between the multichannel and postnetwork eras but rather a process of gradual change that began in the 1980s and was still taking place in the twenty-first century’s first decade. Referring to the years from 1952 through to the mid-1980s as the network era and the years from the mid1980s to the early twenty-first century as the multichannel transition, Lotz says that during the latter, “various developments changed our experience with television, but did so very gradually—in a manner that allowed the industry to continue to operate in much the same way as it did in the network era.”15 Chapter 1 discusses Star Trek’s contributions to the “various developments” of the multichannel era but does not consider the postnetwork era, which, most would agree, was only in its infancy in 2005 when Enterprise went off the air.16 While the consensual periodization within television studies proves useful in contextualizing the Star Trek series within their respective eras, we must be aware of the dangers of a teleological perspective that posits a linear historical process with clear demarcations between periods. Although using different labels than ours (“TVI” for classic network era, “TVII” for multichannel era, and “TVIII” for postnetwork era), Matt Hills warns that periodizations may obscure history’s multiple complexities and contradictions: “Discussions of ‘TVIII’ (or other rival periodisations) [are] themselves working to foreclose and delimit ‘TVI’ and ‘TVII’ as stable discursive objects.”17 Historical change is always uneven; the classic network era and the multichannel era were characterized by both stability and transformation. We show that practices associated primarily with one era can be seen at least in nascent form in the previous period. For example, chapter 1 argues that TOS foreshadowed aspects of the multichannel era. And, as Lotz argues, some practices persisted largely unchanged from the classic network to the multichannel era; for example, day-to-day production of Star Trek during the multichannel era, as we shall see in chapters 2 through 4, had strong continuities with its day-to-day production in the classic network era.

3. individual agency In the introduction to their edited collection Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, Jennifer Holt and Alissa Perren delineate “the key themes and concerns” of their authors, which, they say, have “historical and future importance” for “scholars of media industries.” One of these themes is “the relative power and autonomy of individual agents to express . . .

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creative visions . . . within larger institutional structures.”18 This is also a key theme for us, but one that we feel compelled to justify, since addressing individual agency may seem retrograde, harking back to the worst excesses of the auteur theory in valorizing individual autonomy over historically and geographically determined modes of production. As creative-industries theorist Mark Banks says, In some quarters, a focus on cultural workers as “creative” agents or subjects is viewed with acute suspicion because of sociological inclinations to view creativity as a phenomenon that ought not to be theorized at the romantic level of the “individual genius” but must be more adequately theorized as an outcome of social structure. . . . [Therefore] it is not altogether surprising that critical theorists of the cultural industries workplace have been broadly inattentive to the enigmas of experiential variation, personal subjectivity and human agency in everyday work contexts.19

We pay attention to human agency in everyday work contexts throughout the book and particularly so in chapters 2 through 4, which describe the day-to-day practices of making Star Trek. But we do not romanticize the “individual genius” by assigning credit for a text entirely to one person, as did the auteur theory. Rather, we assert that we can fully understand Star Trek television only by acknowledging the significant contributions of individuals, whether studio executive, writer, or costume designer. Star Trek was the product of both individual agents and the social structures of Desilu, Paramount, NBC, UPN, and the television industry more generally. As chapter 2 argues, the collaborative production process of making a television program requires that individuals operate within institutional constraints, but also requires that institutions provide space for these individuals’ creative autonomy.

star trek scholarship Having laid out the book’s rationale and key themes, as is customary, we must now position ourselves with respect to the existing research, as is also customary. While most of what scholars have written about Star Trek has little relevance to this book’s focus upon Star Trek as television, we must engage with previous scholarship to some extent in order to demonstrate how and why our approach to the subject differs. But this requisite engagement presents a problem. Star Trek has almost certainly inspired more scholarly publications than any other television program. Searching Google Scholar for “Star Trek television” results in 1,140 references. Searching for

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other television programs that have attracted academics’ attention yields far fewer references—for example, 170 for “The X-Files television,” 124 for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer television” and 41 for “Doctor Who television.” These are admittedly inconclusive numbers, subject to the vagaries of Google’s inclusion criteria and search function and biased by Star Trek’s longevity, but the relative number of hits does tend to substantiate our hypothesis that within the academic community Star Trek is the most written about of all television shows. Whatever the precise number of Star Trek studies, however, the broad extent of the literature precludes an exhaustive mapping and renders constructing even a rough guide difficult.20 For help, we turn to the most recent Star Trek bibliography, the eponymous entry in Oxford Bibliographies. In their introduction, coauthors Daniel Bernardi (an established Star Trek scholar) and Michael Green say that the bibliography “represents a cross section of the most important scholarship on this unique cultural phenomenon.”21 Included in this cross section of just the most important scholarship are sixty-nine books, book chapters, and journal articles—yet another indication of the vastness of the literature on Star Trek relative to that on other television programs. Bernardi and Green date scholarly interest in Star Trek to a decade after TOS’s cancellation in 1969, by which point, as we said above, the program had become a great success in off-network syndication. Star Trek became a useful case study, Bernardi and Green say, for the “cultural studies, critical theory, and film and media studies” that were just then “evolving in the academy” because of the show’s engagement with “controversial social issues, including racism, gender equality, the ‘nature’ of sexual identity, nationalism, and colonialism.”22 In the 1990s, when TNG was a great success in off-network syndication, the textual-analysis methodology commonly deployed in Star Trek studies to that point was supplemented by audience- and reception-studies methodology, represented most prominently in the work of Henry Jenkins, particularly his groundbreaking 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.23 Since then, according to Bernardi and Green, “fan and audience studies have become a primary area of Star Trek scholarship.” Tellingly, the bibliography’s introduction includes no mention of any work that specifically addresses Star Trek’s televisual aspects. Neither does the authors’ categorization of the literature: reference works and bibliographies; anthologies; fandom; popular culture; critical race studies; gender studies; sexuality studies; religion; technoculture; and nationalism and geopolitics.24 This book does not discuss the fans, since we think that scholars have already comprehensively covered the subject.25 The book’s last two chapters

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do employ textual analysis in examining the construction of the Star Trek storyworld and its inhabitants. But we frame the textual analysis within an understanding of Star Trek’s mode of production and narrative conventions. By contrast with our approach, some scholars conducting textual analyses treat Star Trek episodes as if they were literary and not televisual texts, looking at common themes, metaphors, ambiguities, humanist values, resonances with canonical texts (for example, Shakespeare, the Bible, Greek myth), and the like. But this work gives relatively little if any consideration to how the production context or narrative conventions shaped the incorporation of those themes, metaphors, and so forth. Others use textual analysis to relate the episodes to American culture and society, engaging in what might broadly be termed “ideological critique” and drawing upon psychoanalytic, feminist, postmodern, Marxist, postcolonial, or queer theory. These ideological critiques rarely address their method, taking for granted the appropriateness of their theoretical framework and often implicitly assuming that popular-culture texts inevitably mirror a society’s dominant ideology or hegemonic order. But texts are refracting prisms, not mirrors; the production context and narrative conventions shape textual representations of ideology. We don’t deal at any length with Star Trek’s relationship to the hegemonic order, since, as with the fans, much has already been said on the topic. But we do offer brief ideological readings of a DS9 episode critiquing racism in chapter 5, and of TOS and TNG episodes dealing with foreign policy and terrorism in chapter 6. Both analyses account for narrative conventions’ shaping of representation. Literary and ideological approaches assign meaning to texts, whereas fan studies assigns meaning to audiences. We believe that audiences, the culture, and the hegemonic order do indeed significantly determine textual meaning, but we also believe that the televisual factors are equally significant and should be accounted for in textual analyses.26 If, as John Corner says, television history is “about artefacts, people, practices and institutions” and concerns “both ‘internal’ issues (about matters of development and relationships inside ‘television’) and ‘external’ matters too (important questions about how ‘television’ relates to larger social and cultural questions),” then most of the Star Trek scholarship to date has concerned itself with external matters.27 This book constitutes the first full-scale scholarly examination of internal issues—of the people, practices, and institutions that made the Star Trek artifacts. For this reason, rather than positioning ourselves within the existing scholarship as a literature review normally does, we have positioned ourselves largely outside of Star Trek scholarship. We must, however, acknowledge those few

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scholars who, to a greater or lesser extent, also approach Star Trek as television. In the introduction to her book in the British Film Institute’s “TV Classics” series, Ina Rae Hark says that she “very early on approached Trek with the analytical eye of the textual scholar I would become.”28 While Hark primarily employs what we have above referred to as a literary approach, her book does include some discussion of the producers and the writers, and we reference it in the following chapters. We also reference three book chapters that we found helpful. A chapter in Catherine Johnson’s Telefantasy examines Star Trek within the context of the classic network era’s business practices, while Hark’s book chapter “Franchise Fatigue” offers an explanation for Star Trek television’s failure to transition to the postnetwork era. And a chapter in Eileen R. Meehan’s Why TV Is Not Our Fault shows how Star Trek television has serviced Paramount’s corporate synergy.29 In addition to this tiny fraction of the extant Star Trek literature, we do, of course, draw upon other scholarly literature relevant to the book’s focus and arguments.30 This introduction has already revealed our reliance upon the televisionstudies literature with regard to periodization and upon the creativeindustries-studies literature with regard to individual agency. As our repeated references to narrative conventions imply, we also rely upon narrative theory, both literary and televisual. We do not provide an overview here, since each of these fields of study has primary relevance to a particular chapter or chapters—television studies for chapter 1, creative-industries studies for chapters 2 through 4, and narrative theory for chapters 5 and 6. The individual chapters’ focus and argument also determine the deployment of evidence. Chapter 1 relies upon insider accounts of the making of TOS, on newspapers and the trade press, and upon our interview data to locate Star Trek within the broad context of American television history in the classic network and multichannel eras. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 rely primarily upon the interview data in their examination of the day-to-day process of making Star Trek. Chapters 5 and 6 rely primarily upon textual analysis, occasionally supplemented by interview data, in their examination of Star Trek’s storytelling. Since television scholars routinely deploy written resources and textual analysis in their research, we do not need to address the methodological implications of using these data. Given the difficulties of access, television scholars less frequently deploy interview data obtained from industry personnel. We do need to reflect upon the methodological implications of obtaining and conducting our interviews with the people who made Star Trek. We thought that talking to these people would elicit evidence more directly related to our research questions, particularly that

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concerning individual agency, than the publicly available Star Trek production “archive” consisting of memoirs; books documenting the production processes of the television series and of the films; numerous interviews with production personnel past and present, both in print and on the Internet; and the like. Although we use some of this material in the following chapters, we knew that agendas very different from our own had shaped these discourses—for example, former production personnel engaged in retrospective justifications of their careers, current production personnel engaged in the promotion of specific Star Trek television series or films. We wanted to ask different questions in the hope of receiving different answers than those asked and answered in, for example, former practitioners’ exchanges with fans or current practitioners’ exchanges with studio publicists or entertainment journalists.

the interviews As our ideas for a book on Star Trek as television began to take shape, we wrote to Patrick Stewart, knowing that he was going to be in London filming, on the off chance that he would grant us an interview. This he obligingly did at London’s Ealing Studios during the filming of A Christmas Carol (1999 TV movie, dir. David Hugh Jones) in March 1999. Stewart, persuaded of the importance of an academic investigation of Star Trek, subsequently wrote to over twenty former and current Star Trek cast and crew, asking them to talk to us. We arrived in Los Angeles in January 2002, when both the film Star Trek: Nemesis and the new television series Enterprise were filming on the Paramount lot; this facilitated arranging interviews with the maximum number of current production personnel, as did the fact that many former Star Trek personnel still lived in Los Angeles. However, our research was necessarily contingent, dependent first upon Stewart’s introduction and second upon the limited time available to us and upon our potential interviewees’ schedules. We worried that the majority of our interviewees were men, despite the fact that this percentage seemed an accurate reflection of the gender distribution within the production team. We did talk to actor Marina Sirtis and producers Wendy Neuss and Merri Howard, but we were unable to interview designer Louise Dorton thanks to a last-minute opportunity for us to meet with executive producer Rick Berman, whom everyone had told us we simply must talk to. We talked to many of the production staff then currently involved in making Enterprise, but we were unable to interview any of the actors. Because production had ceased, and they were not involved in filming, the Voyager and DS9 actors

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were also no longer readily available, although the production staff who had worked on those series, as well as on TNG and Enterprise, were still working at Paramount—an unusual continuity of experience, whose implications we discuss in the book. We were lucky to be introduced to our interviewees in a manner likely to persuade them of our academic credentials and intentions and to frame our interactions with them (planned in advance according to specific interview schedules) quite differently from their more customary public interactions with journalists and fans. Our interviews were not conducted under the usual conditions of celebrity—the television talk show, the press conference, the organized media interview, the orchestrated online chat. We talked to people at their workplaces, during their regular working days, and in conjunction with their colleagues—all of which further marked us out from their customary interlocutors. But the very factor that undoubtedly accounted in part for our courteous reception on the Paramount lot and off raises a methodological concern. We were, and continue to be, very grateful to Patrick Stewart for his assistance; it is highly unlikely that without his imprimatur we would have spoken to luminaries such as William Shatner and Kerry McCluggage, then president of Paramount Pictures Television. But Stewart’s personal introduction brought with it the obligation not to embarrass our sponsor and may perhaps have subconsciously influenced the questions that we were willing to pose, despite our constant striving throughout our two-week Hollywood sojourn to remain highly selfconscious about the interview process. In this, however, we were in some respects not so very different from other academics. All academic researchers who collect information by talking to and/or observing other people have to be reflexive about their own contribution to the process of data collection and the influence that they themselves are having on the research situation. But our situation in relation to our starry interviewees and their colleagues was in other ways more complex than the usual relations between academic researchers and their “human subjects.” For instance, when we interviewed William Shatner in his pleasant, wood-paneled offices in Studio City, California, from which he ran his own production company, Melis (DHG) Productions, it was impossible for us to divorce our television memories of the iconic Kirk from the courteous seventy-year-old, in polo shirt, sweatpants, and glasses, sitting across the desk from us. When meeting members of the public, Shatner must be aware of this, and his answers showed a practiced and fluent expertise in presenting a public face that both acknowledges and distances the Kirk persona. In our interviews, we had to

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be constantly aware of the different roles we were playing. We were Star Trek viewers and fans, and simultaneously academics and professional interviewers, being extra, even extravagantly, careful to emphasize our professionalism and to downplay the fandom.31 We had to present ourselves to our interviewees as fellow professionals and serious, well-briefed, grownup people, disguising (we hoped) the fact that every evening, on getting back to our hotel, we spent at least half an hour enthusiastically reminiscing about seeing Jonathan Frakes (TNG’s Commander Riker) driving around in a golf cart or Ferengi extras eating lunch outside the Enterprise soundstage or, at Patrick Stewart’s invitation, spending two hours on the Nemesis set watching the Enterprise bridge explode. In fact, these reminiscences had a useful dual purpose, since we decided at the end of each day to tape-record them, ensuring that names, dates, times, places, contexts, particular comments, queries to be taken up with subsequent interviewees, and our own initial impressions were accurately preserved. These conversations, and all the interviews, were transcribed in full, and the transcriptions are the basis of the interview material used in the book. All of the interviewees who are still alive (some, alas, have died since we spoke to them) have been contacted, initially via their agents, and offered the opportunity to check the excerpts from the interviews we have used, and only minor changes have been asked of us, which we have made.32 In addition to our specific methodological concerns regarding Stewart’s sponsorship and our dual fan and academic status, we faced a methodological problem common to all academics conducting industry interviews. John Thornton Caldwell argues that academics need to give serious consideration to the ways in which “many film/television workers (including those in the manual crafts) critically analyze and theorize their tasks in provocative and complex ways.”33 Chapters 2 through 4 provide ample evidence of such critical analysis and theorization. But he also warns that “insider knowledge is always managed,” that “spin and narrative define and couch any industrial disclosure,” and that there are “complicated layers of public relations management at work in every layer of the production cultures of Los Angeles.”34 While our privileged access permitted us to evade those complicated layers of public-relations management, we had to be aware of the managed knowledge and “spin and narrative” that might have found their way into our interview transcripts. Denise Mann advises that such transcripts should be treated as “cultural artifacts containing evidence of an intricate, interlocking system of heavily codified, discursive knowledge.”35As we read and reread our interview transcripts in writing this book, the particular intricate and interlocking system among the Star Trek personnel

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became more and more apparent. We found that all our interviewees, even though having different positions and responsibilities within the production hierarchy, gave a consensual view of how the production process worked and voiced similar sentiments about the Star Trek “family,” their respect for each other, and the pleasure they took in their work. It seems unlikely that they were all, in very similar fashion, relaying to us Paramount’s managed knowledge, spin, and narratives. And although our analysis largely reflects our interviewees’ consensual view, we were also attentive to their fairly rare disagreements or expressions of discontent.

the structure of the book In terms of structure and chapter content, the book is divided into three sections. The first (chapter 1) concerns Star Trek and American television, the second (chapters 2 through 4) looks in detail at Star Trek production, drawing on our interview material, and the third (chapters 5 and 6) examines the Star Trek storyworld textually. Chapter 1, “Star Trek and American Television History,” focuses on the broad economic strategies of the television industry. It places Star Trek within the history of the classical network and multichannel eras, arguing that while TOS was in many ways a typical product of the former, it also in some ways presaged the latter. The chapter also considers the role that the post-TOS series played in challenging the three-network oligopoly of the previous era. Chapter 2, “Art, Commerce, and Creative Autonomy,” shifts the focus to the individuals who made Star Trek, looking at the constraints and enablers of individual agency, both those typical of television production in general and those specific to Star Trek. Chapter 3, “The Craft-Workshop Mode of Production,” examines the organization of the day-to-day production process—how all the behind-thescenes workers came together in making the end product, the Star Trek episodes. Chapter 4, “The Public Face of Star Trek,” concerns the particular constraints and enablers of individual agency to which the actors were subject. Chapter 5, “World Building,” examines Star Trek’s vast and complicated storyworld, looking first at what we call “extended seriality”—the forging of narrative links among the five television series and occasionally the feature films—and second, at the narrative potential of parallel universes or what we call “alternate possible worlds.” Chapter 6, “Character Building,” theorizes the construction of the televisual character and uses the theory to explore character stability and change across episodes and across media. It concludes by examining the ways in which the television drama’s ensemble casts can debate rather than reproduce dominant ideologies.

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This book’s particular contribution to the immense field of Star Trek studies is that it is the first extended examination of the people, practices, and institutions that made Star Trek as television. Thus it is also our contribution to television studies. Over the past few years, numerous edited collections have appeared that center on single American television dramas. These collections bring to bear a variety of perspectives on each program, but these multiple perspectives prohibit sustained engagement with the production context and the storyworlds emerging from that context. There are also many book chapters and journal articles concerning specific television dramas, but even if the authors address the production context and the storyworlds, the chapters’ or articles’ relatively short length militates against the kind of full examination that a monograph (or, in our case, duograph) allows. Only infrequently do these edited collections or articles feature data drawn from interviews with production personnel, since, as we said above, it’s not easy for academics to achieve access to industry insiders. We have to look back to the 1990s to find monographs on American television dramas that comprehensively examined their production contexts and storyworlds and incorporated data from production personnel; these are Julie D’acci’s Defining Women: Television and the Case of “Cagney & Lacey” and Jostein Gripsrud’s “Dynasty” Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies.36 Although these volumes provide invaluable historical information, they were written when the field of television studies was in its relative infancy, whereas our exploration of Star Trek has built on the accumulated scholarship of the past two decades. The past two decades have also rendered the case studies less familiar and accessible than Star Trek. Valuable as these works were and have continued to be, we hope that television studies may benefit from what we hope will be a worthy successor to those volumes.37

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: 17

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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.”1 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.2 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.3 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.4 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.”5 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.6 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.7 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

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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.”8 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.”9 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”10 and having a “low opinion of their audience’s intelligence, urbanity, and discrimination.”11 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.”12 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.”13 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.”14 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.”15 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

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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 drama The 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.16 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.”17 The independents had come to dominate television production during the 1960s, accounting for nearly 70 percent of prime-time fiction shows by 1963.18 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.”19 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.20 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

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script to NBC, sold the pilot, sold the series to NBC and supervised it.”21 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.”22 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.”23 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.”24 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.’ ”25 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

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that world, and then going into syndicated television programs at NBC and then into daytime programs at NBC and CBS, and on to . . . Desilu.”26 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.”27 The revolving door functioned as one of the networks’ riskreduction 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.”28 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.”29 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.30 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.”31 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,”32 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.”33 Roddenberry himself said that he had decided that Star Trek “should appear on the outside to be nothing more than safe, acceptable adventure stuff,”34 although we suspect Solow’s influence (unacknowledged by Roddenberry) in making the show safer and more acceptable. For example, Solow reports that Roddenberry initially conceived of Mr. Spock as having

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“not only pointed ears, but a long tail and was red!”35 While this was “inventive,” Solow told Roddenberry, “it’s terrible because television will not accept that.”36 The show that the two pitched to NBC conformed in many ways to the classic network era’s dominant assumptions—most crucially, those concerning the mass audience and least objectionable programming. The outline of the series’s format, reproduced in its entirety in The Making of Star Trek, stressed the familiarity of the unfamiliar: “Star Trek keeps all of Science Fiction’s variety and excitement but still stays within a mass audience frame of reference by avoiding ‘way-out’ fantasy and cerebral science theorem, and instead concentrating on problem and peril met by our very human and very identifiable continuing characters.”37 By contrast with the anthology format and in keeping with the series format that had dominated American television since the mid-1950s, Star Trek would each week return the audience to recurring characters and a recurring setting, the starship Enterprise, a “permanent set” that “provides us with a familiar, week-to-week locale.” This would seem familiar to an audience accustomed to the hit series Gunsmoke, with its Dodge City, and Dr. Kildare, with its Blair General Hospital—both, like the starship crew, “complete and highly varied” communities.38 In addition to familiar characters and settings, a show aiming for “least objectionable program” status also had to draw upon the familiar conventions of the action-adventure genre that, as Johnson says, “had become the dominant form of episodic television drama by the mid-1960s.”39 Invoking another hit series, the outline described the format thus: “The Format is ‘Wagon Train to the Stars’—built around characters who travel to other worlds and meet the jeopardy and adventure which become our stories.”40 Roddenberry also had in mind another variant on the action-adventure genre—the naval saga, most successfully exploited by C. S. Forester in his Horatio Hornblower series. As Shatner told us, “Wagon Train and Horatio Hornblower were the antecedents of Star Trek. Gene gave me a book written by C. S. Forester on Horatio Hornblower. Horatio Hornblower was a young captain of a British vessel that was plying the seas around the world, and he was a world unto himself because he was so far away from a command center.”41 The format outline also asserted that Star Trek would “combine the most varied in drama-action-adventure with complete production practicality.”42 The network executives needed to be persuaded that the show would not unduly challenge their audiences, and also that it would not unduly challenge their and Desilu’s budgets. NBC, under then-current licensing practices, had to foot the greater part of the bill and wanted to ensure that Desilu would be able to make up the shortfall. The format outline explained

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that Star Trek allowed “production-budget practicality by extensive use of a basic and amortized standing set” as well as through the “similar world concept” that permitted “a wide use of existing studio sets, backlots, and local locations, plus unusually good use of in stock costumes, contemporary and historical.”43 A great deal of the action would take place on that basic standing set, the Enterprise bridge; Los Angeles locations would stand in for alien planets; and the historical costumes would be used in episodes such as “Patterns of Force” (2:21) (Nazis), “Bread and Circuses” (2:25) (Romans), and “A Piece of the Action” (2:17) (1930s gangsters). Nonetheless, Star Trek still became one of the most expensive shows on network television. Compared with the industry standard cost of $160,000 per episode, its budget was $200,000. This left Desilu to pick up the $40,000 discrepancy between NBC’s payment of $160,000 per episode and the actual cost of production.44 The studio, as was then standard practice, expected to lose money during the show’s first run and to make money when it went into off-network syndication. While Shatner locates Roddenberry’s “genius” in selling Star Trek, Michael Okuda, chief graphics designer on the post-TOS series, locates it in Star Trek’s production practicalities: Gene Roddenberry’s genius wasn’t really that he constructed a fun science fiction universe. It was that he and his colleagues on the original Star Trek consciously sat down and said, “We’re going to do a television show about the vastness of the cosmos and all the strange things that one finds there.” And for a low-budget television show, even a highbudget television show, that’s something that’s very nearly impossible. You can’t do that. So how do you make it doable? Roddenberry said, “OK, we’re going to tell the majority of that story from one control room.” So you can afford to build one control room. “And most of the rest of the stories are going to take place on the standing spaceship sets . . . most of the time when you go to planets, it’s going to be on earthlike planets and with earthlike aliens.” And if you accept those conventions, you set out to do something which was entirely impractical and made it very practical. And that was genius.45

But, despite Roddenberry’s and Solow’s best efforts to present Star Trek as a typical classic-network-era show, they had not convinced Tinker and Stanley that “it would make a commercial television series, that there was enough of an audience out there to support the mixture of science fiction and fantasy.”46 Just as Solow claims that his insider status had secured the pitch, he claims that it also secured the network’s acquiescence: “I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. These were my friends. At least they could give me a script commitment. They went ahead and agreed to a script,

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which was great.”47 The executives committed twenty thousand dollars to the development of three story ideas, from which the network would choose one for the pilot; of the three, the network preferred the story outline for “The Cage.”48 This first pilot features James T. Kirk’s predecessor, Captain Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter), who leaves the USS Enterprise with a landing party in response to a distress signal from the planet Talos IV. The Talosians, strange-looking, monklike creatures with translucent heads, have lured Pike and his colleagues to the planet in order to encourage them to breed and help regenerate their enfeebled race. The humans refuse to be used in this way, and the Talosians give in and let them return to their ship. Unfortunately, the network was less tractable than the Talosians, the pilot’s divergence from more customary bland formulas indicating that a Star Trek series might pose too great a risk. As Robert Justman later told us, “NBC was considerably appalled by the pilot we made. So much so that they called Herb and Gene in and said, ‘Look, we like what you did, but there’s some things we want to change, especially in the areas of casting, and especially in the areas of “don’t be so smart.” ’ ” Network executives thought the pilot “too cerebral,” a phrase that appears in both Whitfield and Roddenberry’s and Solow and Justman’s books and was repeated by Justman in his interview with us. Whitfield and Roddenberry report that NBC thought that the “story line was too involved, too literate, and dwelt too much upon intangibles” and that “there just wasn’t enough action in the show.” Roddenberry wrote, “I had known the only way to sell Star Trek was with an action-adventure plot. But I forgot my plan and tried for something proud.”49 The network was unhappy with the lack of action and adventure in a program that Solow and Roddenberry had pitched to them in terms of the action-adventure format. The pilot had tipped the balance between regulation and innovation too far toward the latter. There were also, as Justman told us, problems with the casting. NBC particularly disliked Majel Barrett in the role of the Enterprise’s first officer. Solow insists that Barrett was not right for the part and that the network had doubts about her ability to carry the show as the costar.50 Whitfield and Roddenberry tell a different story: according to them, when the network tested the pilot, viewers’ opinions of the Barrett character “ranged from resentment to disbelief,” leading NBC to conclude that audiences would “resent the idea of a tough, strong-willed woman as second in command.” Despite this, the questionnaires showed that audiences liked the actress— the reason Roddenberry gives for subsequently casting her as Nurse Chapel.51 The fact that Barrett was one of his retinue of girlfriends (which also included the other two female members of the cast, Nichelle Nichols

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and Grace Lee Whitney) might also have influenced his decision. It may also have influenced Solow’s report of NBC’s dislike. Whatever motivated NBC’s wariness toward Barrett and/or her character, their concern about the Spock character stemmed from NBC Sales, which was worried about his pointed ears and slanting eyes “being seen as demonic by Bible-Belt affiliate station owners and important advertisers.” NBC’s Broadcast Standards and Practices more generally worried about how the pilot’s “eroticism” would play out in an ensuing series.52 Solow and Justman assert that NBC’s dissatisfaction was primarily due to sensitivity to “the manners and morals of mid 1960s America.”53 A least objectionable program could not feature a demonic Spock or scantily clad slave girls. Its maiden voyage having revealed serious design flaws, the Enterprise might have remained in dry dock had not NBC radically deviated from its established practices to offer Desilu, Roddenberry, and Solow an unprecedented second chance to demonstrate the proposed series’ conformity with those practices. Mort Werner, head of programming, who had “loved” “The Cage,” persuaded the network to pay for a second pilot, arguing that the story chosen for the first pilot had not “properly showcased Star Trek’s series potential.”54 According to Whitfield and Roddenberry, the chance to make a second pilot “shattered all television precedent.”55 Happy with this pilot (“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” written by science-fiction author Sam Peeples), NBC told Desilu to put the series into production. Despite the precedent-shattering second pilot’s violating the period’s dominant assumptions and practices, when Star Trek went into production, the network for the most part managed it in accord with those dominant assumptions and practices with regard to content, scheduling, and, most crucially, ratings. Muriel Cantor articulated one assumption that had particular applicability to Star Trek: “It is well known that networks are reluctant to try new ideas and would rather remake series with themes that have been successful, particularly in the recent past. When a show is considered ‘different,’ creative, or controversial, the networks take more interest in its production.”56 The first pilot had certainly alerted the network to Star Trek’s potential for difference, creativity, and controversy, perhaps inclining NBC to keep a closer eye on it than upon its more conventional programs. Chief among those keeping a close eye would be Jean Messerschmidt, representative of NBC’s Broadcast Standards and Practices, who, according to Robert Justman, “performed her job and performed it well,” being both “firm and reasonable.”57 But some degree of conflict was inevitable, given her responsibility to ensure that Star Trek did not transgress “the manners and morals of mid 1960s America,” as had the first pilot. The three net-

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works’ Standards and Practices departments enforced a voluntary selfcensorship, similar to that of the Hollywood film studios, reviewing “all non-news broadcast matter, including entertainment, sports and commercials, for compliance with legal, policy, factual, and community standards.”58 Most important, Standards and Practices ensured compliance with the National Association of Broadcasters Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters, to which both the networks and their affiliates subscribed.59 Solow said that “every story line, every teleplay, every completed episode resulted in a memorandum from Broadcast Standards detailing items that either had to be changed or removed.”60 The code prohibited “profanity, obscenity, smut and vulgarity”; Broadcast Standards recommended the omission of a “damned” from the script for “Miri” (TOS 1:8). The code mandated that “reverence is to mark any mention of the name of God”; Broadcast Standards recommended that “McCoy’s line ‘Thank God for that fantastic strength of his’ must be delivered in a reverent manner.”61 The code instructed that “the use of horror for its own sake will be eliminated; the use of visual or aural effect which would shock or alarm the viewer”; Broadcast Standards recommended “restraint here and throughout the script [of “Miri”] to ensure that the blemishes are not unnecessarily gruesome to the viewer.”62 The code dictated that “the costuming of all performers shall be within the bounds of propriety”; Broadcast Standards recommended “caution here [in “Miri”] when Janice opens her uniform to check on the progress of the disease; avoid exposure which would embarrass or offend.”63 The code also said that “the movements of dancers . . . shall be kept within the bounds of decency”; so much for green Orion slave girls. From a twenty-first-century perspective, network executives fretting about gruesome blemishes or embarrassing exposure may seem risible, but we should remember that the code’s dos and don’ts reflected—indeed, enforced—the consensual view of the mass audience described above, advising broadcasters to “bear constantly in mind that the audience is primarily a home audience.”64 Solow, we think correctly, defends the network from those such as Roddenberry who accused NBC of undue interference: “Star Trek suffered no more than any other network show. All programming was subject to the same restrictions.”65 But the comments of Solow’s coauthor, Robert Justman, indicate that these restrictions, even if common to all shows, were nonetheless irksome. Justman told us that the biggest difference in working on TOS and TNG was that for the latter series there “was no network. There was no Broadcast Standards department. There were no censors. We censored ourselves, so to speak. We did not have to submit one of our stories to the network for approval by Programming, and that same

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script to Broadcast Standards for approval by the broadcast censors.” We say more about this in the next chapter. Just as NBC followed standard practices in censoring Star Trek, so it did in scheduling Star Trek. Despite the period’s assumptions about programs having to appeal to a mass audience, the network’s schedulers were aware that Star Trek appealed primarily to high school and college students. (For more on the concept of niche audiences, see below.) The Thursday at 8:30 slot assigned for the first season worked for this young audience; subsequent time slots on a Friday night did not, since the young viewers were more likely to be out of the house than watching television. The Friday slot resulted from the first season’s disappointing ratings. Following the standard practice with underperforming shows, NBC scheduled Star Trek after the more successful Tarzan, gambling that viewers would stay with the network.66 They didn’t, and ratings continued to be disappointing. After giving a last-minute reprieve from cancellation in the second season, NBC once more moved Star Trek, this time to the 10 p.m. Friday slot that helped to seal its doom as a first-run network program. But the schedulers were once again acting in accordance with conventional industry strategies, as Solow and Justman explain: Due to its audience “age and gender” appeal, Star Trek would be most successful in an early-evening time period. But the programming and sales structure of network television necessitated a building-block effect. Shows on a given night were expected to move their audience on to the following shows, building to the late evening prime-time shows, more adult in nature, that would capture the time period and those big advertising dollars. However, the building-block effect did not work if the early-evening shows had no appreciable audience.”67

Star Trek’s appeal to otherwise hard-to-reach young people probably kept it on the air for three seasons, but its failure to deliver the required audience share made it increasingly unattractive to advertisers, at that time concerned with absolute numbers and not with viewers’ demographic profiles. For the most part, the networks wanted large numbers of viewers, not desirable, niche viewers. Since the first season’s ratings were already weak and ratings continued to decline in the subsequent seasons, it’s not surprising that NBC canceled Star Trek; what is surprising is that NBC renewed it for its second and third seasons.

in defense of the network: supporting nbc Continuing to act as industry insider long after his association with the network ceased, Solow has mounted a vigorous public defense of NBC,

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central to which is criticism of Gene Roddenberry, the man often regarded and even revered as Star Trek’s prime mover by the fans. In one interview, Solow referred to “the usual Roddenberry self-promotion technique of blaming any personal shortcomings on NBC or the studio.”68 He elaborated in another interview: There were certain obligations and responsibilities I had to . . . NBC who put up a lot of money to buy the series. Gene was treated as every other television producer was treated in that you have leeway to do what we had discussed you should do. If you go past those boundaries, then of course we at Desilu, myself would come down and NBC would. . . . what he would do is take out the frustrations of not being in total control by picking scapegoats, so he would treat NBC as someone who was against him, for instance, which just wasn’t the truth. NBC was trying to be supportive, but if there was a problem, Gene would turn it around and blame NBC, at times blame Desilu.69

The strained relations between Solow and Roddenberry stemmed partly from their respective positions in the industry: Solow, the manager, with “certain obligations and responsibilities” to both Desilu and NBC; and Roddenberry, the self-proclaimed “artist,” who valued self-expression and resented institutional constraints. Said Roddenberry while TOS was still in production: “The television writer-producer faces an almost impossible task when he attempts to create and produce a quality TV series. Assuming he conceived a program of such meaning and importance that it could ultimately change the face of America, he probably could not get it on the air or keep it there.”70 As we discuss in the following chapter, there is a fundamental tension between concepts of art and the requirements of commerce in the entertainment industry, one that seems to have played out in the relationship between Solow and Roddenberry. This conflict has also shaped the historical record, as seen in the often-divergent accounts of Star Trek’s first incarnation offered by Solow and Roddenberry and their coauthors. Roddenberry’s penchant for claiming the lion’s share of the inspiration and the credit no doubt fed into Solow’s negative assessment of the man, but we are inclined to concur with Solow’s defense of NBC. We do so because: (1) NBC’s treatment of Star Trek mostly accorded with dominant practices; and (2) NBC’s occasional departure from those dominant practices led to Star Trek’s later success. NBC’s commissioning a second pilot got the show on the air; its keeping the show on the air, in the face of disappointing ratings, resulted in just enough episodes for the syndication success that jump-started the Star Trek phenomenon. Just as there would have been no

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Star Trek without Solow, or someone like him, there would have been no Star Trek phenomenon without NBC, or a network like it. Star Trek was conceived in the mind of Gene Roddenberry but was incubated and came to maturity in accord with the dominant practices and assumptions of the classic network era. The network had not failed Star Trek, according to those assumptions and practices; Star Trek had failed the network, consistently running over budget, despite Roddenberry’s assurances of production practicality, and consistently delivering low ratings. True to form, the seventy-ninth and final episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” exceeded its budget by six thousand dollars and its shooting schedule by a day.71 The last shot, taken at 11:30 at night, was not followed by the traditional season-end wrap party, for there was nothing to celebrate. Increased budgetary constraints imposed by the studio in the hope of decreasing its losses, the departure of several key figures, among them Solow and Justman, and Roddenberry’s stepping down from the executive producer role had resulted in a season of twenty-four episodes that fell far short of the show’s initial promise. The Enterprise had crash-landed; its triumphant relaunch in a feature film a decade in the future would have seemed as wildly improbable that final night as the most fantastical Star Trek plot. In Solow’s words, “At the time of the series’ cancellation, any Paramount executive . . . who predicted there could ever be Star Trek profits would have been immediately incarcerated in the nearest asylum for the severely insane.”72 Solow speaks of Paramount executives because Desilu had been acquired by Gulf + Western in 1967. The company had also acquired Paramount Pictures, and as a result Desilu became Paramount Television.

“a huge asset of the company” In 2002, Paramount executive Kerry McCluggage, then president of Paramount Pictures Television, told us of Star Trek, “It is a huge asset of the company. If you were to separate out the value of that brand, that would be certainly in excess of a billion dollars, just on its own. It has meant over ten movies. We’re on now the fifth iteration of a television series. So add all that up, and the merchandising and books and fan clubs, and it’s a multibillion-dollar industry, just in and of itself. So, it is very important to the overall profitability of Paramount and its parent company, Viacom.”73 When NBC canceled TOS in 1969, Star Trek was not “a huge asset” but had in fact been losing money for both Paramount and NBC because of high production costs and low ratings. The show’s prime-time performance

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indicated that the chances of Paramount’s making up even its initial outlay, let alone a profit, in syndication were not good. When UPN canceled Enterprise in 2005, Paramount was potentially losing a huge asset, since the television show was meant to be a continuation of the money-spinning franchise that Star Trek had become. A studio press release at the time said: “All of us at Paramount warmly bid goodbye to Enterprise and we all look forward to a new chapter of this enduring franchise in the future.”74 Paramount had too great an investment in the Enterprise to leave it in dry dock; it released that “new chapter,” the first entry in the rebooted film series, in 2009, only four years after the last television series went off the air. The next section explains how Star Trek became a huge asset, in the process turning into one of the most atypical television programs ever made.

star trek and the multichannel era Some New Yorkers may first have seen Captain Kirk not on a television screen but in an advertisement for a television. On Wednesday, August 24, 1966, the day before Star Trek’s first-ever TV appearance as part of an NBC fall-season preview night, the New York Times ran an advertisement that touted three of the “full color” network’s new shows and the new Magnavox color television, available from Macy’s department store. Tarzan (Banner Productions, 1966–69) would deliver tigers, elephants, and Cheetah the Chimp; The Hero (Talent Associates, 1966–67), an actor smoothly gunning down the bad guys on a movie set; and Star Trek, “exciting missions to worlds beyond imagination.” The twenty-one-inch Magnavox color TV console would deliver a “265 sq. in. viewable area,” “automatic degausser,” and “automatic gain control”—all for the price of $459.50 (worth $3,052.83 in 201075). A montage photo included images of all three new series, but the screen on the product photo showed a medium close-up of William Shatner as the heroic Enterprise captain.76 On April 22, 1968, two months after NBC responded to fan protests by renewing Star Trek for a third season, the New York Times ran another Macy’s advertisement mentioning the program: “Imagine yourself luxuriating in a bath of bubbles, martini in hand, television tuned into Star Trek.”77 This might sound “out of this world,” but the new Pearlwick hamper, combining clothes bin, built-in TV, radio, clock, telephone, bar, book compartment, electric razor, and jewel hideaway, would make all this possible for a mere thousand dollars (worth $6,643.81 in 2010).78. Although its signature peacock debuted in 1956, NBC did not became the “full color” network until 1965, at a time when the high cost of color receivers kept

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ownership to around 6 percent of American families.79 Penetration figures for Pearlwick hampers aren’t available, but we can safely assume that even fewer than 6 percent of American families could have afforded or would have wanted a bathroom entertainment center featuring a “jewel hideaway.” Macy’s had chosen its demographics well, aiming both advertisements at well-educated and affluent New York Times readers inclined to be technologically savvy early adopters and to watch shows such as Star Trek, subsequently labeled “cult television.” Associations among desirable demographics, cult television, and technology drive the multiplatform, transmedia storytelling of the postnetwork era, but these two advertisements show that the classic network era also forged such connections, demonstrating the danger of engaging in rigid historical demarcations. As we said at the chapter’s outset, while TOS in many ways typified the classic network era, it also presaged the business practices of the multichannel era. The rest of the chapter uses Star Trek as a case study to examine the complexities of the transformation of the American television industry from the classic network era to the multichannel era. We look first at Roddenberry’s creation of what we call “the producer brand,” then at TOS’s attraction to niche audiences, and finally at the role that TOS and its successors played in undermining the threenetwork oligopoly and establishing the multichannel environment. In doing so, we show that television history has not proceeded in neat teleological fashion, with clear breaks between distinct periods defined on the basis of their dominant assumptions and practices. There is, instead, a certain degree of continuity, as individuals, programs, and institutions in one era experiment with practices that may (or may not) subsequently become dominant in the following era. Lacking the comparative evidence to do so, we cannot claim that Star Trek was the only classic-network-era program to engage in this experimentation, but we think that its level of experimentation was at least atypical.

the producer brand The multichannel era made Chris Carter, Steven Bochco, David E. Kelley, Aaron Sorkin, and other showrunners household names. More showrunners, such as Carlton Cuse and Matthew Weiner, gained similar status in the postnetwork era. In the classic network era, only a very few producers forged a recognizable public profile—the producer brand. In the simplest terms, a brand is the association of desirable values with a corporation or person that is intended to generate value by encouraging consumer loyalty.

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Channel proliferation and audience fragmentation have led to a strong emphasis on the branding of networks in the multichannel and postnetwork eras.80 As Roberta Pearson has argued elsewhere, these factors have also led to the increased significance of the producer brand, as audiences, freed from the constraints of televisual flow, pay less attention to distributors and more attention to content and its creators.81 The showrunners of the multichannel era served as the well-known public spokespersons for their programs, their brands lending their products distinction in a crowded field and serving as a guarantor of quality or, at least, of potential quality. Producers and their brands suit the needs of the multichannel and postnetwork eras; they did not serve the needs of the classic network era. In that earlier period, most producers kept a low public profile. Least objectionable programs were expected to acquire their requisite one-third of the audience through the network’s scheduling and promotional practices, not through a public spokesperson who might radically distinguish the show from the competition and in so doing potentially render it objectionable. In 1971, in his forward to Muriel Cantor’s book, Frank La Tourette stated that the television producer “prefers to turn the publicity spotlight away from himself so that it may shine fully on the program or the series he produces. He . . . would embrace even anonymity if that would help his program achieve a higher Nielsen rating.”82 But at least two classic-network-era producers, Rod Serling and Gene Roddenberry, sought higher ratings by turning the spotlight on themselves through creating a producer brand, an intangible asset with no legal status that nonetheless generated value.83 Serling and Roddenberry were both associated with an artistic integrity and social conscience that contrasted with what contemporary critics often saw as the commercial degradation of a television industry acting in accord with the “least objectionable program” assumption. Roddenberry also forged an association between himself and the 1960s “new frontier” of space travel, his “vision” of the twenty-third century reflecting the optimistic view of a scientific and technocratic future then most fully represented by NASA.84 Both were seen as mavericks in the classic network era, but the public selfpromotion in which they both engaged became the standard practice of the later eras. Just as Serling’s most lasting achievement, The Twilight Zone, probably inspired Roddenberry’s vision of Star Trek, Serling’s prominence outside the industry may have inspired Roddenberry’s construction of his producer brand, particularly in its emphasis upon the metaphoric uses of the science fiction genre and public opposition to the “least objectionable program” strategy. Together with Paddy Chayefsky and Reginald Rose, Serling was

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one of the best-known writers of the so-called golden age of live television, winner of three Emmy Awards for his scripts for Patterns (Kraft Television Theatre, ABC, 1955), Requiem for a Heavyweight (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1956), and The Comedian (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1957). In 1959, in a move that some saw as surprising, the well-known advocate of quality and opponent of censorship abandoned the live drama of New York for the filmed drama of Los Angeles to produce a new science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone. Saying he didn’t “want to have to compromise all the time, which in essence is what the TV writer does if he wants to put on controversial themes,” Serling emphasized that abandonment of the live drama didn’t entail abandonment of artistic integrity. “We [the sponsor and Serling] have a good working relationship wherein with questions of taste, questions of the art form itself, questions of drama, I’m the judge. In 18 scripts we have had one line changed.” Conflicts with the sponsor were unlikely, however, because The Twilight Zone was “strictly for entertainment. Because [the shows] deal in the areas of the imagination and of fantasy and of science fiction, there’s no opportunity to cop a plea or chop an ax or anything.”85 As we now know, although allaying sponsor concerns by dismissing The Twilight Zone as “strictly entertainment,” Serling used the fantasy/science fiction format to address many of the most controversial issues of the 1960s: prejudice, the Cold War, individual conscience, and the like. Post–Twilight Zone, Serling, no longer having to placate sponsors, was free to admit this: “I found that it was all right to have Martians saying things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”86 In retrospect, he reclaimed the mantle of angry young man and staunch opponent of censorship that he had shed for a time to accommodate the realpolitik of the classic network era. Those metaphoric Martians did Serling a favor since, in an ironic twist worthy of one of his own scripts, the public identity he so craved now rests securely on the filmed rather than the live drama. Only television historians remember Requiem for a Heavyweight, but Twilight Zone fans old and new still happily recount their favorite episodes. Serling’s producer brand, seemingly alien to the sensibilities of the classic network era, perfectly suits those of the postnetwork era. Prior to Star Trek, Roddenberry, like most classic-network-era writers and producers, remained unknown outside the industry. While Serling received copious coverage in the New York Times, Roddenberry’s only pre– Star Trek mention is a credit for his Kaiser Aluminum Hour script “So Short a Season,” a “drama of the old West.”87 But Star Trek, and its creator’s assiduous self-promotion, would give Roddenberry a public

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reputation and a fan base to rival, and eventually surpass, Serling’s. In 1985 the former became the first television writer to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, while the latter, despite his preeminence during the “golden age,” had to wait another three years for his star. At Star Trek’s debut, Roddenberry immediately began crafting the Star Trek myth and with it his producer brand, seeking cultural legitimacy through many tactics. Claims to scientific accuracy seemed intended to liberate the show from the kiddie-TV associations of most previous televised science fiction—for example, CBS’s Lost in Space, the program it chose over Star Trek. The show’s initial publicity foregrounded Roddenberry’s consultations with personnel from the Rand Corporation, NASA, and Caltech to obtain the latest scientific opinions on space travel and spacesuit/starship design.88 At the end of the show’s first season, the Los Angeles Times reported that Roddenberry would attend formal presentation ceremonies at the Smithsonian Institution to donate the pilot episode, still photos, and descriptive material that it had requested.89 By the end of the second season, Roddenberry was claiming that “over a hundred high school science classes assign Star Trek as credit” and that “even educational journals ask students to analyze the show.”90 In the third season, when the show’s future seemed bleak, Roddenberry wrote to Herb Schlosser, vice president of Programs, West Coast, citing the Smithsonian’s acquisition of production materials as a reason for renewing Star Trek despite its low ratings.91 The New York Times ran an interview with Roddenberry at the start of Star Trek’s second season, in which the reporter stressed the distinction between Roddenberry’s show and previous television science fiction: “Science fiction has been notably unsuccessful on TV. The fact that Star Trek has made it into a second season . . . makes it an exception. Its success must be attributed to creator-producer Roddenberry and his insistence on the credibility factor. For this reason, he urges his writers not to get too wrapped up in the wonder of it all. ‘People aren’t going to stop eating, sleeping or getting dressed in a few hundred years. We’re trying to imagine . . . what they’ll most likely be eating or thinking or wearing.’ ”92 In the same article, Roddenberry also distinguished Star Trek from mainstream television by virtue of its social relevance, which, as Serling had constantly pointed out, could worry sponsors. The New York Times quoted Roddenberry as saying, “The point we’d like to bring home is that we on earth have the choice of living together or dying together.” The Times noted that Roddenberry would “attempt to stress this point by introducing . . . a Russian character as a crewman aboard the ship” (this at the height of the Cold War, of course).93

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Less battle scarred and perhaps thus less wary than Serling, Roddenberry made explicit the metaphoric interrogation of contemporary mores. In another article after the end of the show’s first season (and at the height of the Vietnam War), the Los Angeles Times said that “[b]ecause Star Trek takes place in the 21st century [sic], Roddenberry finds it easier to take on subject matter which, if it were pinned on contemporary characters and situations, would probably be tossed out by the network as too controversial. For example, war between the planets on Star Trek can be condemned. Here on earth in 1967, TV would rather not make a comment on war.”94 On that same date, the paper featured an interview with Roddenberry: “We did shows last year about sex, bigotry, unionism, racism and religion. We even did one on Vietnam—disguised of course.” The reporter’s comments indicate the contemporary status of mainstream, commercial television even in its “hometown” newspaper: “You are justifiably surmising that we were talking with the producer of an educational or closed-circuit tv project or an experimental lab in some small eastern university. . . . [But Roddenberry] was discussing stories he released over normally gutless, non-commital, play-it-safe, fun-and-games commercial television.”95 This comment reflects a culturally prevalent assessment of television in the 1960s, echoing as it does Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow’s famous characterization of the medium as a “vast wasteland.” Cultural critics such as Minow and Serling routinely lambasted the dominant medium’s timidity and sameness. Discursive opposition to the putatively gutless mainstream, a hallmark of cult and quality television in the multichannel and postnetwork eras, was a significant aspect of Roddenberry’s producer brand at the height of the classic network era. Roddenberry forged his producer brand not only in the newspapers but also through his book The Making of “Star Trek” (published during TOS’s initial network run). Catherine Johnson suggests that Roddenberry and his coauthor, Stephen Whitfield, used the book to characterize Star Trek as “an unusual networked series that went against the dominant network strategy of producing formulaic programmes designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.” The book, says Johnson, shows how Roddenberry used the science fiction genre to buck the trend of network programming by developing television drama that was intellectually stimulating and addressed social issues.96 After TOS’s cancellation, Roddenberry cultivated the image of himself as valiant David against NBC’s oppressive Goliath. In 1973, the Los Angeles Times reported that Roddenberry “still grows darkly angry at NBC’s cavalier treatment of Star Trek.”97 His ingenious end runs around network censorship figured prominently in his narrative. In the

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run-up to the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the New York Times once more interviewed Roddenberry: “TV was so tightly censored that science fiction was the only way to escape the taboos in politics, religion or anything else that was considered controversial. I thought of ‘Star Trek’ as a ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’ ”98 A few years later, speaking this time to the Washington Post, Roddenberry elaborated on the Gulliver theme: “When Swift wanted to comment on his time, crooked prime ministers, insane kings and queens . . . he would have gotten his head chopped off for it if he’d written it straight. So in Star Trek I did much the same thing. I talked about things you couldn’t talk about . . . sex, religion, union management, labor, all that stuff. . . . It went right over the network’s heads. But all the 14- and 16-year-olds in the audience knew exactly what I was talking about.” In case the readers missed the parallel, the reporter helpfully explained that “the demented monarchs in Roddenberry’s case were the TV network executives.”99 Contemporary journalistic accounts demonstrate that Roddenberry successfully created a producer brand consonant with the period’s fascination with space travel and anxieties over the cultural status of television. His championing of Star Trek’s scientific credentials and quality may have nudged the hitherto devalued science fiction genre on a path toward respectability and even critical acclaim that eventually led to The X-Files (Twentieth Century Fox Television, 1993–2002) and Battlestar Galactica (Syfy Channel, 2003–2009). Roddenberry’s championing of artistic innovation and social conscience in television was a legacy to his (and Serling’s) spiritual heirs, the showrunners of the multichannel and postnetwork eras who similarly position themselves against the putative artistic wasteland of network television. Roddenberry’s producer brand did not immediately aid his career, however; after cancellation, he was “perceived as the guy who made the show that was an expensive flop” and he “couldn’t get work.”100 His associations with the franchise remained vexed; he was fairly quickly reduced to marginal participation in the feature-film series, was not consulted when Paramount first contemplated TNG, and was rapidly sidelined once that show began production. Paramount wanted the brand, not the potentially troublesome man behind it. According to Roddenberry’s authorized biographer, David Alexander, “Gene’s name on [TNG] was, [Paramount] thought, critical to its success. Gene’s magic name would be out front for all to see . . . he was the single person who could say, ‘It isn’t Star Trek until I say it’s Star Trek.”101 That magic name had to remain out front even as Roddenberry’s failing health reduced his input into TNG to a name in the credits.

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Interviewed for a trade publication after Roddenberry’s death, Rick Berman, his successor as executive producer, said: “The fans never knew that Gene Roddenberry’s active involvement in The Next Generation diminished greatly after the first season.”102 Nonetheless, the Roddenberry brand’s value was increased by the need to distinguish content in the free-for-all resulting from multiplatform distribution and audience fragmentation, as well as by Star Trek fandom’s attachment to TOS’s creator, and continued to thrive into the multichannel and postnetwork eras. Roddenberry received a credit as the “creator” on all episodes of all four spin-off series, and also on all the TOS and TNG films. And of course he continues to receive creator credit on the feature-film reboot, the first installment of which was dedicated to him and his recently deceased widow, Majel Barrett Roddenberry. As the New York Times put it in an editorial the week after Roddenberry’s death, “His imagination continues to beam.”103 That imagination continues to beam even today in part because of Roddenberry’s astute construction and Paramount’s calculated exploitation of his producer brand. It’s particularly notable now that Roddenberry’s is the only name associated with the Star Trek television series and the previous films that is acknowledged in the new J. J. Abrams movie versions. It’s unlikely that Rick Berman will be memorialized in a New York Times editorial, since he refused to cultivate his own brand during his eighteenyear association with Star Trek. We discuss Berman at this point in order to stress once again the dangers of a teleological television history. While many showrunners of the multichannel and postnetwork era have embraced the Serling and Roddenberry legacy of brand promotion, some, Berman among them, have not. If Roddenberry behaved like a multichannel or postnetwork producer in the classic network period, Berman’s failure to construct a producer brand made him in some ways similar to Roddenberry’s contemporaries who were, in La Tourette’s phrase, happy to shine the spotlight elsewhere. We suspect that Berman, like the classic-network-era producers to whom La Tourette referred, would have been happy with anonymity if it resulted in higher ratings. Roddenberry’s most active involvement with the franchise was as executive producer on the first two seasons of TOS and TNG, but Berman contributed to the development of TNG, acted as the chief executive producer of Star Trek television from 1989 to 2005, and had significant input into all the TNG feature films. As Berman told us, “in terms of Paramount’s perception I sort of became the Star Trek guy. I am the only person who has been involved in all of it.”104 He resolutely resisted attempts to portray him

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as Roddenberry’s creative heir: “All the things that I’ve read and heard over the years about Gene passing the mantle of Star Trek on to me are all nonsense. I don’t recall any passing of a mantle. I was the person who was an executive producer under him.” In 1986, when Berman, then Paramount Television Network’s vice president for long-form and special projects, was invited by Roddenberry to become executive producer on TNG, he had “never seen a Star Trek movie. I had, I guess, watched some of the original Star Trek series, when I was a kid or in college. Maybe a little bit, but not a lot.” Said Tracey Torme, a staff writer during TNG’s first two seasons, “Rick is not a wide visionary. He is more of a professional producer. He always approached the show from a practical level. When I first met him, he was a straight-ahead-producer who was Paramount’s guy and he adapted. But he wasn’t dying to be on “Star Trek.” This was just his next job.”105 Berman represented himself to us as someone doing his job, not as a “wide visionary.” While he was happy to make “provocative, issue-oriented shows,” he said that “four or five of those a season is usually enough. After that, it starts getting kind of preachy.” We asked Berman how he felt about the term “Roddenberry vision,” used to refer to Roddenberry’s conception of an ideal utopian future without war, poverty, or racial conflict: I know, it’s become a very common terminology—Roddenberry’s vision of the show—and I think it gets blown a little bit out of perspective. The answer to . . . your question ‘Is there a Rick Berman vision?’—the answer is, absolutely not. There is none. I have never even dreamt of it. My vision is to create the best and most entertaining television shows that we can for the money that they give us, and to try to have some fun doing it, and to try to keep the audience from having the same thing shoved down their throat week after week.

Berman’s failure to construct his own brand or to publicly embrace Roddenberry’s did him no favors in the fan community. As part of his brand-building activities, Roddenberry cultivated fans from the moment that he premiered TOS’s first episode at Worldcon (the World Science Fiction Convention) in 1966 and continued to do so up to his death. As the spin-off series increasingly diverged from the original series format of a starship boldly exploring the universe and achieved lower and lower ratings, doing justice to the Roddenberry vision become a point of contention among Star Trek fans. Perhaps influenced by Roddenberry’s narrative of epic conflicts with NBC over creativity versus the bottom line, fans began to accuse Berman and fellow producer Brannon Braga of pursuing profits and ratings at the expense of the creator’s original formulation of the Star Trek storyworld. A 1996 post to a thread on “what is going wrong with the

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Star Trek series” listed several factors, including “Gene Roddenberry’s Example Not Followed. When this man died the integrity, warmth and fascination of the Star Trek series diminished.”106 Fan disgruntlement escalated as TNG films Insurrection and Nemesis flopped critically and at the box office and as the Enterprise series garnered dismal ratings. In December 2002 a group of fans began the Save Star Trek Campaign, “a major initiative calling for sweeping changes within the Star Trek franchise leadership and creative direction with the goal of ‘restoring’ the franchise to Gene Roddenberry’s creative precedents.”107 The campaign’s online petition to Paramount leaders Sumner Redstone and Sherry Lansing demanded the removal of “the current leadership of the franchise from their positions, including Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, and their entire staff.”108 Roddenberry’s imagination continued to beam so strongly that fans resented Berman simply for not being Roddenberry—a resentment probably intensified by the fact that, as Tracey Torme suggested, Berman had no qualms about admitting that he himself “wasn’t a dyed-inthe-wool fan.”109 Berman remained unruffled by the controversy. When asked about the fans’ attitude toward him, he wryly replied: “There are people who probably think that the quality [of Star Trek] would improve greatly if I were to be hit by a truck.” Some academics who have written about Star Trek since we spoke with Berman seem to share that sentiment. In the Star Trek chapter in her Cult Telefantasy Series book, Sue Short asserts, “Contributing staff such as D. C. Fontana, Robert Justman and Gene L. Coon may have played an integral part in developing the series, yet Roddenberry created Star Trek, investing it with his ideals and affirming a faith in our potential to improve which is integral to the franchise.” She claims that Berman was “personally mentored by Gene Roddenberry on the ‘rules of Star Trek’ and vowed never to break them,” an account very much at variance with what we heard from the man himself. Speaking of Enterprise, she says that “the executive producers didn’t seem to care about the show, its fans, or the legacy it drew upon.”110 In her book “Star Trek,” Ina Rae Hark discusses the negative fan appraisals of both Berman and Brannon Braga, executive producer on Enterprise. She, like Short, blames them for Enterprise’s failure, saying that the producers were “clearly not writing Enterprise out of love for the stories they were telling or of the audience members who viewed them.”111 Again, this is not what we heard from Berman—or, for that matter, Braga. There were many reasons for Enterprise’s comparative failure, but the executive producers’ lack of love for the stories and respect for the audience were not among them. We take up this point in the follow-

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ing chapter but now move on to a section on Star Trek’s niche audiences in the classic network era.

niche audiences Star Trek arrived twenty, perhaps even thirty, years too soon, at a point when the television industry still placed much greater value on the sheer number of viewers than on the demographic profiles of specific audience segments. Herb Solow said that while the TOS ratings were disappointing, they had an upside: “Although in the first season, numbers were low, they were steadily low—no dramatic fluctuations week after week. That was positive, indicating an intensely loyal audience. These forerunners of ‘Trekkers’ watched Star Trek because they liked the series, not tuning in or out because of a prior week’s episode or the TV Guide advance description of the upcoming week’s episode.”112 But in 1966, sheer numbers dictated a program’s success or failure; it was not until the multichannel and postnetwork eras that appealing to demographically desirable niche audiences became standard business practice. TOS appealed to a relatively small audience of loyal viewers, but it did not deliberately set out to do so; all concerned would much rather have attracted the one-third of the audience that would have guaranteed the show’s survival. We do present some evidence that TOS’s attraction to niche audiences played a part in persuading NBC to renew the show for its second and third seasons, but NBC eventually canceled the show because it was not competitive according to the dominant assumptions of the classic network era about the mass audience. Nonetheless, a discussion of Star Trek’s initial audiences reveals yet again the unevenness and complexities of television history and contributes to a growing interrogation of the assumption that the mass audience completely dominated the thinking of the classic network era. The shift to demographic thinking is seen as one of the primary demarcations between the classic network and multichannel eras. The conventional wisdom has it that CBS’s 1970s youth-oriented sitcoms (All in the Family [1971–79], The Mary Tyler Moore Show [1970–77], and M*A*S*H [1972–83]) pioneered niche-audience strategies that became dominant from the early 1980s onward with quality dramas such as Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87). But, as Mark Alvey argues, these sitcoms signaled the culmination of “more than a decade of research and rhetoric”113 not only at CBS but at the other two networks as well. Elana Levine says that, during the 1960s, ABC used daytime programming to brand itself as the “young, unconventional network” through shows aimed at young audiences: the

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gothic soap Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis Productions, 1966–71) and the Chuck Barris–produced game shows The Dating Game (1965–73) and The Newlywed Game (1966–74).114 Aniko Bodroghkozy says that from 1967 onward “broadcasters and advertisers tended to fall back on the eighteento-forty-nine demographic as the general age composition they wished to attract” but “continually tried to refine and further limit the age range in attempts to figure out what the audience really wanted.”115 But, as Alvey notes, “as the 1970s wore on, mass ratings maintained considerable importance.”116 Elana Levine sums up: “[T]hroughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the ‘big three’ broadcast networks alternated between long-held strategies for mass-ratings success and newer ideas for attracting more demographically specific audience segments.”117 Clearly the roles of niche audiences, demographics, and narrowcasting in the classic network era require further investigation; we make a small contribution to that investigation by providing evidence about a specific 1960s niche audience: Star Trek viewers. Because of its often poor performance against its rivals, NBC was an early champion of demographic thinking. Alvey tells us that Paul Klein, he of the “least objectionable program” doctrine, flaunted “his network’s demographic superiority at every opportunity, citing it as the criterion for leadership.”118 By 1963, NBC’s research bulletins began to emphasize the “quality” of the audience, characterizing NBC as the “leading network for upper income, upper educated young adults.”119 These claims continued throughout the mid-1960s, with phrases such as “number one network among young adults,” “the leading network among the better marketing groups,” and “the preferred network among college-educated adults” showing up in the bulletins.120 But NBC used demographic analysis primarily to defend poorly rated programs; it had “negligible” influence on programming decisions.121 By 1967, however, demographics “began to play a role in the retention of programs with marginal audience share (twenty-eight to thirty-one).”122 In a 1967 article in Television magazine on programs in this “vast gray belt,” Klein said that audience “quality” might justify renewing shows despite relatively poor Nielsen numbers. “A quality audience—lots of young adult buyers— provides a high level that may make it worth holding onto a program despite low over-all ratings,” said Klein, specifically citing this as a key motivation for Star Trek’s renewal after a first season in which its poor ratings would normally have portended cancelation.123 As Klein told TV Guide in a later interview, Star Trek was retained after a second season of poor ratings “because it delivers a quality, salable audience”—in particular, “upper-income, better-educated males.”124

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From the beginning, NBC emphasized that while Star Trek would “stimulate the imagination,” it would not do so at the expense of “bypassing the intellect.”125 Judging from the contemporary press, Star Trek’s appeal to the intellect and to the quality audience seems to have formed the main talking points in the network’s publicity for the show. The Los Angeles Times’s Hal Humphrey reported halfway through the first season that “[s]o much of [Star Trek’s] mail is from scientists and clergymen that the NBC sales department has been able to use that fact in making its sales pitch to particular potential sponsors.”126 The article also mentions another cult favorite, saying that the heavy mail protest against canceling the UK-made series The Avengers (1961– 69, ABC Weekend Television) caused ABC in the United States to bring the program back to replace the canceled Custer (1967). Avengers and Star Trek viewership probably overlapped; some of those who wrote to ABC to save the former may well in a few months’ time have written to NBC to save the latter. Reporting NBC’s decision to renew Star Trek for a third season, the Washington Post said that the show drew “more mail from upper educative viewers than any other program on NBC.” The article characterized Star Trek as having “relatively low ratings and high prestige.”127 The Los Angeles Times article reporting the renewal used almost exactly the same phrase—“high prestige but relatively low ratings”—indicating common provenance in the network publicity that Alvey references.128 Perhaps aware of their network’s views on the subject, Star Trek’s showrunner and stars also emphasized appeal to demographically desirable viewers. Roddenberry told Hal Humphrey that the show received four thousand letters a week during its first season, “a lot of it . . . highly literate,” from “graduate students at Harvard and from astrophysicists.”129 A Los Angeles Times profile of Shatner said that the show was “extremely popular in the intellectual community, especially among scientists and rocket engineers.” Shatner had toured Cape Kennedy the previous spring and discovered that “the people at the Cape are out of their minds about the show. . . . [They] enjoy [it] because it gives an insight on what the future will be like.”130 In a New York Times interview, Shatner spoke of the amalgamation of several niche audiences: “It has action-adventure . . . so the kids like it. On another level, we deal with a philosophical concept—that what’s alien isn’t necessarily evil—so we reach their parents. Many of our episodes deal with scientific concepts, so our program entertains the technicians and space scientists. And with the hippies, we have a far-out show. They think we’re psychedelic.”131 First officer Leonard Nimoy (Spock), also speaking to the New York Times, added teenagers to the mix. The article said that “teenagers avidly

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follow Nimoy-Spock in the fan magazines and bid at auction for his foamrubber ear-tips at science fiction gatherings.” Nimoy thought that teenagers appreciated the fact that Spock, “in spite of being an outcast, being mixed up, looking different . . . maintains his point of view.”132 Like any multichannelera or postnetwork-era show aimed at a niche audience, Star Trek most probably appealed to a combination of smaller audiences, ranging from disaffected teens to rocket scientists. For example, Mary Celeste Kearney says that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Twentieth Century Fox Television, 1997– 2003) would not have succeeded by appealing only to teenagers, since that age cohort watches less television than others; network executives know that teen shows must target multiple demographics even in the age of narrowcasting.133 Again, Star Trek seems to have gotten there first. Star Trek viewers were not just a demographically desirable audience; they were also an active audience in the days before the active audience became a commonplace. Frequently invoked by Roddenberry and Trekkies as evidence of the show’s unique status, the campaign that reputedly prevented cancelation after the second season has long contributed to Star Trek mythology, 134 but the pages of the Los Angeles Times corroborate the protest’s impact: “When news of the rumored cancellation of NBC’s Star Trek reached the hinterlands, it started the biggest rumble since Tony Galento fought Max Baer. On the surface it appears that the series has more fans than Lawrence Welk. Even a large contingent of Caltech students will protest with a torchlight parade over the weekend.”135 The paper ran a page-three article on that Caltech protest, which increased to nearly three hundred as “sympathetic students from other colleges and high schools” joined in. At NBC’s Burbank studio, “NBC director of film programs James Seaborne appeared . . . with a small army of press agents and studio photographers to assure fans a decision on Star Trek is ‘still pending.’ ”136 On March 1, 1968, over the end credits of the episode “Omega Glory,” NBC officially announced that the program had been renewed for a third season. The Los Angeles Times ran follow-up articles in July and August. The first filled an entire page—a big picture at the top, text in the middle, and another big picture at the bottom: “NBC was inundated with thousands of protests. Students from scientifically oriented universities literally marched on NBC—even delegations from MIT [who had picketed NBC’s New York headquarters] and Caltech. In a rare showing of candor, NBC has admitted that this had an ‘influence’ on saving the series. The turn of events was so startling that it began to sound like a far-fetched science fiction story.”137

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The second article included an interview with Roddenberry, who told the reporter about a “sub-culture in our flakey society that supports cultist publications, known as fanzines” and said that “hundreds of fanzine people” had visited the studio and even written “lengthy critiques of the shows, some of them very helpful.” He also spoke of the “save Star Trek” campaign, saying that “prestigious groups,” including Werner von Braun’s White Sands Missile Range staff, had signed petitions and that “the network got over one hundred thousand pieces of mail, over a million signatures.”138 According to Herb Solow, Roddenberry exaggerated the extent of audience response: “I located the man at NBC back in 1967 who was responsible for answering all the fan mail. That one million letters was really 12,000 letters. But 12,000 was huge. It was the largest outpouring of mail NBC had ever received.” He also pointed out that, as has now become common knowledge, Roddenberry himself was behind the campaign: “It was an orchestrated event. The executives at NBC became aware that it was orchestrated and kind of resented the embarrassment. So it helped to get Star Trek renewed from year two to year three, but when year three came along, Star Trek found itself in a terrible time period with very little promotion behind it, so you have to say the letter writing campaign helped and hurt at the same time.”139 It is nonetheless telling that in a time before organized television fandoms, the fans were willing to be orchestrated not only to write letters but to march in the streets. Even those NBC executives familiar with Star Trek’s demographics might have been surprised by the show’s ability to get the most elusive of all audiences marching in the streets. As Variety’s Les Brown said of demographic thinking in 1969, “To speak of an 18–49 viewership is to obscure the fact that 18–25 scarcely exists—for television. . . . It isn’t that American youth will not watch television, but rather that it doesn’t watch it very often. Although the population census represents 18–25 as a large group, it’s probably a small one before the set at any given hour. And with three networks and any number of independent stations trying with all their might to capture that single element of the audience, it is necessarily being splintered to almost negligible size.”140 And yet hundreds, perhaps thousands, in this age category were so committed to sitting in the front of the set during Star Trek’s hour that they were willing to write, petition, and march to keep doing so. While this was admittedly a very small fraction even of the Star Trek audience and a minuscule fraction of the television audience, their very public engagement with their beloved show may have sent a signal to the networks. According

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to Bodroghkozy at this time, “Warning bells were ringing within industry circles, suggesting that the seemingly successful formula of escapist fare consisting of sit-coms, westerns, cop shows, variety shows, and the like were quickly alienating younger and highly educated viewers. . . . Paradoxically, the tried-and-true approaches for maximizing the total audience were driving away the more lucrative viewers the industry needed to maintain its economic growth in the future.”141 The very public attraction of niche audiences to Star Trek was an early, and admittedly faint, signal that the three-network oligopoly would give way to the multichannel era of audience fragmentation. The signal may have been strengthened by Star Trek’s appeal to niche audiences in offnetwork syndication, which the next section addresses.

the emergence of the multichannel era Star Trek struggled during its network first run but took off in off-network syndication, a surprising success that led directly to the establishment of the great and powerful franchise it became by 2005. This franchise produced TNG, the most successful drama series in first-run syndication to date, and launched a new network, UPN, centered around its flagship show, Voyager. After the original series, no Star Trek television show appeared on a major network; Star Trek’s success epitomized the weakening of the classic-network-era oligopoly. And it all began with TOS’s off-network syndication—that is, the rerunning of old network shows on individual stations, both affiliated and independent—that from the early 1960s onward became an increasingly significant aspect of the television marketplace.142 Because of financing arrangements, television shows made money not in their network runs but in the syndication market. This is why Desilu was willing to make up the difference between the $160,000 that NBC contributed and the nearly $200,000 that making an episode actually cost. Star Trek had not performed well on NBC, but its surprisingly strong performance on nonaffiliated stations around the country led directly to Paramount first attempting to relaunch Star Trek as a television series and then launching it as a feature film series. The syndication market received a considerable boost when the broadcasting regulatory authority, the Federal Communications Commission, required all television sets manufactured from 1964 on to receive channels broadcasting on the UHF spectrum—a move that immediately began to increase the number of independent (non-network affiliate) stations needing content.143 In 1967, while the original series was still on the air,

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Paramount Television Syndication struck a deal with Kaiser Broadcasting, which owned a number of major-market UHF stations—Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and San Francisco. Kaiser, aware of the series’ demographic profile, scheduled the show every night against their competitors’ 6 p.m. newscasts, “gambling that young males were not heavy viewers of television news programs,” as Solow and Justman put it.144 VHF stations followed this narrowcasting strategy as well. In the autumn of 1969, WPIX, one of three New York City VHF independents, scheduled Star Trek against the network news, hoping to emulate the success that fellow independent WNEW had had in “stripping” ( running every weekday at the same time) I Love Lucy in the same slot. WPIX president Fred Thrower said that the station was “banking heavily on Star Trek.”145 He, like Kaiser Broadcasting, may have been motivated to acquire the show by virtue of its proven appeal to niche audiences, particularly those desirable young males. Judging from Star Trek’s performance elsewhere, Thrower’s investment undoubtedly paid off. In the first year of syndication, the Los Angeles Times reported, the show continued to “acquire the most enviable ratings in the syndication field.”146 Two years later the same paper reported that Star Trek was now seen in more than sixty countries and one hundred US cities. The show was still working its magic on those elusive younger viewers. “The timeslots for the reruns, usually late afternoon or early evening, make it an attractive lure for the young audience,” reported the Times. Many in that young audience, in what was becoming established fan practice, watched the shows communally: “Students at many colleges such as Caltech cluster in rooms with televisions whenever the shows are aired.” But the upmarket audience included professionals as well as students. STAR (Star Trek Association for Revival) was said to include doctors, dentists, lawyers, scientists, and college professors among its members. And just as in the NBC years, the Star Trek audience continued to be an active audience. The programming director of L.A.’s Channel 13 was quoted as saying: “We get more mail and phone calls about this show than any other show we’ve ever had on the air.”147 By the mid to late 1970s, university students were allegedly halting “their studies to watch the 50th re-run of Star Trek episodes on television”148 and, having “become addicted to continuing Star Trek re-runs on non-network stations,” flocking to Star Trek conventions.149 Advertisers were reportedly lining up to “get into the Star Trek time slot at premium rates.” Mary Barrow, publicity director for L.A.’s KTLA, which in 1977 was airing Star Trek seven days a week, said that it was one of the station’s “hottest shows. . . . And it has gotten hotter as it has grown older.”150 Two years later another KTLA spokesperson was still singing the show’s praises: “It’s

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as good now as it was the first day we ran it.” By that time, episodes had “been seen 30 to 40 times in many markets.”151 But, contrary to usual industry practice in which “shows usually get cheaper the longer they’ve been around,” Randy Reiss of Paramount Television said that “we’re now getting more for Star Trek and when the movie comes out [in 1979] it will get even better.”152 Even by 1986, twenty years after TOS’s premiere and seventeen years after its cancellation, it was still the fifth-highest-rated one-hour show in syndication, seen in 140 national markets covering 90 percent of the nation.153 The show was also continuing to perform well in overseas markets, already shown in 120 countries by 1977.154 It may be the case that Star Trek’s famously multicultural—or, more accurately, multiplanetary—cast played a role in its overseas success. If so, Star Trek could be seen as the harbinger of a postnetwork-era trend: international casting specifically intended to appeal to foreign markets, as with Lost (ABC, 2004– 10) and Heroes (NBC, 2006–2010). As California Business reported, Paramount certainly had an eye abroad with the first spin-off, TNG: “Paramount is smart enough to see that Star Trek, with its cosmopolitan, interplanetary cast of characters, travels well overseas. Next Generation is not just a domestic phenomenon; the overseas market is extremely lucrative.”155 Once more, Star Trek got there first. But it was the domestic phenomenon of the original series syndication that gave birth to TNG. Said Kerry McCluggage: “The original Star Trek . . . became a hit and a phenomenon when it was sold into syndication. There were only seventy-nine episodes, but they were stripping it five days a week, and it became immensely popular. And it was the popularity of that show in off-network syndication that spawned The Next Generation.” The key phrase here is “off-network.” TOS, syndicated at a time when the mass-audience model still dominated network thinking, proved that a show aimed at the younger male audience could be very profitable. Paramount specifically designed TNG to exploit this market niche; according to Daily Variety, Paramount’s “syndie prez,” Steve Goldman, believed that the three major networks’ prime-time programming (with the exception of sports) had ignored the eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old male audience at which TNG was targeted. TNG not only surpassed network series “in the key selling demo” but also proved “a household success,” showing that it, like the original series, amalgamated demographic segments.156 TNG became as hot in first-run syndication as its predecessor had been in offnetwork syndication, Paramount employing business practices that became standard in the multichannel era and contributing to the weakening of the established networks.

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First-run syndication—that is, programs first aired in syndication rather than on the networks—had been a major component of early television programming, encompassing a range of genres, but had faded in importance as the networks, in concert with a small and closed circle of producers, took over origination of the vast majority of television content.157 By the late 1980s, first-run syndication had for a long time been the exclusive province of Wheel of Fortune, Entertainment Tonight, and similar fare. As Derek Kompare puts it, “[F]ictional first-run syndication finally returned to prominence in the late 1980s through the late 1990s (after an effectual twenty-five year absence) led by . . . [Star Trek: The Next Generation].”158 A rapid growth in the number of independent stations during the 1980s, increasing from 100 in 1980 to 328 in 1986, facilitated fictional first-run syndication’s rebirth. These independents had “thrived by using a new method of financing called barter syndication to acquire first-run programs.”159 Rather than paying an upfront acquisition fee, stations gave up a certain percentage of commercial time to the syndicator, who then sold it on to national advertisers. Paramount decided to use this business model for TNG, the first fictional first-run series to be distributed on this basis. In a decision aimed at both short- and long-term profitability, the studio bypassed all four networks (including the fledgling Fox, which wanted to use the show to help launch its Saturday-night slate160) and offered the show to the 145 stations (including 98 independents) that were broadcasting the original series.161 In exchange for running the new show for free, local stations would allow Paramount seven minutes of commercial time in each episode to sell to national advertisers. The station would sell the remaining five minutes of commercial time, keeping profits for themselves. This income from advertising still would not cover the cost of production, but Paramount already had their surefire money spinner in syndication—TOS. The deal clincher was that Paramount would sell the profitable TOS only to stations who took TNG as well. To have followed the standard deficit-financing model by licensing the show to a network for a fee that barely covered production costs would have meant Paramount would have had to wait for off-network syndication to make money. Barter syndication made TNG profitable much sooner. As senior industry analyst Doug Lowell explained, Because everyone else got so fearful of cable and worried about the bottom line they stopped making expensive programs for syndication. The attitude is: If it’s cheaper to do an Oprah Winfrey or a live action cop show, then why run this big deficit financing if we don’t have to? And suddenly, you have a zillion Geraldos. This is a big mistake because

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such a show has no library value—no one is going to want to watch it five or 10 years from now. But what Paramount did . . . is to continue to make the kind of TV programs that do build a library.162

Kerry McCluggage explained how Paramount built the exploitation of the library into the original TNG deal: Paramount made a commitment to do [TNG] in first-run syndication, and simultaneously sold the back end to the same stations that were buying the front end, which was how we did Deep Space Nine as well. And it was a huge success. The same stations that were airing it in first run also purchased the rights to strip it and run it in the equivalent of off-network syndication later. So they would be buying the right not only to air it once, but to then air it [again]; usually they’d get about six runs of each episode.

Paramount further exploited the back catalogue on its own television networks, beginning with running TNG, DS9, and Voyager on Viacom’s Nashville Network, subsequently rebranded many times. CBS, as a result of the breaking up of Paramount Viacom, now owns the rights to Star Trek television and continues to run all five series on its various satellite channels at home and abroad.163 TNG became a first-run syndication phenomenon, outperforming firstrun stalwarts such as Wheel of Fortune as well as network hits like Cheers, LA Law, and Monday Night Football164 and consistently ranking in the top ten of hour-long dramas.165 Its biweekly airings attracted an estimated 20 million viewers, including many of those sought-after affluent young males.166 TNG’s ratings triumphs so disconcerted the established networks that they joined together to dispute Paramount’s claim that TNG (and the studio’s other first-run shows, DS9 and The Untouchables) were delivering higher ratings among eighteen- to-forty-nine-year-old men than top-rated network shows.167 But as Paramount’s Goldman put it, the networks were unable to stop the “first-run monster” that caused affiliates to preempt the network feed in favor of first-run syndication shows such as TNG.168 TNG’s stellar ratings showed that a first-run show could compete on an equal basis with network shows, while Paramount’s innovative business practices made the first-run market potentially more profitable. As Electronic Media reported, Paramount’s taking TNG into first-run, with “several innovative marketing twists—including double runs, an aggressive seven/five barter advertising split [commercial minutes allocated to the network and the station], and upfront sales of back-end repeats [off-network syndication as part of the original deal]”—established “industry standards.”169 Trey Paul, a writer for King Features Syndicate, credited TNG with “the current pres-

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ence of so many fantasy hour dramas in syndication (Babylon 5, Robocop, Time Trax, etc.).”170 Kompare adds Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Forever Knight, and Highlander: The Series to the list.171 All of this was directly attributable to TOS, since Paramount had linked the acquisition of TNG to the acquisition of the earlier show, already proven as a powerhouse in the off-network syndication market.

upn, and an earlier risk not taken Paramount’s gamble with TNG and first-run syndication paid off to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and indirectly led to the launch of Paramount’s own network, UPN. But ten years before TNG’s debut, the studio had contemplated an even greater risk and an even more direct challenge to the network oligopoly—revealing more complexities hidden beneath historical periodizations. In 1977, Paramount tried to launch a fourth network, the Paramount Television Service, on the strength of Star Trek’s syndication success. In June of that year, the New York Times announced that “Star Trek will return to the airwaves as part of a television service being established by Paramount Pictures.”172 Paramount planned to revive the original series with the original cast (minus Leonard Nimoy, who was in dispute with the studio over revenues from licensed products bearing his image) as Star Trek: Phase II. This show, in conjunction with made-for-TV movies, would have formed a “three hour block of expensive original programming one night a week” to be offered to independent stations.173 In August of that year, Gene Roddenberry talked about Star Trek: Phase II, saying that the show was in preproduction, with filming scheduled to start in November. Roddenberry also said that Paramount was considering setting up a fully independent twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week network.174 A few days later, the Los Angeles Times reported that Shatner had been signed to reprise the Kirk role and confirmed that shooting would begin in November.175 But come November, Paramount announced that the new Star Trek, which had been scheduled to air in April 1978, would not now be shown until September at the earliest. The studio said that although stations covering 57 percent of the country had expressed interest, recent falls in advertising rates had negatively affected the proposed network’s economic viability.176 As we know now, audiences had to wait another ten years for more Star Trek television and another eighteen years for a Paramount network. In 2000, the Los Angeles Times’s Brian Lowry gave the behind-the-scenes story of the abortive fourth network, “an epic tale full of intrigue, feuding and Star Trek.”

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“The men leading the 1 NEX Paramount Television Service,” as a sales brochure for the venture said, became some of the most influential players in the entertainment industry. They included Barry Diller, then chairman of Paramount Pictures; Michael Eisner, the studio’s president; Richard Frank, its vice president, later president of the Walt Disney Studios; and Mel Harris, currently co-president and chief operating officer of Sony Pictures. . . . To Diller’s chagrin, Paramount pulled the plug six months before the venture was to make its debut. Studio chief Charles Bluhdorn worried that PTVS would lose too much money, though the $40 million projection is less than 5 percent of the losses incurred by UPN thus far.177

Instead, Paramount decided to exploit Star Trek’s popularity via the cinema rather than television, launching the feature-film franchise in 1979 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The preproduction work on Star Trek: Phase II did not go entirely to waste; the film incorporated some of the elements, and TNG recycled two of the scripts. Barry Diller moved to Fox in 1984 to find Rupert Murdoch more receptive to the fourth-network idea, which became a reality in 1986 with the Fox Network. But the history of a 1970s fourth network that never happened shows yet again that developments strongly associated with the multichannel era have roots in the classic network era. It wasn’t until January 1995 that Paramount launched its own network, UPN, becoming the sixth network of the multichannel era. (The fifth network, the WB, had been started by Warner Bros. earlier the same month.) As it had with TNG, the studio used Star Trek as a lure to pull in independent stations, which, to get the new Voyager, had to agree to initially carry four hours of Paramount programming from 8 to 10 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays.178 Kerry McCluggage, who launched UPN by “literally traveling around the country, forty-some-odd cities, to sign up affiliates,” explained how Voyager persuaded stations to join the new network: “We could tell them what at least one of their shows would be, and that was Star Trek: Voyager.” Because almost all of the stations McCluggage targeted either ran TNG or DS9 in syndication or competed with stations that did, “being able to talk to them, not just about our vision for a network, but to make that vision specific and real, and show them a tape of a presentation of what Voyager would be, made our job enormously easier, and we got the best affiliates. So we had a much better distribution start going in [than did the WB]. Primarily because of Star Trek.” However, explained McCluggage, even with Voyager and then Enterprise to attract the independents, distribution remained a problem. UPN and the WB could never rival the number of stations affiliated with the previously established networks:

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There are some limits as to how far you can grow, just based upon the number of broadcast stations. We will continue to grow, but beyond the top fifty markets, there aren’t going to be six broadcast stations in the market. So there’s not going to be a station that can be ABC, a station that can be NBC, CBS, Fox, Paramount, and WB. The WB and UPN will have certain limitations about their growth. They’ll cover it by building cable stations, satellite distribution, et cetera, and eventually, if the ratings continue to grow, you’ll see affiliates switch. We’ve had some Fox stations become UPN affiliates. I think in one instance, an NBC station became a UPN affiliate.

UPN’s relatively smaller number of affiliates accounted in part for Voyager’s and then Enterprise’s disappointing ratings. Rick Berman told us that “a lot of shows that are not half as good [as Enterprise]” were “watched by huge numbers of people” just because they were on NBC or CBS. “We have 86 percent of the people covered [through the UPN affiliates]. That means 14 percent of the US don’t even get the show.” Enterprise did continually struggle in the ratings and only managed a fourth year, enough to make up a syndication package, because Paramount reduced UPN’s license fee. And UPN itself met its demise a year after Enterprise’s cancellation, when in 2006 it merged with the WB to form the CW network.179 Star Trek may have played a significant part in the transition from the classic era to the multichannel era, but it did not survive into the postnetwork era. This chapter has outlined the broad industrial conditions in which Star Trek operated during the classic network and multichannel eras. While noting TOS’s conformity to the production and distribution strategies of the classic network era, it has also noted TOS’s atypicality in foreshadowing the multichannel era and demonstrated that TNG and then Voyager played key roles in the transformation that occurred between the two eras. So far, we have told the story of Star Trek largely in terms of what Susan Christopherson terms the “competitive strategies of the firm.”180 These competitive strategies changed in the almost four decades between the premiere of TOS and the cancellation of Enterprise. TOS had to attract the necessary one-third of the audience necessary for a network’s profitability, and then recoup the studio’s investment through a strong performance in the off-network syndication market. Enterprise had to perform well enough in the ratings not only to sustain itself but to serve as Voyager’s successor as UPN’s flagship program. The competitive strategies of the firm, however, were not executed by Desilu, Paramount, NBC, or UPN; they were executed by individuals within those firms—Solow and Roddenberry, who together launched TOS; and

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Berman, who sustained the post-TOS franchise. Christopherson tells us, “It is difficult to understand either the nature of a creative worker’s ‘flexibility’ or the degree to which self-expression or economic motives are important in their work lives without some understanding of the strategies undertaken by the firms to whom they sell their products or services.”181 This chapter has offered an understanding of competitive strategies; the next chapter, together with chapters 3 and 4, considers creative workers and selfexpression in the day-to-day process of making Star Trek television.

2. Art, Commerce, and Creative Autonomy

The previous chapter discussed Star Trek as a product emerging from what Susan Christopherson terms the “competitive strategies”1 of the firm—or, in Star Trek’s case, the multiple firms of Desilu, Paramount, and NBC. It showed how Star Trek’s role in these firms’ competitive strategies changed over the four decades of production, as the American television industry gradually transformed from the classic network era to the multichannel era. We hypothesized these competitive strategies as structural determinants of television production and distribution, but also showed that without individual agency—that is, without Herb Solow and Gene Roddenberry—there would have been no original series and hence no Star Trek television. Initially, Solow and Roddenberry each contributed to aligning Star Trek with the competitive strategies of Desilu and NBC, conforming the Star Trek concept to the storytelling and production conventions of the classic network era. Solow was institutionally positioned as the interlocutor between the firms’ competitive strategies and the day-to-day production process, while Roddenberry positioned himself as the maverick contesting institutional constraints in the name of creativity. Later, the two men clashed over creativity and credit—a clash that, it could be argued, derived from that commonly perceived tension in media industries between commerce and art—the former driven by managers’ desire for profitability and the latter by individuals’ desire for self-expression. Writing during the transition from the classic network era to the multichannel era, Todd Gitlin asserted that in network television, commerce almost always trumped art: “Most network television is simply bad—inert, derivative, cardboard—because no one with clout cares enough to make it otherwise. It is good enough for its purposes. . . . In headlong pursuit of the logic of safety, the networks ordinarily intervene at every step of the 55

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development process. . . . More often than not, commerce defeats not only art but commerce itself.”2 Writing three decades later, when the processes of technological and industrial convergence had already had a profound impact upon the American television industry, Mark Deuze offered a more nuanced evaluation of the intricate interplay between art and commerce: In terms of the management and organization of work, media organization can . . . be considered as quite special, partly because of the delicate and contested balance between the creative autonomy of cultural creators, and partly because of the scientific management of commercial enterprises. This relationship between commerce and culture can be seen as a sibling rivalry, as both management and culture creators not only need each other, but much of the work of managers and of culture creators is cultural and economic at the same time. Indeed, cultural and economic concerns are not necessarily different, but in the context of media work rather must be seen as constituent material practice.3

This chapter, together with chapters 3 and 4, addresses the creative autonomy of cultural creators within the constituent material practice of making Star Trek television. Did particular individuals—executive producer Rick Berman, production designer Herman Zimmerman, construction coordinator Tom Arp—have creative autonomy, defined by Deuze as the ability to make “more or less independent decisions in the creative process of producing media”?4 They told us that they did, and we believe that—despite the limitations on workers imposed by the competitive strategies of the firm, most evident in the day-to-day production process in the requirement to make a profitable product on time and on budget—these individuals mattered. Star Trek emerged not from Desilu, Paramount, NBC, or UPN but from the combined creative labor of individuals working at all levels within these institutions over four decades. As John Thornton Caldwell says, individual agency is situated “not just in the corporate organization and economic strategies of the studios and networks” but “in the social interactions, conceptual tactics, and cultural expressions of workers.” It’s not the conglomerates who manufacture content; rather, “screen content results from a loosely organized and dispersed arena of socio-professional and intercultural contestation that unfolds within the conglomerates.”5 Whereas the previous chapter traced the history of Star Trek through the classic network and multichannel eras, this chapter and the following two discuss the Star Trek production process primarily in the latter period. Two reasons motivate our decision to focus on the multichannel era. First,

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as we argued in the introduction, while some factors altered between the two eras, others remained stable. The changes in the American television industry’s business model from mass to niche audiences affected the kinds of programs made and their distribution but had relatively little impact upon the production process. In the case of Star Trek, the most meaningful difference between the original series (TOS) and subsequent ones was, as we’ve indicated in the previous chapter and discuss further below, distribution and the role of the network. Second, the majority of our interviews were with people then working on Enterprise, many of whom had been with Star Trek since the early days of TNG. The rich and detailed perspective on the production process provided by our interviewees demands a sustained consideration of their work and input during the multichannel era. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 also differ from chapter 1 in terms of their analytical framework. Chapter 1 took what might broadly be described as a media-industries perspective, drawing on the television-studies literature. These chapters take a related but conceptually distinct creative-industries perspective, since this literature offers a framework for analysis of the collaborative production of cultural products by a large workforce that is generally absent from television studies. As David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker point out, “Until recently, only a very small proportion of . . . studies of cultural production focused on the creative labour that is fundamental to that production. In some arts and humanities studies [there is] a focus on individual producers rather than on the complex division of labour which . . . is the basis of most cultural production.”6 This is largely true of the field of American television studies, which, insofar as it has considered individual workers, has tended to do so primarily in terms of the executive producer or showrunner. By contrast, we are interested in the creative autonomy of all the individuals within the complex division of labor—the intricate coordination of the work of producers, writers, production designers, set builders, and all the others required to turn out a weekly television series. We account for the input of the belowthe-line employees, the “craft” workers, as well as the above-the-line employees, the “artists.” This is because, as Mark Banks argues, “while artists remain the primary source of those original or distinctive ideas that can eventually materialize as cultural industry commodities . . . the role of the craft labourer is often as crucial in ensuring that cultural goods achieve their intended commodity form.”7 By including the craft workers in our analysis, we take a broader view of the production process than that characteristic of much of television studies and indeed of much of the research on

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creative industries more generally. According to Banks, “populist appraisals and . . . many (if not all) academic analyses of the creative industries” have tended to overlook workers performing what are often perceived as “nonartistic jobs . . . based on craft skills and processes—such as camera work, set-design, printing, lighting, model-making [and] editing.”8 The chapter begins by assessing the creative autonomy of the Star Trek workers in terms of their relationship to the studio and the network and with regard to their position within hierarchies constructed by the industry’s constituent material practices and discourses. It then shows how the Star Trek production process exhibited the typical constraints and enablers of creative autonomy posed by the television industry’s temporal and budgetary restrictions. It concludes by discussing the uniquely atypical constraints and enablers of the Star Trek storyworld and the Roddenberry legacy. Chapter 3 follows on by looking in more detail at the making of Star Trek television, examining the interdependence among individuals in the creative process. Chapter 4 completes our examination of production by enumerating the determinants of the creative autonomy of the actors, who, for reasons that we will explain then, warrant separate consideration.

creative autonomy: “more freedom to do what we want” We have so far used the term “creative industries” unproblematically, but it is a contested concept requiring definition. The extensive literature on the topic includes much debate about the origins, specificity, and delimitation of the term. No matter how specific and delimited the definitions, however, they always include television and thus implicitly always include Star Trek, so we need not enter into the definitional debate.9 We accept the definition offered by Hesmondhalgh and Baker since it highlights the distinctive nature of the work undertaken in the creative industries: “ ‘Creative industries’ . . . is . . . a concept centred on . . . symbolic, expressive and informational work.”10 Creative industries make symbolic, expressive, and informational products—for example, films or video games—as opposed to products that, while having symbolic dimensions attributed to them, are intended for utilitarian purposes—for example, cars or soap. These industries are generally characterized by collaborative, industrially organized production, a specialized division of labor, professionalization, mass reproduction or dissemination, and mass consumption.11 But, in attempting to account for the creative input of individuals, the most important characteristic of the creative industries is the managers’ attitude toward and degree

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of control over the workforce. As Banks puts it, there is “the necessity . . . of maintaining . . . the tension between autonomous impulses of creative workers and the demands of managers for standardized, predictable production. This is because it is a commonly held view of managers that only through allowing creative workers certain ‘freedoms’ will they be empowered and inspired to produce the new, culturally distinctive commodities that capital requires. . . . The separation of art and commerce is thus a necessary feature of cultural industries production.”12 Michael Piller, executive producer and head writer on TNG and executive producer and cocreator of both DS9 and Voyager, adamantly asserted that doing his job well depended upon such a separation: “There is a very clear division, or at least there should be . . . between the commerce and the artistic, if you can use that phrase, side of the business.” He accepted that studio and network executives have to be driven by the bottom line. “It’s called show business for a reason—it’s fundamentally an industry. Their job is to make money and to have a profit and to keep their company solvent.” But, said Piller, “the writer’s job should be to do the kind of storytelling that amuses and explores and somehow provokes thought. The moment we start thinking about writing things that will make money or get higher ratings, we lose everything we are as writers.”13 This loss could lead, in Gitlin’s phrase, to commerce defeating not only art but commerce itself. Gitlin implied that this happened in the classic network era because of the networks’ constant interference; as we saw in the previous chapter, NBC exerted control over TOS content through its Standards and Practices division. The network’s role in the creative process, or lack thereof, was the single biggest factor differentiating Star Trek production in the classic network era from Star Trek production in the multichannel era. We interviewed Kerry McCluggage, who, as president of Paramount Pictures Television at the time (2002), was the most powerful person to whom we spoke (his status signaled by his occupation of Paramount founder Adolph Zukor’s old office). McCluggage said that making TNG for first-run syndication had resulted in “tremendous creative freedom” that “everybody involved found extremely liberating.” Returning to network distribution via UPN for Voyager and Enterprise was agreed upon subject to the condition that the new network not be involved on an “operative basis”—that is, that it not interfere with the day-to-day production of the series. In an instance of the socioprofessional and intercultural contestation within conglomerates that Caldwell refers to, Paramount Pictures Television saw UPN’s interests as different from its own. According to McCluggage, “[n]etworks have a different agenda than suppliers of

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programming. They’re in a different business than you are in the production of television programs.” McCluggage explained that meddling from UPN executives might make the television shows less attractive to audiences and thus less commercially viable—a disastrous outcome for a studio so dependent on the Star Trek franchise: All of the executives, whether you’re talking about network executives or studio executives, that have anything to do with the creative process in television, all have good intentions. They’re trying to give notes and thoughts that they think will improve the product. But some of them understand it better than others. And ultimately, I believe that an audience can smell a show that doesn’t have a distinct point of view. That doesn’t mean that [the producers] are not going to take input from people, but that input is going to be filtered against a standard of ‘This is what we’re trying to say with this television show.’ The importance of Star Trek to the studio is such that we would not even allow the possibility of a network’s creative input damaging our franchise. We’re certainly free to make our own mistakes, and we’ve made some, but we didn’t want to fail on somebody else’s terms with this franchise.14

He saw the separation of art and commerce as a necessary division between the function of the producer (the studio) and the distributor (the network). The next most powerful person to whom we spoke was Rick Berman, executive producer on the Star Trek series since TNG’s third year, who performed what Hesmondhalgh and Baker refer to as a “creative management role,” mediating “between, on the one hand, the writers, directors, actors, camera operators, and on the other hand, more senior management.”15 Berman implied that the separation of art and commerce depended on independence not only from the network, but from the studio as well: “I’m the major point of contact with the studio, but luckily, because the studio has a great deal of trust in us, we have very little contact with the studio. The less contact with the studio, the better. The less contact with the network, the better. It’s more freedom to do what we want.”16 This is not to say that the network and studio exerted no control over the show, just that they exerted relatively little creative control, especially in comparison to the TOS days. We asked Brannon Braga, executive producer and head writer on Enterprise, how much freedom he had to determine the show’s direction: “A lot of freedom. When it comes to our budget, how the episodes will be aired, how will they be promoted—that’s all the network and the studio. When it comes to creative content and how the show is run on a daily basis—that’s me and Rick [Berman].”17 Budgetary constraints are one of the more

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obvious ways in which commerce controls art, and we discuss those below. But less obvious factors, such as the network’s power to determine the number of episodes or the order in which they were broadcast, could also affect the creative process and creative autonomy. Braga was unhappy with the studio’s and network’s “financial decision” that the post-TOS Star Trek series should have twenty-six episodes as opposed to the twenty-two episodes then standard in the industry.18 Despite the fact that those extra four episodes were a “killer” in terms of the demands made upon the production staff’s time and energy, and despite the fact that he had “complained and complained,” Braga said, “I’m just told, ‘Here’s your order, do the shows.’” In this instance he saw himself as a subordinate in the production process, his creative autonomy curtailed by the studio and network: “I’m just a writer man. I just come in and do my job.” Peter Lauritson, who had advanced from associate producer on TNG to supervising producer for postproduction on Enterprise, generally delighted in the freedom from network control that Star Trek had enjoyed since TNG. Before TNG, he had worked in postproduction on Paramount shows distributed by one of the big three networks such as Happy Days (ABC, 1974– 84). But when he entered the “syndication world” of Star Trek, “we got to call the shots a little more. We got a little more leeway in being able to [make the show] without too much interference.” But, despite what McCluggage told us, UPN seems occasionally to have interfered in the Enterprise production process, as intercultural and socioprofessional contestation between network and studio played out. “What makes my life miserable is when the network doesn’t give us adequate time to complete an episode,” Lauritson told us. This occurred when UPN executives sought episodes that they believed would perform well during the “sweeps” period (the months of November, February, May, and July, when the audience-measurement company Nielsen compiles the data from 2 million paper diaries kept by households across the country). “[Network executives] are looking at a list of episodes and they say, ‘This is the episode that has to air during the sweeps period,’ ” even if that particular episode was not scheduled to air until after the sweeps period. But Lauritson had to do as much as he possibly could “to give them what they would like.” That might entail finishing an episode in half the time usually accorded to postproduction, which annoyed Lauritson, “because that show is not going to get what it needs and it deserves to be what it could have been. It’s no fun to put out something that you’re not really satisfied with.” For the studio, the episode had commercial value because it resulted in higher ratings and higher advertising revenues. But for Lauritson it lacked artistic value because it fell

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short of his high professional standards: “You feel you should be able to do the best job you can.”19 Banks says that “artistic desires for creative autonomy and independence” will always exist “in uneasy tension with capitalist imperatives of profitgeneration and controlled accumulation.”20 Despite the relative degree of creative freedom allowed by the studio and network, capitalist imperatives sometimes prevailed over autonomy; Enterprise had to have twenty-six episodes, and those episodes had to be aired in the network’s preferred order. But for the most part, managers such as McCluggage and Berman actively facilitated and protected the individual agency of their workers. It was in their best interests to do so, for, as Banks also tells us, “[c]apitalism must offer creative workers some degree of ‘space’ and autonomy in order to spark ideas; otherwise there can be no new cultural production of any real value—merely standard reproductions of the same generic formats, openly subject to diminishing returns.”21 In the television industry, these standard reproductions might take the form of what McCluggage called “a show put together by a committee,” one that lacks a distinct point of view. Producing any television show requires the collaboration of numerous workers; producing a television show with a distinct point of view requires the ideas of the talented individuals within the collaborative process. These talented individuals are attracted to television production precisely because it can afford opportunities for their creative input. As Jim McGuigan says, “[T]he motivation for engaging in cultural work is quite likely to be some expectation of favourable opportunity for connecting conception and execution, the accomplishment of something like non-alienated work.”22 While in some instances, as with Lauritson and the sweeps episodes, our interviewees may have felt alienated, generally they conveyed satisfaction with the degree of autonomy they were accorded and believed that their work and ideas helped to shape the final product. Crucially, however, the extent to which this shaping occurred varied from individual to individual. Hesmondhalgh and Baker point out that “an important ‘intermediate’ level, between the subjective experience of workers and the historical and systemic forces structuring those experiences . . . is that of the organization: of how work in the cultural industries is managed, coordinated and divided.”23 This management, coordination, and division results in workplace organization that privileges the autonomy of some workers over that of others: “The input of different groups of workers into ‘creative’ outputs varies and . . . this variety can be the source of important hierarchies and distinctions in cultural production”24 These hierarchies and distinctions lead in turn to the unequal distribution of power and

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prestige “between different creative workers within the same media organization.”25 Robert Blackman, costume designer on Enterprise and on the previous post-TOS series, told us that he considered his staff—“those people who sew the costumes”—to be “artists,” not “artisans.”26 But the constituent material practices in which workplace distinctions and hierarchies are embodied defined the women (and they were all women) as craft workers—artisans, not artists—and defined Blackman the same way.27 The authors of Global Hollywood 2 explain that “Hollywood distinguishes between ‘above-theline’ and ‘below-the-line’ costs. The former lies within the key sector of budgets and includes supposedly ‘proactive’ workers such as writers, producers, stars and directors, while the latter term covers ‘reactive’ workers, or proletarians such as make up artists, carpenters, costumiers, set designers and electricians.”28 This distinction has a profound impact upon individual workers’ creative autonomy. As a general rule, those considered artists have greater autonomy than those considered craft workers. This is because, as Banks argues, “[i]n the creative industries, artistic labour has a high status, and is valorised as the primary source of creativity, ‘genius’ and aesthetic value.” By contrast, “The craft worker . . . is a mere producer and inhabits only a mundane world of tools and technique.” For these reasons, “artists are actually more autonomous since their ability to resist the incursions of rationality and managerialism in the day-to-day practices of work are more pronounced and protected.” Some craft workers, however, have grounds for claiming an autonomy equal to that of the artists. As Banks puts it: “The defence of the artist against rational management (‘I am original’, ‘my art is inimitable’, ‘you cannot tame creativity’, etc.) is unavailable to all but the most skilled craft workers whose talents are recognised as unique or commensurate with non-replicable elements of artistic labour.”29 While Blackman’s costumiers were replicable elements, Blackman himself was not; he, like many of our other below-the-line interviewees, had a unique talent and could claim artistic status. Despite the fact that the industry did not recognize them as such, many of our craft-worker interviewees unselfconsciously referred to themselves as artists. For example, Dan Curry, visual-effects supervisor on the post-TOS series, told us, “[M]y interest as an artist matches my interest as a filmmaker, in that, instead of just mimicking reality, you can create realities that are convincing that can only exist in the medium, be it painting or be it movies.” Curry had been fascinated by science fiction and visual effects since childhood, when he used an optical printer to make a film in which it appeared that dinosaurs were chasing

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his brother.30 By contrast, Michael Westmore, supervising makeup designer on the post-TOS series, had little interest in and relatively little experience with the science fiction genre prior to Star Trek. But he told us that working in the genre didn’t pose problems for him, because the job was basically the same: to “come up with the ideas. I’ve always been an artist and I’ve always done makeup. It was just a matter of switching gears from doing old-age makeups and fight makeups to fantasy and aliens.”31 Self-ascription of artistic status was undoubtedly empowering, but even more empowering was the recognition of that status by others. Graphic designer Michael Okuda was responsible for “the control panels, the alien signage, some technical detailing on the props, as well as the video and computer displays on the set.” He also acted as a consultant to the writing staff, helping to maintain the “scientific” and technical consistency of the show’s visuals and storylines. He pointed out that “one of the reasons that producers hire artists is, they have a sense of what they want to accomplish but they don’t necessarily know how to do that. So it’s our job to say, ‘Well, we can do it like this or we can do it like this.’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I kind of like that, why don’t you try that.’ ”32 The specialized division of labor characteristic of the creative industries can enable the creative autonomy of the craft workers, at least in the minds of producers clever enough to know what they don’t know how to do. Another characteristic of the creative industries—professionalization— can also augment the craft workers’ creative autonomy. Many of our interviewees derived cultural capital from extensive professional training and experience in their chosen fields. This served both as a source of creative inspiration and as a reinforcement of their credibility with the producers. Curry has degrees in fine arts and theater, and both Zimmerman and Blackman have degrees in theater, Blackman both from the University of Texas and the Yale School of Drama; the latter two also worked in the theater prior to entering the screen industries. Blackman’s background was in classical theater, “tons of Shakespeare.” He drew a connection between his theatrical work and his current job: “It’s like doing Elizabethan doublets and dance wear. Both of which I’ve done. So it’s just combining those together in another thing.” He had a pragmatic, but at the same time historically informed, approach to clothing the actors: I think all good designers have a certain kind of cultural anthropological edge to them. One of the things that I think Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] really appreciate about what I’ve been doing, and where I think my strength is, is I keep saying, no, Enterprise is only 150 years from now. So if we think that in 1420 the button was invented,

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it’s now 2001—the zipper’s going to be gone in our space suits? No. Our space suits should have thirteen zippers, which is what they have.

In this case, Blackman’s cultural capital enhanced his creative autonomy with the producers, who accepted his argument that the uniforms for Enterprise should not be as streamlined as those on TNG, DS9, and Voyager—all set in the twenty-fourth century. In fact, when discussing Enterprise with us, Rick Berman specifically mentioned “creating costumes that were made out of denim and had zippers on them.” Zimmerman had a similarly culturally informed approach to set design: You design the future by looking at the present. You design the future by telling yourself what is probably not going to change. Even a thousand years from now, we’ll still have two eyes, two ears, hands, and feet. Have to sleep, have to eat. Tables and chairs, for instance. The proportions of those things we use every day are going to remain the same, and have remained the same since recorded history, so you can hang your design hat on things that are stable, rock-solid ideas that aren’t likely to change.

One source of those rock-solid ideas were the books on contemporary European, Asian, Soviet, and postmodern architects, Art Deco design, and the works of Sir Norman Foster that lined his office shelves. Zimmerman posited a standard aesthetic source for science fiction imagery, which he and his fellow designers drew on: “A lot of science fiction ends up being kind of vaguely Romanesque, or vaguely Art Deco, or vaguely Egyptian or whatever, and that’s intentional, I think. The trick is to cobble together things from different periods and make it seem like it’s new. But it only works for the audience if they can find something familiar, even if it’s supposed to be four hundred years in the future.” As was the case with Blackman’s zippers, Zimmerman’s cultural capital came into play in his interactions with the producers. How, for instance, did he set about designing the B’aku village for the ninth Star Trek film, Insurrection (1998)? “Rick Berman came in one day with a magazine that had a cover that had a photograph of the facade of a hotel in Bali, and he said he liked it. I thought I would see if we could incorporate it in some way. That photo was the inspiration for the village sets. We were going for a Pacific Rim architecture.” Thus it was that Zimmerman’s professional skills and cultural capital—in this case, his knowledge of global architectural styles— enabled him to render Berman’s idea into material practice.33 The craft workers whom we interviewed were at the pinnacle of their professions and were granted a large degree of creative autonomy despite

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their official below-the-line status. Nonetheless, they were positioned as less important than the above-the-line producers and the writers. As we show in the following chapter, they accepted this positioning, seeing their primary responsibility as bringing the writers’ words to the screen under the leadership of producers Berman, Lauritson, and Merri Howard. But the constituent material practices, together with the articulation of these practices in industry discourse, impose hierarchies and resultant relative degrees of creative autonomy upon the above-the-line writers and producers as well as upon the below-the-line craft workers. The producers’ and writers’ hierarchies are articulated in the discursive constructions of their respective professional guilds: the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Producers Guild of America (PGA). The WGA website has a helpful guide for aspiring and practicing television writers, “Writing for Episodic TV: From Freelancer to Showrunner.” The document delineates the titles, responsibilities, and rights accorded to each step of the professional ladder, from lowly freelancer to entry-level staff writer to mighty showrunner, although it notes that titles “by themselves have become a notoriously poor guide to who actually does what on a television show” and can vary from show to show. The document does, however, make clear throughout that the showrunner, the executive producer, has the greatest control over the day-to-day production process and thus over the final product: “It is not unusual on an hour drama . . . for virtually all story editing and producer responsibilities (e.g., giving script notes, doing rewrites, handling budget, casting, studio and network discussions, on-set crises, post- production, etc.) to be tightly held by the showrunner with little delegation.”34 With some shows, the showrunner is also a writer and does undertake all story editing and producer responsibilities. On Star Trek, Berman, who came from a producing rather than a writing background, delegated writingrelated tasks to head writers such as Michael Piller and Brannon Braga, upon whom the studio bestowed the coveted executive producer title (although, as we discuss in the next chapter, Berman exercised ultimate authority over every step of the production process, including the writing). Like its WGA counterpart, the PGA website includes a document that sets out the hierarchy of titles and responsibilities, “Code of Credits— Long-Form Television—Credit Guidelines.” Once again, the showrunner, the executive producer, stands at the top of the ladder, having “final responsibility for all business and creative aspects of the production of the longform television program, with direct participation in making decisions concerning a majority of the producing functions.”35 Next in order of authority are the co–executive producer, the supervising producer, and so on down to

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the associate producer, who, at the bottom of the ladder, “is responsible for performing one or more functions delegated to him/her by the Executive Producer, Co-Executive Producer, Supervising Producer, Producer, ‘Produced by,’ or the Production Manager.”36 Wherever they were placed in the hierarchies of constituent material practices and industry discourse, all our interviewees, from executive producers to below-the-line craft workers, expressed pride in having, in one form or another, made an individual contribution to Star Trek. Inevitably, however, the extent and impact of those contributions correlated with the individual’s position in the hierarchy. Michael Piller, as executive producer on TNG, DS9, and Voyager, topped the Star Trek hierarchy together with Berman; it was Piller’s head-writer stint on TNG that may have saved the show from an early demise. TNG had struggled to find its way in its first two seasons because of conflict and turnover in the writing staff. Early in the third season, Piller signed on first as a writer and then as co–executive producer and head writer. From that moment the show transformed from a retread of TOS to, in McCluggage’s phrase, a show with a distinct point of view, more centered on character development and dilemmas. Many attribute this transformation to Piller’s ability to mold the writers into a strong and cohesive team as well as to recruit new talent:37 Piller told us, “One of the most rewarding aspects of TNG was to see that people actually did like what I wanted that show to be, and I had made a substantial investment in new directions and new challenges. And year three, my first year— that changed the direction of the show, and audiences came.” Piller’s impact depended not only on his position at the top of the hierarchy but upon the abilities that he brought to the role. As the WGA points out, “Managing writers is a different discipline than banging out a script on your own. There is no inherent correlation between literary and managerial skills. Television writers are initially promoted on the strength of their writing, with virtually no regard to their ability to supervise the work of others.”38 Luckily for Star Trek, Piller turned out to be very good at supervising the work of others; unluckily for Star Trek, as we suggest in the following chapter, not all of his successors had this ability to the same degree. While Piller exercised his creative autonomy to improve Star Trek’s storytelling, producer Peter Lauritson exercised his to improve Star Trek’s visual effects. He joined the TNG production staff because he saw an opportunity to “do Star Trek right.” He had been working as supervisor of television postproduction at the Paramount studio when he became involved in some of the preproduction planning for TNG in 1986. Lauritson was familiar with the problems that the TOS production staff had faced two decades

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earlier when visual effects demanded more time and money than normally available to a weekly television show: “One of the major difficulties of the original Star Trek was that they could never do as many visual effects as they wanted to do. They had every optical house in town working on the shots, and it cost too much money and the schedule was too tight. I saw that the technology was just becoming available to make that work.” The new technology was shooting on film and transferring to video—a process that streamlined postproduction editing and sound editing but that, most important for Lauritson, meant that “with visual effects, you could do more for less money.” Realizing that film-to-video transfer would enable TNG to far surpass TOS’s visual effects, Lauritson told Robert Justman that he’d “really like to help out on this.” Elsewhere in the hierarchy, craft workers Okuda and set decorator Jim Mees expressed the same pride and satisfaction in their work as Piller and Lauritson, but made more limited claims for their impact. Like Lauritson, Okuda saw in TNG an opportunity to build on the look of TOS and pay homage to the designs of his “personal hero,” Matt Jefferies: I’m proud of the instrumentation style for TNG—not because I think that’s what the technology’s going to be like in the twenty-fourth century. I haven’t a clue what technology’s going to be like in the twenty-fourth century. But what I did, and this is emulating what [TOS designer] Matt Jefferies did in 1964,39 is to say I’m going to pick a particular style and them I’m going to shape that style based on what we can afford to do on a particular basis. The convention of those Plexiglas panels with those backlights—that’s arbitrarily our twentyfourth century. Matt Jefferies did it brilliantly in the original Star Trek.

Mees told us, “I’ve had a great life with Star Trek.” He had been an art director but found a greater outlet for his creativity in being a set decorator: “I define the art director and the set decorator as the cake baker and the icer. I ice the cake. You can have a crappy cake, but I can make it look really good. I pick fabrics. I pick furniture. And I also help develop the characters’ rooms, their spaces, by picking the types of objects that are in the room, and the plants, and how they interact with the characters.”40 Okuda and Mees believed—as did Blackman and Zimmerman and, indeed, most of those whom we interviewed—that their creative choices mattered, and that without their input, Star Trek would have been different and perhaps not so distinctive. Wherever they were placed in the production hierarchies, the creative autonomy of all the Star Trek workers was stimulated by their employment stability, an increasingly rare factor not only in the television industry, but

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in the creative industries generally. As those writing about the creative industries have argued, the historical shift in the logic of capitalism to the system now commonly referred to as neoliberalism had profound consequences for workers’ conditions of employment. Jim McGuigan refers to the crisis of organized capitalism or “Fordism” during the 1970s, which “called into question . . . its organisational inefficiency and costs, especially labour costs.” The post-Fordist, neoliberal system of organization that emerged from the crisis “is characterised by the disaggregation of vertically integrated major corporations, outsourcing, reduction in the social wage. . . . The balance of power in the labour bargain between capital and labour shifted inexorably from the latter to the former and working life became much less secure and more precarious.”41 Creative-industry scholars commonly refer to the lack of security as precarity. Hesmondhalgh and Baker say that precarity is a term “used to refer to many different forms of ‘flexible exploitation,’ including illegal, seasonal and temporary employment; homeworking, subcontracting and freelancing; and so-called selfemployment.”42 In strong contrast to the historical screen industries, precarity is the determining condition of employment in their present-day counterparts. Job security, in the form of long-term contracts with a particular employer, had characterized both the classic Hollywood cinema and the classic network era. As Caldwell says, during these periods “workers were parts of highly institutionalized . . . communities,” but the breakup of the studio system and the disappearance of network oligopoly led to “employee churn.”43 Today, as the authors of Global Hollywood 2 argue, screen workers have become freelancers or casualized labor rather than company employees, and work is organized on a project-by-project basis, with jobs constantly starting and ending.44 If they are lucky enough to find consistent employment by migrating from project to project, most workers still face the prospect of long working hours for relatively little remuneration. Precarity structures the careers of those both above the line and below the line; writers experience no more security than set decorators. According to Denise and William Bielby, “Hollywood writers are usually paid by large multinational corporations like Disney, AOL Time Warner, and Sony, but they sustain their careers by moving from one film or television project to the next, with no permanent attachment to any particular employer.” The most successful writers go on to ever-bigger projects and ever-larger fees, but they are in a very small minority: “Writing in Hollywood is highly lucrative for a tiny elite, but even modest success is elusive for most.”45 The writers to whom we spoke were lucky to be members of this tiny elite;

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indeed, all our interviewees back in 2002 were part of a tiny elite of securely employed and well-paid workers in the Hollywood system (although many of our interviewees spoke of the long and grueling hours that were a necessary condition of turning out a weekly television program). They had escaped precarity through what Deuze calls the “quite predictable” production process of “popular franchises and series” made “with crews consisting of more or less the same team members”46—in other words, through employment conditions that resembled those of the Fordism of the classical Hollywood and classic network periods. Once again, Star Trek exhibits its combination of typicality and atypicality: typical of long-form television drama in the predictable production process and in its crew consisting of more or less the same team members; fairly atypical in that some of these team members had been part of the predictable production process over eighteen years of continuous production, from TNG to Enterprise.47 We say “fairly atypical” because other shows of the multichannel era, such as Law and Order (NBC, 1990–2010) and ER (NBC, 1994–2009), had long runs; the former, like Star Trek, spawned a franchise. We return to this point in the next section. Our interviewees were well aware of being highly privileged relative to their counterparts elsewhere in the industry. A sense of being part of a permanent and durable cultural product is reflected in many of their comments, as is the realization that their circumstances were atypical. For example, director Winrich Kolbe pointed out the intrinsic relationship between what seemed at the time to be the institutional stability of the Star Trek deal and personal security: “It’s the only safe thing in the industry. I mean, there’s no other show that is being booked for seven years. It’s almost like a pension plan.”48 Working on Star Trek, as Zimmerman put it, was “like having a guarantee, as much of a guarantee as there is in show business, of a steady job.” So convinced by this guarantee was construction coordinator Tom Arp that he decided to continue with Enterprise rather than accede to Zimmerman’s request that he work on the tenth Star Trek feature film, Nemesis (2002). With an eighteen-month-old son to support, he chose the security of the television show.49 Ironically, Enterprise was canceled in 2005, becoming the first of the post-TOS series to last less than seven years and bringing to a halt the eighteen years of continuous production. However, when we spoke to Arp and the rest of our interviewees in 2002, Enterprise’s cancelation was in the future, and the expectation of job security enhanced their sense of creative autonomy. As the next chapter argues, the continuous, long-term employment of the workers also fed into the creative process through facilitating cooperation among them.

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time and budget constraints: “a tiger by the tail” Herman Zimmerman told us that in all the post-TOS series, “[w]e had a tiger by the tail. You always do on a television series—trying to make a quality product with the pressures of budget and time.” In Zimmerman’s formulation of the interactions among time, budget, and quality, commerce molds art, but not completely. The ultimate goal of the production staff was a quality product, one that accorded with the high professional standards our interviewees repeatedly articulated. To paraphrase Lauritson, they all wanted to do the best job they could. This interplay between art and commerce typifies long-form television from the classic network era to the postnetwork era, and that interplay in the making of post-TOS Star Trek is the subject of this section. William Shatner, whose experience of television encompassed not only TOS but also the title role in T. J. Hooker (ABC, 1982–86) as well as many guest appearances on other series, told us how time pressures limit artistic impulses: “Television is no time for frills, for fancy, indulgent artwork. If you are going to be artistic, you have to be immediately artistic, you have to be the kind of painter that throws paint at the canvas and not contemplate the composition, and the color combination and the texture. You have to go entirely by instinct, and you’re spraying paint around, and you’re doing van Gogh, and not Monet, and that’s television.”50 The post-TOS Star Trek episodes were shot in seven or eight days, with one episode following another in rapid succession. Said Zimmerman: “When you finish episode six on Wednesday, you start episode seven the next day on Thursday. We don’t usually work Saturdays and Sundays, thank goodness, but it is a demanding schedule; and keeping the stories new, the environments different, week in and week out is a challenge.” Braga, who of all our interviewees seemed to feel the time pressures most severely, complained that the time allotted for shooting was “ludicrously short for a show of this magnitude”—another instance of the studio and network making what he perceived as unreasonable demands upon the workforce. Braga said that the myriad responsibilities of the executive producer role made it difficult for him to find time to write scripts: “It’s very difficult to do when the phone is ringing every ten minutes, or there’s a crisis on the stage, or I have to go to a meeting, so I need to schedule my time very, very well, which I don’t do well to begin with. I’m not as organized as I should be. So I usually end up writing a scene when I have a free hour.”

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Michael Westmore told us that television demands that you “churn things out as fast as you can,” giving as an example the process of making the alien prosthetics required in almost every episode. “We have these light cookie ovens and they have gone round the clock. They’re cooking all the time. They’ve got a twenty-year guarantee, and they just keep cooking.” Although the prosthetics were in continual production, there were many times that “pieces [were] coming out of the oven the night before the actor walked in, maybe eight hours, nine hours later.” Tom Arp said that “time is usually our biggest enemy”; the short time allotted to build the sets for the next episode inevitably had an impact on the construction crew’s efficiency, which in turn had an impact on the budget: On a feature film you put three or four guys to work on a set for three weeks, and they’re going to do a really great job, and your man-hours are way lower. I have to build that same set in three or four days. So instead of three or four guys, I have to put ten guys on it. So your manhours are ultimately the same, but your efficiency level goes way down. Doing something that’s a one-person job for eight hours, if you put eight people on it, are you going to get it done in one hour? It doesn’t work that way. And that’s why a lot of times the cost goes up in episodic television—because of the time and the schedule.

The cost might go up for a particular episode, but the overspending would have to be balanced by a less expensive episode. Kerry McCluggage explained the studio’s budgeting practices: We set what they call a “pattern budget” for an episode. I’ll make it up, but let’s say it was 2.4 million dollars per episode. The producers will do an episode that’s 2.8 million dollars, and then, somewhere down the line, they’ll do one that’s 2.2. And variations in between. So we allow them the flexibility to figure that out among themselves—where they want to spend their money, on what episodes, and is it worth spending a little more here, and maybe save a little bit somewhere else.

The studio allowed the producers a great deal of freedom within the pattern budget: “They’re really great producers, and they’re on a very, very long rope to make those decisions themselves, and they’ve been very responsible about it.”51 Producer Merri Howard had the primary responsibility for administering the pattern budget: “The studio gives us x amount of dollars. They want us to go ahead and produce the shows based on coming as close to zero as possible at the end of the year. They know that we might have certain shows that we spend more money on because those are going to be our sweep shows, but the next script will have to save the money.”52

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The producers had to devise a rough plan for each season that accounted for the variations in expense among the episodes. Ron Moore, who began his Star Trek career as a freelancer and ended it with a brief stint as co– executive producer on Voyager, described how the pattern budget required trade-offs between different elements of storytelling: On TNG or DS9 you knew that action costs money. The big expenses were set construction, makeup, and visual effects. So if you’re off on an alien planet, that’s an expensive show. If you’re on the station, and characters are coming to you, now you can do more stuff. You can have more special effects, because you’re not building sets. You just got familiar with the buying and trading within the confines of the episode. As you were developing the season, you would look ahead and say, “OK, this is going to be a heavy show, there’s going to be a lot of money for this episode. And I’m going to need a cheap show on episode four to make up the deficit.” Because you had a pattern budget for each episode, and you had a pattern budget for the course of the year. And what really mattered was being on budget by the end of the year. We did it every year.

He confirmed McCluggage’s statement about the producers being on a very long rope: “The studio was pretty easy about going up here and then down here as long as it kind of evened out by the end of the year.”53 Dan Curry told us that visual effects often cost more than originally budgeted for. (Presumably it was the other departments’ budgets that suffered as a result.) The quantity of visual effects varies from episode to episode, depending on what the writers need to tell the story. Some episodes don’t have very many visual effects because they are character-driven stories. But if it’s an effects-driven story, we can have well over three hundred effects shots in a single episode. So we have a generic average pattern budget that we try to work with, but we hardly ever have a show that conforms to the pattern in that budget. Our final budget is either more or less, and usually it’s more.

Michael Westmore, too, spoke of working within the pattern budget: If there’s only one alien [in an episode], we can always go overboard because we have more time to really put into one individual look. But if in the next show coming up there are going to be twenty-four aliens, you have budget problems. If you do something big and elaborate, I’m going to need twenty-four makeup artists to apply them. So to keep budgets in line, usually whenever the number of aliens grows, the appliances become simpler—a different type of nose piece or forehead.

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Moore, Westmore, and Curry accepted budgetary trade-offs as a necessary condition of series television rather than seeing them as an irksome restraint. We suggested to Rick Berman that his role as intermediary between the studio and the production staff entailed a constant tension between the desire to make a quality product and the requirement to conform to time and budget limitations. He replied: “There’s something very challenging about being able to get something done in a limited time and turning out good television for a limited budget. Our budgets are very handsome as budgets go, and we’ve always been good at, at least at the end of season, coming in on budget. There’ll be a lot of episodes that’ll be over budget, but others that will be under. But there’s not a lot of tension and pressure.” Ron Moore told us about successfully meeting the challenge of turning out good television with a limited budget in the DS9 episode “Waltz” (6:11) and with limited time in the TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (3:15). “Waltz” was what the television industry terms a “bottle show”; such shows had been a regular feature of Star Trek since TOS. Robert Justman said that although NBC wanted the Enterprise to visit a new planet in each episode, the producers could not accomplish this within the limits of the pattern budget: “We consciously alternated planet shows with ship shows. Most other series called them ‘bottle shows,’ but regardless of what they were called, their purpose was the same: to save money by ‘bottling up’ the action.” This bottling up entailed few new sets, no expensive locations or equipment, no more than a few additional actors in addition to the regular cast, and limited effects. Despite the lack of aliens and alien planets, “many Star Trek bottle shows were enormously compelling, as indicated by both fan reaction and the ratings.”54 The compelling nature of the bottle show derives from a sustained focus on the characters and their interactions; “Waltz” concentrated on a wounded Captain Sisko and his long-term adversary, Cardassian Gul Dukat, stranded together in a cave. Moore described “Waltz” as just a two-man play. You have two characters, and it was about a psychological battle of wills. Sometimes that constraint of not having a lot of money makes you work harder as a writer to make it interesting. It’s like writing a play. You go deeper into the characters and a psychological battle back and forth. That’s a different sort of show than when you’ve got a lot of money and you’re doing a big battle show, with lots of special effects, and you’ve got spaceships flying back and forth and explosions and run-and-jump.

In “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” a fan favorite often included in lists of topten TNG episodes,55 a breach of the temporal-spatial continuum results in

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an alternate time line in which the Federation is on the brink of defeat in a long-running war with the Klingons, and Captain Picard and the crew must restore the status quo. The episode could have been a disaster, since Moore and the other writers (Ira Steven Behr, Richard Manning, and Hans Beimler) had to write a tricky temporal-paradox script very quickly to keep up with the production schedule. Moore recalled, We were behind, way behind. We wrote it over Thanksgiving break holiday. We were in here [at the studio] and Paramount was deserted, and the writing team was in and we were each writing an act and sewing them together. It didn’t make any sense. We didn’t understand it. At the time, we were convinced that it was just awful and it was never going to work. We hated it. And then it turned into this great show. So you never know.

The occasional weak episode is an inevitable consequence of series television. It’s almost impossible to maintain consistently high quality over the course of, in Star Trek’s case, twenty-six episodes, and fans delight in compiling lists of the worst episodes almost as much as they do in compiling lists of the best. But, as with “Waltz” and “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the writers often turned out good television not despite but because of the limited money and time accorded them. All our interviewees endeavored to make the quality product of which Zimmerman spoke, one that met their professional standards and those of their colleagues. They were privileged workers in the creative industries, able to connect conception and execution and accomplish nonalienated work in the form of a product that reflected their ideas and input. Time and budget limitations both constrained and enabled the creative autonomy of the Star Trek workers in the balance between art and commerce that typifies long-form television drama. The final sections of this chapter explore the atypical constraints and enablers of the Star Trek storyworld and the Roddenberry legacy.

the star trek storyworld: “we work within the universe” All long-form television drama has to balance storyworld continuity and change; the storyworld must be consistent enough to keep viewers watching from episode to episode, but it must not become so predictable that viewers lose interest. The longer a program runs, the harder it is to preserve this balance; scripts become more predictable as the writers inevitably run out of new ideas, while the turnover of production staff and cast members militates against consistency. For example, despite the fact that only one

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character from the first season of ER remained by the fifteenth season, that season still had to take place in a storyworld recognizable to loyal viewers who had followed the show from the beginning.56 Continuity was maintained by the series’s format—the professional and personal lives of doctors and nurses positioned differently within the hospital hierarchy—and by the series’s setting in the familiar environs of the real Chicago and the fictional County General Hospital. In the process of a long run, CSI (CBS, 2000 to the present) and Law and Order (NBC, 1990–2010) gave rise to spin-off shows that posed a greater continuity challenge by transferring the series’ format to a different setting and enacting it with a different cast. But the formulaic formats (a team of crime-scene investigators, the investigation and prosecution of a crime) and similar settings (contemporary American cities) helped incorporate the sequels into the broader CSI or Law and Order storyworld. The format of space exploration and the setting in the future made sustaining the balance between continuity and change more difficult for Star Trek spin-offs. Kerry McCluggage told us, “The guys that do Star Trek, as we create each new series, they have two masters they have to serve. One is that they have to make a show that is recognizable and compatible and within the boundaries of what our audiences have come to know as Star Trek. And yet they have to make it different. It can’t just be a regurgitation of the same stories and characters.” TNG reprised TOS’s format of boldly going, but updated the setting to the twenty-fourth century. Subsequent series rang changes upon both format and setting. DS9 and Voyager both varied the format as a result of varying the setting: based on a stationary space station, DS9 initially focused more on the conflicts among the space station’s inhabitants than it did on exploration, while Voyager, set in the unfamiliar quadrant of the galaxy in which the ship had been stranded, centered on the crew’s efforts to get home. Enterprise was created in 2001 to reinvigorate a faltering franchise; DS9 and Voyager had not delivered the hoped-for ratings, while the feature film Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) had performed disappointingly both critically and at the box office. Seeking to reengage old audiences and attract new ones, the producers of Enterprise decided to return to the TOS format of space exploration, but to set the show prior to TOS, in the twentysecond century. But the post-TOS variations in format and settings could not, in McCluggage’s phrase, go beyond the boundaries of what audiences recognized as Star Trek. Whether focusing on exploration, conflict, or returning home, the format had to retain the established conventions of the Federation, the Prime Directive, familiar alien species, and so on. And

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whether taking place in the twenty-second or twenty-fourth century, the design elements—the ships, the equipment, the graphics—had to have a family resemblance. The greatest continuity challenge, however, was a narrative one. The five Star Trek series spanned a fictional time of four centuries; each post-TOS series faced the unprecedented task of building a distinctive storyworld that nonetheless had to accord with events that had taken place in the fictional past or were to take place in the fictional future. The three programs set in the twenty-fourth century had to acknowledge the events of the twenty-third century, while Enterprise had to foreshadow these events. Taken together, balancing continuity and change across the four postTOS series’ formats, settings, and narrative posed greater constraints upon—yet provided more opportunities for—creative autonomy than was the case with long-running shows such as ER, CSI, and Law and Order. McCluggage told us about creative decisions that shaped the integration of each of the post-TNG series into the Star Trek storyworld. While DS9’s failure to perform as well as TNG in the ratings stemmed in part from the audience fragmentation of the multichannel era, he believed that the format change may also have been a factor. Thinking that the “lack of exploration” was leading to audience dissatisfaction, the producers returned to some extent to the TOS and TNG formats. The wormhole introduced in the series premiere became more prominent in the scripts, and the characters began exploring the unfamiliar quadrant of the galaxy to which it led. As McCluggage explained to us, Voyager’s departure from the exploration format also posed problems: “This was a ship that was thrown into an entirely different quadrant, was trying to get home, and could not rely on the Federation for support. This caused some of the crew and the characters to be looking backwards instead of looking forwards. And the producers tried to deal with that over the life of the show, and I think successfully.” McCluggage spoke at length about the creative thinking behind Enterprise, which the producers intended to be a “return to the values that were inherent in the original Star Trek and also in The Next Generation.” TOS was a particularly important inspiration, not only in the emphasis “on exploration, pure and simple” but also in “the design of the captain” and the focus upon “three primary characters.” Like Kirk and unlike his more buttoned-up successors, Captain Jonathan Archer was meant to be available for romantic adventures. And, unlike TNG, DS9, and Voyager, which featured “a crew of seven,” Enterprise “shone the primary spotlight on the troika of characters”: the captain; Vulcan female T’pol (like Spock, science officer and second in command); and Trip, the engineer and chief confidant

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of Archer. But while the format and characters were a deliberate return to TOS, Enterprise was also specifically “designed to invite an audience in that didn’t know anything about the Star Trek saga.” Braga, like McCluggage, emphasized the need to reach out to new viewers. He agreed with us that the appearance of Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive, in the Enterprise pilot was “a great moment for the fans.” Nonetheless, he said, “[y]ou have to make sure that people who didn’t know Cochrane have some sense of who he was in the pilot. You have to make sure that it’s not alienating to people who might be sampling the show for the first time. Because for every hard-core, long-term fan, there’s a new fan waiting to come out, and that’s really what we want.” Although Braga, among all our interviewees, expressed the most dissatisfaction with the studio’s creative constraints, in this instance he and McCluggage spoke with one voice; they knew that Enterprise had to attract new audiences for Star Trek television to survive. Judging by Enterprise’s disappointing ratings, the new fans did not come out, and, worse yet, many hardcore fans—including, it must be said, the authors—lost interest. But if the prospect of returning to the TOS format and changing the setting to the twenty-third century did not excite the audiences, it did stimulate the producers, who had begun to suffer from the idea fatigue common to long-running programs—in other words, from the now overfamiliar storyworld imposing limits on creative autonomy. “The twenty-fourth century was becoming stale,” said Braga. “After three TV shows, each of seven years, taking place in the same century, in the same politics, and in the same area, it was time for a change.” But that change involved a tussle over creative autonomy between Berman and Paramount. When Paramount asked Berman to do a new series, he told them that “the only way I would be willing to do it would be if it was something dramatically different.” That something dramatically different would be a TOS prequel that afforded the opportunity to “truly go back to where no man had gone before,” to fill in the years between the apocalyptic twenty-first century Earth of the feature film First Contact (1996) and the perfect utopian Earth of TOS. It also meant “creating characters that were closer in time to the present, and because of that they could be a little bit more believable, they could be a little more scared, a little bit more excited— not take it all for granted, as the Picards and the Kirks perhaps did.” Berman thought that this was “the right idea,” but the studio disagreed, wanting the new series to go farther forward in time.57 Socioprofessional contestation between Berman and his employers ensued. When Berman made it clear that he was “not interested in doing anything other than

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going backwards [in time],” the studio “spent about a year discussing it among themselves, and then they decided to research it.” In an unusual procedure that attested to Star Trek’s economic importance to Paramount, the studio produced three animated videos, one based on Berman’s idea and the other two based on “dreadful ideas” from “people in the executive offices.” Berman described what happened when the three “extremely silly” videos were screened for a focus group: “They [the studio executives] actually asked me to sit next to them, which was kind of like asking you to sharpen the blade that they’re going to cut your hand off with. It took months for the reports [on the focus groups] to get written and analyzed, and the final answer was that people seemed to be certainly as happy, or more happy, with our idea than the other two. That, combined with my stubbornness and tenacity, made the studio finally roll over and say, ‘OK, go ahead.’ ” At this point, McCluggage had a number of meetings with Berman and Braga “because he wanted to get involved in the initial creative stages,” Berman told us. We asked him whether it was unusual for studio executives to intervene in the development process to this extent, and he replied, “It’s not unusual for studio execs—it is unusual for the chairman of the company.” Like the videos, McCluggage’s presence attested to Paramount’s firm resolve that the next iteration of Star Trek television jump-start the failing franchise. But in stark contrast to Gitlin’s network executives, who didn’t care enough to make good television, the chairman of the company made some key contributions. It was McCluggage’s idea to incorporate “some distant future characters” from the twenty-ninth century, and it was he who persuaded Scott Bakula to take the Captain Archer role. Yet, even with McCluggage’s involvement in the development process, Berman had won the battle over creative autonomy, and he, together with his colleagues, reaped the rewards. He said that creating a show that “was different, was fresh” was “a great thrill. . . . I [was] more involved in the writing and more involved emotionally in this series than in any other series.” Part of the thrill derived from designing the twenty-second-century setting, in real-world time, 150 years in the future, but in fictional time, several decades before the TOS’s twenty-third century. To complicate matters further, the representation of “future” technology in TOS and even its successors seemed outdated by twenty-first-century standards. Said Berman: “You want things that are more modern than today but are less modern than Captain Janeway [in Voyager]. It seems simple; then you realize that the computer sitting on my desk is thinner and more modern than the one that’s sitting on Janeway’s desk. So how do I make something more modern

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than that when that already is more modern than Janeway’s?” The producers dealt with the challenge in part by basing the look of the new Enterprise upon contemporary military hardware. McCluggage told us, “Rick worked with Herman Zimmerman on the design to make it feel more like a military vehicle, industrial. There’s no carpeting and soft walls, it’s metal, and more like a submarine.” Both Zimmerman and Jim Mees clearly relished the challenge of designing the new ship. Zimmerman thought that “part of the charm” of Enterprise was the fact that “you’re closer to our own reality in the things you see on the bridge and in engineering and in the cabins, in the corridors. You’ll find things that are more familiar to you. Not so imaginary. Not so far in the future.” They particularly enjoyed complying with Berman and Braga’s instructions to pay “homage to the classic show,” which they did by incorporating aspects of the TOS Enterprise. Doing this, said Zimmerman, meant using “a lot of things that Gene [Roddenberry] invented,” including the flip communicator, Uhura’s earpiece, Spock’s viewfinder, and the circular bridge. Jim Mees told us that they took the “mechanical approach” from TOS: “Everything on [the] Enterprise is mechanical. It turns, it blinks.” For the helm, “[w]e actually went and bought plane parts so that there is a movable steering wheel, there is a movable gear shift.” The thrill of creating the new show derived not only from ensuring the family resemblance of the design elements but also from ensuring the narrative continuity of the vast and complicated Star Trek storyworld. But, whereas TNG, DS9, and Voyager needed to maintain continuity with events that had already happened in the storyworld past, Enterprise had to account for events that were still to happen in future time lines. Braga said that he and Berman knew the “old shows,” as did other members of the production staff. When continuity issues occurred, “we always make sure that we have a logical reason and work within the universe.” We asked specifically about one such issue: the depiction of Enterprise’s Vulcans. The earlier programs had established that Vulcans do not lie, but Enterprise’s Vulcans did. Braga reassured us: “We discussed that. In my opinion, it’s open to interpretation. It’s not like there’s something in the Vulcans’ brains that makes them not lie.” Braga argued that the lying resulted from cultural difference; the Vulcans had still to attain the moral high ground they occupied in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries: “In this century, they’re very intuitive. And they’re kind of nasty. I think maybe by Kirk’s time, they’ve evolved just like humans will.” The violation of continuity may have disturbed some fans, but it resulted not from carelessness but from the kind of careful consideration given to every aspect of the new program.

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In her essay on the decline of the Star Trek franchise, Ina Rae Hark says that it is “premature to declare the franchise dead on the basis of the eleven seasons of Trek on UPN, during which Berman appeared willing to churn out mediocre product upon which to slap the Trek brand for the sake of profit.”58 Hark was right about the vitality of the franchise; we think she was wrong about Berman’s willingness to churn out inferior product, to let the demands of commerce override those of art. In fact, he specifically told us that he thought that “the eighteen episodes that we’ve completed of Enterprise are as good as anything on television.” All our 2002 interviewees spoke about Enterprise with particular enthusiasm, and all expressed satisfaction about rising to the creative challenges posed by returning to the TOS format, designing the twenty-second century, and integrating episode storylines into the Star Trek storyworld. But all these talented people—enjoying as much creative autonomy as, if not more than, they had on the previous series, and believing that they were indeed making another quality product—in actuality collaborated to produce a show generally deemed to be poor, or at least not as good as its predecessors. It failed artistically, just as it failed commercially. Enterprise’s cancelation, together with the tenth feature film’s dismal box-office performance, meant that Star Trek disappeared temporarily from both the big and little screens. J. J. Abrams’s feature film Star Trek (2009) and its sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), have drawn in new audiences for Paramount, but none of our interviewees—or, indeed, anyone involved with any of the Star Trek television series—contributed to that reboot. To quote Ron Moore, “[Y]ou never know”; the creators may judge something bad that the audience judges as good, as in the case of “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Equally, as in the case of Enterprise, the creators may judge something good that the audiences judge as bad. But this, too, is characteristic of the creative industries: no one sets out to make a bad product, but most new products fail. It’s not surprising that Star Trek television eventually ended; it’s surprising that it lasted as long as it did.

the roddenberry legacy: “what our audiences have come to know as star trek” The next chapter speculates on the creative reasons behind Enterprise’s failure; here we conclude with a discussion of the Roddenberry legacy—a constraint on and an enabler of creative autonomy unique to Star Trek. Roddenberry’s continued influence upon Star Trek television was exceptional in the industry. Ron Moore’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica (Syfy, 2004–9) neither invoked nor involved the original program’s showrunner,

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Glen A. Larsen (although he did receive a screen credit as a consulting producer). In the United Kingdom, the rebooted Doctor Who does not look back to the creators of the original 1963 series, but rather foregrounds the new showrunners: Russell T. Davies, followed by Stephen Moffat. Paramount’s exploitation of the Roddenberry brand long past his involvement in the production process and even long past his death makes economic sense. Fans judging each Star Trek iteration according to its conformity with the Roddenberry vision makes cultural sense, since audiences are accustomed to an auteur figure. Deference to Roddenberry during TOS and the initial TNG years made industrial sense, since, as we argued above, the constituent material practices of the television industry place the showrunner at the top of the hierarchy. Uniquely, however, Roddenberry continued to play an influential role in our interviewees’ understanding of the Star Trek storyworld long past his death. When we interviewed them, Roddenberry had already been dead for eleven years, but he was still inspiring strong, contradictory opinions among those who had worked with him. Some played down his contribution to the show, while others called him “a genius”; for all, he was at least a reference point, and for many, an influence. The storytelling conventions that he established in the 1960s continued to be a constraint on—or, conversely, an inspiration to—production staff in the twenty-first century, forty years later. While, as we showed in chapter 1, the appeal of Roddenberry’s storyworld derived from the practicality of its production, it also derived from the humanist ideals that he incorporated into that storyworld, ideals that made TOS a distinctive television show. And, crucially, Roddenberry had the personal charisma to persuade others to sign up to those ideals. Herman Zimmerman, who was hired by Roddenberry during the TNG development process, told us that the man then in charge of television production for Paramount, Michael Shoenbrun, had to twist Zimmerman’s arm to get him to go to the interview with Roddenberry: “The scuttlebutt on the lot was that it was probably going to be just another one of Gene’s failed attempts at resurrecting his original classic series.” But five minutes with Roddenberry convinced Zimmerman that TNG presented a great opportunity. He “was the most generous, lovely human being I’d met in this business. He had a fire about his vision of the future that was contagious. It made you want to work with him,” Zimmerman told us. It was not the production practicalities but the Roddenberry vision that attracted him: “[Rodenberry’s] vision of Star Trek was all-inclusive. It was every religion or no religion at all. No gender gap. No poverty. These are great altruistic ideals that Gene represented, and we’ve all gone to great lengths to keep the

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show on that path.” Kerry McCluggage confirmed Zimmerman’s statement that the Roddenberry vision still mattered: You do try to factor that in, because that’s part of the appeal of Star Trek. He had an optimistic view of the future. He had a whole notion of how the Federation would evolve, and the Prime Directive, and things that are key elements in the show and values that are inherent in the show. In exploiting this property on a commercial basis, you really do find yourself going back to that, thinking, how does this fit in with the original vision of the show? And even though he’s not a physical presence, he’s certainly very much a part of the thinking of everybody that’s involved with the show.

McCluggage’s reference to commercial exploitation recalls what Deuze says about “cultural and economic concerns” not being opposed, but rather part of the “constituent material practice” of media industries. The incorporation of the Roddenberry vision into everybody’s thinking was a response to both artistic and commercial imperatives. While Rick Berman was, as we saw in chapter 1, uncomfortable with the term “Roddenberry vision,” he agreed with McCluggage that “the uplifting vision of a better future, of a humanity that is filled with promise, is one of the absolute—probably the single primary reason for Star Trek’s continued success, decade after decade, and that all came from Gene.” For that reason alone, Roddenberry’s humanistic values needed to be retained. Berman and his writers, however, found that working within the boundaries of Roddenberry’s storyworld posed problems. In the “very specific twentythird century” that Roddenberry created for TOS, McCluggage explained, “there wasn’t a lot of conflict between the characters” because, with the disappearance of “want, poverty, disease, people were out pursuing a better quality of life.” This conception of the characters had structured the storytelling of the first series. “But when The Next Generation began, Gene firmly restated all of these beliefs. He felt extremely strongly about them all. It was very difficult for us. When you’re writing drama, drama’s all about conflict, and when you can’t have conflict between your characters, it’s a pain in the ass. The conflict always has to come from outside, and it’s extremely difficult.” Michael Piller faced many problems when he took over as head writer in TNG’s third season. Foremost among those problems was what Piller referred to as the “Roddenberry box”—Roddenberry’s insistence that the humans of the future would have matured beyond the standards of the twentieth century. Echoing Berman, Piller said that “his rules were very strict, and he was very adamant about keeping them.” This had resulted in

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“a very angry and disenchanted writing staff that were all furious with Gene because he wouldn’t let them do what they wanted to do.” Rather than take the writers’ side, however, Piller felt “that it wasn’t my job to change the show and battle with Gene. I figured if this franchise had lasted thirty years, Gene must have been doing something right, so rather than be intransigent, I listened, and tried to figure out what it was. And it took a few tries.” The following account from Piller concerning the “very first show” he developed illustrates how maintaining consistency with the established storyworld—or, in this case, remaining within the Roddenberry box— served as inspiration to rather than constraint upon creative autonomy: There were no scripts in development, and I had to get something ready for the next week. I said, “I want to see every piece of material there is in this building, anything that’s been abandoned and rejected.” Someone gave me a script by a young kid about to go into the navy, Ron Moore. It was “The Bonding” [3:5]. I looked at it, and it had a great idea about a kid whose mother was killed on a ship—she was a crew member, and the kid is terribly overwrought with sadness. The aliens, seeing this, basically provide a substitute mother, the image of a mother, just a replica. And I said, “That’s a really interesting concept, let’s do it.” I took it to Gene and he said, “It doesn’t work, death is a part of life in the twenty-fourth century; no one grieves when somebody dies, children accept death as a way of life. The kid won’t be unhappy that his mother has died.” And I said to myself “OK” and went back to the writers’ room and said to the guys what Gene said. And I said that’s about the freakiest thing I’ve ever heard, that a kid’s not going to cry when his mother dies, but that’s what Gene says. So that’s what we start with—the freakiest thing you’ve ever seen, a kid who doesn’t cry when his mother dies. Troi, who was a very underdeveloped character in the third season, says the only way we can get rid of this replica mother is if the kid absolutely strips away at levels of civilization and feels the true emotions that this loss represents. And ultimately that’s the way we went, and it was a far more interesting story than if the kid was whining for two acts.

Piller learned from this experience that “Gene had these rules for a purpose.” While many of the writers chafed against the rules, Piller liked them, because “it forced us to be more creative and forced us to find new ways of telling stories.” As Piller continued to defend the Roddenberry box, “it ultimately turned into ‘Piller’s box.’ I take a great deal of pride over helping to direct the show in a way that Gene Roddenberry really cared for.” Ron Moore, whose first Star Trek script was “The Bonding,” encountered the Roddenberry box more directly when working on the script for

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“Family” (4:2), the episode in which Picard goes home to France to recover from the trauma of his Borg assimilation in “The Best of Both Worlds” (3:26 and 4:1). Picard’s cathartic moment occurs after a fistfight with his older brother, with whom he had never got along. Moore told us, “We [Moore, Piller, and Berman] had a meeting with Gene, and he did not like the fight between the brothers. He thought that it was bad parenting, [that] it said something bad about the Picard family and that the older brother really needed psychological help.” Moore was distressed, but Berman and Piller managed to talk Roddenberry into accepting the scene. In this case apparently even Piller felt that the Roddenberry box worked against rather than facilitated good storytelling. Later, as cocreator of DS9 and Voyager, Piller himself began to think outside the Roddenberry box. Berman told us, With Deep Space 9, we created a show where the space station provided the conflict. It was an inhospitable place. We also had a number of characters who were not Starfleet officers. So there could be conflict among those characters. On Voyager we threw in the fact that there were these Maquis fighters59 who were mixed in with the Starfleet officers, and they were thrown off to the other side of the galaxy, and again there was tension, we could bend the rules a little bit that way.

Berman said that the producers bent Roddenberry’s rules a bit “to make the show easier to write”—that is, by introducing the conflict between characters that they believed necessary for good storytelling. But in keeping with Roddenberry’s rules, conflict arose not among Starfleet officers but between Starfleet personnel who exhibited all of Roddenberry’s humanistic virtues and non-Starfleet personnel who did not. The rules were bent, but not broken, as the producers sought to maintain that tricky balance between continuity and change. This chapter has explored the ways in which the interdependence of art and commerce both constrains and enables creative autonomy, looking in particular at the typical and atypical constraints and enablers encountered by the Star Trek workers. We conclude that individuals, whether writers or construction coordinators, above or below the line, did matter, to a greater or lesser extent, within the collaborative production process. The following chapter investigates how all the workers came together to write and make Star Trek in the collaborative process that we term “the craft-workshop mode of production.”

3. The Craft-Workshop Mode of Production

The previous chapter investigated the constraints on and enablers of creative autonomy for individuals at all levels of the Star Trek production hierarchy. This chapter investigates the interdependence between these individuals as they worked together to create the final product, focusing particularly on the pre- and postproduction stages for which we have the most evidence of collaboration among the workers. The first section discusses the Star Trek “family,” a team of people who had been working together for so long that they had developed what showrunner Rick Berman described as a “creative shorthand” that facilitated their interactions.1 The second section addresses the preproduction role of the writers—who, all agreed, were the most crucial players in the process since they provided the scripts from which everything else followed. The third section looks at how the producers and the craft workers worked together in the pre- and postproduction stages to make a Star Trek episode. While the longevity of the Star Trek family was, as we said in the previous chapter, atypical within the television industry, the writing and making of Star Trek were, we think, fairly typical of the production of the long-form television drama during the multichannel era (with obvious exceptions such as greater dependence upon visual effects and the production of twenty-six episodes per season). We say “we think” because we lack the comparative data to conclusively determine whether this was indeed the case. Mark Deuze asks whether “the attitudes, behaviours, and choices of an individual are simply a product of socialization into the existing order of things, or can her goals, ideas, and action be considered to be more or less independent of the way things work in existing companies or organizations?” His answer is that “whatever people do in a certain way produces routines, rules and norms that in turn inspire people to do things in a certain way.” In 86

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other words, “people in . . . organizations over time tend to commit to patterned behaviours.”2 Patterned behaviors marked every stage of the Star Trek production process but did not override creative autonomy; rather, as Deuze says, “people do things together and in doing so continuously struggle for symbolic power within their respective fields of work.”3 This chapter investigates the patterned behaviors, the doing together, and the struggling of the Star Trek production process—where, in Deuze’s words, a “combination of specific technical and organizational arrangements” were “shaped by the generally idiosyncratic habits of individual media practitioners.”4 The necessary relationship between art and commerce requires a mode of production that integrates these individual workers into a smoothly functioning unit; idiosyncratic habits have to some extent to be regulated in order to meet the commercial imperative of putting out the product on time and on budget. But that relationship also requires that managers tolerate or even encourage the idiosyncratic habits that result in the distinctive rather than repetitive products necessary to compete in the marketplace. We took away from our interviews the impression of the television production studio as a kind of atelier, similar to a classical painter’s studio; there is a shaping vision, there is an overall style, and, within this, a number of skilled practitioners produce continuous imaginative solutions to creative problems, supported by skilled laborers—a craft-workshop mode of production.5 Mark Banks points out that it is commonly assumed that the “production of commodities in art, music, television, film and so on is seen to arise most effectively from real or simulated studio or workshop environments where artists are provided with freedom to organise their work process. Creativity is judged to derive from the efforts of these creative individuals or closely knit groups who can work together to generate something novel or distinctive.”6 Banks looks back to a mode of production common in “‘pre-modern’ or ‘pre-industrial’ economies,” which, he argues, affords workers “a sense of creative freedom and meaning in work.”7 The craft-workshop mode suits the interests of both capital and labor, who have “a specific interest in maintaining an authentic production process where craft, art and commerce can mutually combine and flourish—even though . . . each will try inherently to tip the balance of the work process to favour their own preferential interests.”8 While our interviewees did not, of course, use the term “craft workshop,” their comments echoed Banks’s argument, as in the following account from production designer Herman Zimmerman of the making of a film (which applies equally to the making of Star Trek television):

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Everybody that works on a film thinks that their part of the film is important and that they know what the end result’s going be. And we’re all wrong, because making movies is a true expression of democracy in action. The producer knows it’s his because he got the people together and the studio to give the money. The writer knows it’s his because he put the words on the page. The director knows it’s his because he really is the guiding hand. The production designer thinks it’s his because he or she has had a hand in creating everything you see on the screen except the actors. And the director of photography et cetera, et cetera. And until it’s all put together, until it’s edited and sweetened and the titles are put to it, and music, it’s a work in progress. And we’re all happy to have been a part of it, but none of us could have imagined it exactly.9

Michael Piller could have been describing the craft-workshop mode when he told us how he incorporated a new member into his writers’ room: “I used to give a speech, in case the first-time freelancer was obviously intimidated, that this room was safe: do not inhibit yourself; do not censor yourself from speaking even if your idea is the most stupid idea you have ever had, or think it is. Your idea might not be right, your solution to the problem might not be right, but there’s an energy and a chemistry in the room and suddenly we have this organism working, and ultimately that energy leads to solutions.”10 As we argued in the previous chapter, that energy and chemistry was greatly enhanced by the stable conditions of employment that the Star Trek workers enjoyed; it not only enhanced individual creative autonomy but also facilitated individuals working together as a team.

the star trek “family”: “a wonderful working relationship” Stability permitted the workers to refine their skills and fit them to the needs of the particular production process. Costume designers, makeup artists, production designers, and others all become adept at working within the conventions of science fiction and the even more specific conventions of the long-running and multifarious television production that was Star Trek. They also become adept at working with each other; they were one of the closely knit groups to which Banks refers. The longevity of the project meant that many workers had been employed for more than a decade on the project—some since the beginning of TNG—and had become used to each other’s ways of working. A stable production team, standing still for long enough for observers to get a good look at it, also uniquely facilitates

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critical examination. Our interviews showed the extent to which the team and the individual are seen to matter in the collaborative enterprise of television production, within the ever-present framework of commercial imperatives. In many cases the interviewees had a dialogue of sorts with each other, since we were able to mention what we had learned from one member of the team to another member, interviewed later. Reading our interviews, we noticed how often different people working at different levels of production used similar phrases. The words “love” or “passion” or “pride” to describe subjective experience, and collective concepts such as “organism,” “family,” “unit,” “chemistry,” and “team” to describe the working process, recurred frequently, often linked to quality judgments such as “good,” “talented,” and “expertise.” Sound producer Wendy Neuss’s comments about production meetings were typical: “When we got a particularly good script I could just feel everybody feeling challenged, and the level would rise because this was a group of very talented people and everyone brought their expertise to the table, and when you got a good script everybody just got reenergized.”11 The family theme emerged immediately in talking to one of our first interviewees, visual-effects supervisor Dan Curry: “All the departments have a really great working relationship with the other departments. We’ve been together so long that mutual trust and respect make us like family.”12 This theme continued through every interview at every level of production. Was this idea of family (which, of course, does not mean freedom from conflict but which can mean a certain fluidity in hierarchies) simply an idealization meant for public consumption, an instance of the kind of spin that John Thornton Caldwell tells us often characterizes industry workers’ public pronouncements? We felt that it was not: interviewees strove hard to explain how this collaborative set of relationships worked in a practical sense at their particular level of operation. Executive producer Rick Berman spoke of the atypicality and benefits of the Star Trek “family”: “One of the great things about Star Trek is, because it’s a franchise that has such a force to it, we have been able to do what few people in television can do, which is to maintain a family of people. We have people here, many people, who have been with us for fifteen years. We get to have a wonderful working relationship.” He described how this worked in the case of costume designer Robert Blackman, then in his thirteenth year of working on the series. Blackman himself had already told us that Berman, sometimes frustratingly, liked to check everything almost frame by frame. But Blackman noted that this did not mean Berman dominated the relationship: “What I’ve taught him is that collaboration is not a bad thing, that we can share ideas. And that, if

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nothing else, I, as a fellow artist, need to voice my ideas.”13 Berman’s response to this: Bob knows what I like, and I know what Bob is capable of doing, and I have a great deal of trust that he knows what he’s doing. He shows me things, and there are times where I’ll say, “That’s horrible,” and he’ll change it. Most of the time it’s not horrible. The same thing is true with our editors, and with people like Peter Lauritson, who runs our postproduction, and Merri Howard, who runs the production end of things. So you develop very unique relationships with people when, in the television business specifically, you get to spend so many years together.

At each level of production, our interviewees emphasized the longestablished nature of the show as a source of efficient working and of personal and creative satisfaction. These advantages were always expressed as deriving from collaboration with colleagues. Said construction coordinator Tom Arp: “It’s a good, established show, the producers know what they’re doing. . . . The people on the show pretty much work together as a family, they all enjoy it, and they take a lot of pride in it.”14 Jim Mees described the way in which the team had been working together for so long as “osmosis. We just sort of know instinctively what’s going on.”15 Michael Westmore, makeup supervisor, echoed the point: “I’ve been doing [this] now for fifteen years; it has a pattern to it. I get a script, I read a script. It’ll give me little clues in there.”16 Michael Okuda pointed out the advantages of a stable team in terms of learning from past mistakes and being able to correct them: “One of Star Trek’s greatest assets is that we have assembled a team of people who have been through this cycle many times. If a writer says, ‘We want something extraordinary,’ we know how to break it down into manageable chunks, or I’ll say ‘Here’s something that we tried before, and it’s impractical for the following reasons.’ ”17 All of these comments reinforce Deuze’s observation about patterned behaviors and show how these repetitive patterns facilitated working within the constraints of time and budget. But those repetitive patterns led to the making not of a repetitive product but of a distinctive one, partly because they led to the mutual enhancement of the creative autonomy of individuals within the team. People at a high senior level, such as Herman Zimmerman, were certainly self-consciously aware of their own experience, authority, and talents, but also acknowledged the influence of colleagues in “inspiring” them: Much of what I do is intuitive collaboration. I’ve found inspiration in something that Michael Westmore has done. A prosthetic for an alien

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face gives me an idea of what that alien race’s environment would look like. Bob Blackman’s costumes for the Cardassians, in the later episodes of TNG, gave me the inspiration for the whole design philosophy for the Deep Space Nine space station. I look to all the people that I work with for inspiration. I learn more working with them than I ever could working alone; I get much more than I give, because these brilliant people are working on this show.

Describing people as “brilliant” requires us to ask how they got to be so brilliant in the first place—how they got started. Rick Berman expressed wonder: “How anybody breaks into this business is baffling to me because it’s so difficult. But with great pride we have people who started off in rather menial jobs, who have won Emmys and have gone on to run departments. They bring people in, and those new people come up, so it’s a continual process which is unique to Star Trek because of the continuity.” Berman here was describing something like an apprenticeship system, again facilitated for many long-serving production staff by the nonprecarious longevity of Star Trek television. In their online guide to working as a television writer, the Writers Guild of America also described an apprenticeship system—which, however, it argued, was on the way out: “In the not so distant past, episodic television writers worked their way up through the ranks, slowly in most cases, learning the ropes from their more-experienced colleagues. Those days are gone, and while their passing has ushered in a new age of unprecedented mobility and power for television writers, the transition has also spelled the end of both a traditional means of education and a certain culture in which that education was transmitted.”18 The apprenticeship system is an element of the craft-workshop mode that, as the WGA indicates, may now be disappearing. However, in the case of the multichannel era of Star Trek television, many workers did work their way up—a process enabled by the show’s durability, its eighteen unbroken years of continuous production. Brannon Braga, “a lowly intern” who “hit it off well” with the staff working on the show at the time, which included Michael Piller, was given a chance to write a script. He then “wrote another and another” and joined the staff. Eric Stillwell, who when we met him was working with Michael Piller’s production company, Piller Squared, was another example. Stillwell entered the Paramount workforce at a lowly and relatively poorly paid level, as a page–tour guide around the studios, but, with the assistance of Robert Justman, he succeeded in breaking into the show he’d been a fan of since the age of twelve, Star Trek. He served as TNG script coordinator, and he was also the coauthor of the unsolicited storyline for “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (TNG 3:15). Having become friends

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with Michael Piller, he moved to Piller’s production company to work on The Dead Zone (UPN/USA Network, 2002–7), first as script coordinator and office manager and then as an associate producer. Tom Arp also worked his way up in what was, for him, literally a family trade: “I started as a carpenter very, very young. My father was in the industry, and he did special effects and he did construction. I just kind of worked my way through, and got a couple of lucky breaks, and I became a foreman, and then a general foreman, which is right underneath a coordinator, and then I was able to become a coordinator, and I’ve been coordinating ever since.” Underlying this network of professional and personal interrelationships is, of course, the more structural role of organized labor—trade unions, which also acted as a guarantor of quality and expertise, according to the account given by Tom Arp, who was responsible for his local unit of the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE): You can’t just take a painter off the street and make him a painter. It’s not like rolling a flat wall out. They’ve got to be able to make stuff look old, they’ve got to make a piece of wood look like metal. There’s a lot of techniques, and it takes a long time to learn your trade. The unions have contracts with the studios that have been standing since, God knows when, the thirties, and so it’s always been unions that have controlled this. When I got into the industry, I joined a union, and then I learned how to be a prop maker. I didn’t learn how to be a prop maker first. I learned how to be a prop maker after I was in the union.

Jim Mees also emphasized the role of the union in supporting the creative hierarchy of which he was a part: “Louise [Dorton] is the art director, Herman [Zimmerman] is the production director. The pecking order is basically Herman, Louise, Jim, me. We work as a true group. Union-wise, we are all Local 44. The art director is in the local, I’m in the decorating local.” The above comments are a brief account of the activities that went on, as it were, on the shop floor. But the crucial element in the production of a finished product within a tight time schedule, and within a budget that, though seen as generous, was also described as tight, was overall creative control. How did above-the-line workers—producers and writers, and to a lesser extent directors—coordinate and mesh (or not) with the hands-on skills and efforts of the craft workers? As the WGA makes clear, in television drama the creative buck stops with the showrunner, and here Star Trek conformed to the typical production patterns of the industry. Although Berman emphasized familylike cooperation, it was clear that the rest of the family considered him the paterfamilias. He exercised tight overall creative control of all stages of the production process. Everything, from initial

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script to final edit, was subject to his approval. Herman Zimmerman summed up what every other member of the team, whether makeup, budgeting, costume, sound, or writing, told us about Berman’s oversight: “Everything is very much hands-on with Rick Berman, so nothing gets built that isn’t approved, that isn’t very carefully looked at before it’s built. And, I must say, Rick Berman is very clever in knowing what’s important and what isn’t.” Others echoed Zimmerman’s obvious respect for the showrunner’s high standards and creative instincts. Blackman referred to Berman’s “amazing eye” and Winrich Kolbe to his “stylistic vision,” while Westmore told us, “There is, especially from Rick Berman, a demand for excellence. And if it doesn’t look good, that phone rings.”19 Our interviewees repeatedly told us to “talk to Rick,” and when it seemed as if Berman might not have time to see us, Jonathan Frakes intervened, phoning Berman’s personal assistant and asking her to fit us into his schedule. All believed that we would not have a full understanding of the Star Trek production process unless we interviewed Berman. When we finally got that interview (which lasted for almost two hours rather than the originally scheduled twenty-minute slot), we asked Berman why he thought everyone told us to talk to him. Reminiscent of Todd Gitlin’s bashful executives who disclaimed credit for being significantly influential, he said he was “totally baffled by that.” He viewed his role as an overseer, interestingly invoking the term “God,” and endorsing the claims of his colleagues that no detail could escape him: I guess I instill a certain quality control on it and a consistency in terms of the quality of the filmmaking. I’m the person who works on every script, and I see every drawing for the sets. And Bob Blackman comes to me with all of the designs and materials. I supervise the final editing on all of the shows. I go to as many as possible of the sound dubs, where all the sound effects and music are mixed in. I work with Peter Lauritson, who runs all our postproduction on the visual effects, and the opticals and how those are done. So I kind of oversee everything. And I think that there is a consistency that’s important, and I’m a believer in that; God is in the details, and the details are very important in Star Trek.

If, as we suggested, the craft-workshop mode of production is a kind of atelier, then it was Berman who provided the shaping vision and ensured the consistency of the overall style. As we saw in chapter 1, he emphatically denied that there was a “Berman vision,” and indeed, as we saw in chapter 2, he stressed his commitment to Roddenberry’s initial conception of the Star Trek storyworld, but post-TOS Star Trek would have been very different with a different showrunner. It would also have been very different without

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writers Michael Piller and Brannon Braga; craft workers Michael Westmore and Robert Blackman; Berman’s deputies, producers Merri Howard and Peter Lauritson; and all the other talented individuals who worked in the atelier.

writing star trek : “everything comes from the script” Berman echoed many of his coworkers in saying that crucial to success at every level were the writers. In the words of Herman Zimmerman, “[I]t all begins with the script. We designers have to create these new worlds and new civilizations, mostly by the seat of our pants. Everything comes from the script.” Or, as Robert Blackman put it, “[the script is] the only basis for character development. And character development then leads to what the hell they wear.” Many of Berman’s coworkers distinguished between good and bad scripts, even if they didn’t necessarily articulate the standards by which they made their judgments. Winrich Kolbe claimed: “We all know what a good script is. We might not be able to express it.” While contributions from the rest of the team could slightly improve a script, our interviewees knew that a poor script resulted in a weak episode. However, as Kolbe said, whatever the quality of the script, production-schedule pressures precluded his doing much to make it better. If a script was not particularly good, “it’s up to us on the set to elevate from boring to maybe halfway interesting. It can be a little bit improved through visual pizzazz.” But that visual pizzazz, as Dan Curry told us, had to serve the needs of the story: “Great visual effects cannot save a bad story. We on Star Trek try to make the visual effects always drive the story, and we also try to avoid doing gratuitous ego-gratification shots for the visual-effects team. We’re always trying to make sure that it never supersedes or snaps you away from the story.” Just as writers are at the top of the workplace hierarchy according to industry conventions, so are they central to the functioning of the craftworkshop mode of production. The rest of the workers defer to the script, because without the script there would be nothing for them to make. It can be argued that, within the collaborative production mode of the craft workshop, writers have a greater degree of creative autonomy than the other workers, whose job it is to put what’s on the page on the screen within the constraints of time and budget. In the case of Enterprise, it was the difficulty of finding writers that played a part in bringing the show to its early conclusion after only four

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seasons. At the time that we talked to our interviewees, during the production of the first season of Enterprise, the lack of the core ingredient—good scripts—was already a problem. Berman acknowledged this: “The biggest problem that we have is writers. It is very, very difficult to write Star Trek. You can get writers to come in here who are top writers of television, top writers of feature films, playwrights. And the odds are [that only] one in twenty of them will be able to write this show.” Brannon Braga confirmed this, saying that most of the writers working on Enterprise were new to Star Trek “and a lot of them aren’t getting it. They’re very good writers, but they don’t quite get Star Trek.” Braga continued: You need to get the tone right. And then you need to know that Star Trek tells a certain kind of story, that it’s a hopeful show. Then you have to know how to write for science fiction, then you have to have a certain knowledge of science. You really just kind of have to have inherent talent and the ability to adapt to this existing universe, the incredibly complicated, long-lived continuity that’s been around now for a lot of TV shows, and it’s a very, very hard thing to do for even the most talented of writers.

Star Trek had in the past benefitted from writers who knew how to write the show, but as Berman pointed out, their success meant that some of them moved up the WGA hierarchy to become showrunners in their own right: “DS9 had a good group of writers that worked well together. There was a period with Next Generation that had a good pool of writers. But as these writers succeeded and as we spread out to more shows, many of them suddenly found themselves in showrunning situations, going off to other programs.” When writers left, the showrunner or the head writer had to come up with replacements and ensure that they became part of a smoothly functioning team. Berman told us that “Michael Piller was very good at finding writers.” As noted in the previous chapter, Piller is generally credited with transforming and perhaps saving TNG, partly by the way in which he organized the writing team and integrated it successfully into the production process. Piller, like Berman a manager as well as a writer, had the ability to mobilize the essentially collaborative nature of television production to resolve many problems and conflicts at the beginning of TNG’s third season. As a writer, Piller recognized the centrality of his fellow writers in generating overall quality and consistency for the series and set up what seems to have been a highly effective, if unorthodox, system for making sure he found them. Above all, he went against standard industry practice

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by accepting unsolicited scripts, including a script idea from a young administrative assistant, Eric Stilwell, and his friend Trent Christopher Ganino. This script, “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” about which Ron Moore spoke in the previous chapter, turned out against many odds (including multiple authorship) to be one of the most successful and interesting TNG episodes.20 As Piller pointed out, his “fundamental responsibility was to ensure that every story in every script was as good as it could possibly be, every week, and it was a full-time job and I worked with a staff of writers—five or six writers—at a time on TNG. We hired people and took pitches from independent writers and read material from freelancers and even amateurs. I just needed ideas, I needed to be bombarded with ideas for shows, which I would then buy and work with the writers to develop.” Piller described in some detail the way in which he worked with the writers, using the TNG episode “The Inner Light” (5:25), written by Morgan Gendel and Peter Allan Fields, as an example: The first thing is a pitch, an idea. Someone comes in and says, “Captain Picard is struck by a probe and he passes out. Suddenly he begins to live an entirely other life as an alien on another planet. And at the end of the episode he learns that the aliens have basically programmed him to learn about their culture.” And then I’d say, “I love that idea, I can see exactly how it’s going to end. Let’s go away and write it.” Then we take the story once it has been approved by everyone [including Rick Berman and the studio], and we sit in front of a board and break the story down act by act,21 line by line, beat by beat—so you’ll often have a board that’s covered with scribble in different colors for different acts—and by the time we’re finished with it, it resembles a road map for the writer to go off and write a script based on the structure that we have.

Piller also acknowledged the importance of allowing individual writers— especially, as he put it, “great” ones—to have creative autonomy at this stage: “I always tell them, ‘This is a road map, not a bible,’ because once the writer gets alone with his word processor things may occur, characters may want to go left, they may suddenly want to turn right—and the writer has to know they have the freedom to make changes to bring back more [to the writers’ room], and the great writers bring back more than sticking to the board.” Piller is worth quoting at length because so many people have attributed success to his way of working with that most crucial of ingredients, the writers. This chapter and chapters 2 and 4 all emphasize the collaborative nature of television production and the economic and temporal constraints under which commercial television production has to work, but individual

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creative autonomy still matters. The extent to which, in our interviews, Michael Piller’s name kept coming up as a model of how to organize skilled workers to produce a successful television-drama episode indicates that one individual can make a very significant difference in the production process. It is significant, too, that he himself acknowledged the need to give individual writers the freedom to do “more than sticking to the board.” Piller himself was proud not only of his abilities to manage the writing team but also of his own individual contributions as a writer, contributions that spoke to his creative autonomy. Often writers’ own personal experiences find their way into the storyworld. Piller spoke to us of the genesis of one of TNG’s best-remembered episodes, the two-part “Best of Both Worlds” cliff-hanger that ended season three and began season four: People remember “The Best of Both Worlds” and say, “Oh yes—the BORG!” But the truth is that story is really about Riker and whether he’s big enough to sit in the big chair—mentor versus master. If you look at that particular story in that third season you can learn a lot about me. That story is about “What have I lost?” He’s trying to decide whether he should stay on the Enterprise, and that was happening to me, deciding whether I was going to leave Star Trek or not. What I brought to that show was an inner life that came straight from my own inner experience—I lived through the characters and made them as real and flesh and blood so people could care about them.22

Like Piller, Brannon Braga, described by Judith and Garfield ReevesStevens as Star Trek’s “David Cronenberg,”23 saw himself as having made a distinct contribution to the Star Trek storyworld: “I did the more highconcept science-fictiony episodes, or the offbeat, darker episodes. On Next Generation and in early Voyager, I did a lot of dreams and screwing around with reality. I did virtually all of the time-travel episodes.” But Braga’s move from being “the member” of the scriptwriting team who liked to explore mental and physical disintegration to executive producer and head writer seemed paradoxically to have worked against rather than facilitated his creative autonomy. With Enterprise, he told us, he was trying to do “something completely different” than he had in the past, a show “that isn’t grounded in high-concept science fiction, that is more grounded in the characters.” But doing something completely different perhaps resulted in the loss of his distinctive voice: “But I’ve written so many episodes now, more than any of the writers, I don’t know what are mine. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’ve done everything.” Braga’s comments and the demise of Enterprise suggest that he did not adapt well to the transition from writer to manager. There appeared to be

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nobody on the Enterprise team who could do what Michael Piller had done for TNG—setting up a writing group that could negotiate storylines and work reasonably effectively together. An attempt was made to find a Piller type when Manny Coto took over the writing team for Enterprise’s doomed fourth season. Ina Rae Hark praises Coto’s efforts to restore the dramatic tension and quality of the series: he “embraced its role as prequel and close cousin to [TOS].”24 The connection between the failure of the product, economically and creatively, and the creative autonomy of particular individuals is well illustrated by what happened to Enterprise. Braga could do “high concept” and had written some of the more experimental and innovative episodes of TNG and subsequent series. But he seemed to be less able to create the kind of working setup that enabled the dramatic “rotation” of characters and their stories on a continuing basis, as enabled by Piller. Again, as history was to demonstrate, a writer having to move outside his comfort zone and write everything (as Braga had to do on Enterprise) suggests the truth of Berman’s claim that writers were the key to success—and the lack of them a key reason for failure. Braga worked well as part of a varied team in TNG and its successors. His assumption of responsibility for much of the writing, as well as executive producing, may have militated against his particular individual talents for writing innovative and experimental stories. We have shown the crucial centrality of the writers and their scripts to the production process. However, this does not mean that gifted literary individuals had things all their own way in turning a script into an episode; as members of the craft workshop, writers had to collaborate and negotiate with their colleagues in the preproduction process. Ron Moore’s account of these negotiations attests to the complete interdependence of art and commerce within the constituent material practices of the industry. He was particularly illuminating on the “struggling and fighting” and trading that went on between the writers’ team and other workers. Moore’s account illustrates the centrality of the writers while at the same time showing their utter dependence on the collaborative production process and on the constraints imposed by the budget. As he told it, in such negotiations a little authorial cunning could sometimes allow writers to gain an advantage: There’s a continuous revamping of everything all along the way. First draft to writers, get their notes. Second draft, to everybody, to executive producer, get notes, rewrite. You start to get into prep seven days before the beginning of principal photography. That’s the day you have to give the script ideally to the director. You have a production meeting, you get all the department heads, you sit down in a big room and go

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through the script scene by scene. How much it’s going to cost, where are you going to build the set. If there’s phaser shots, do you see explosions, are you going to blow out that wall? You come out of the production meeting and you’re rewriting the script to take into account certain production [budget] lines. Can you get him in the shuttle craft? Can you get rid of the set? As a writer, you learn to pick your battles— you decide what’s important in the script, and sometimes you overwrite the script. And then, you can say, “Yeah I’m going to cut that.” You can draw your line and say, “Goddammit, I cut that set for you. You’re going to have to do this set.”25

Although seen by all as central to the production process, the writers nonetheless, to paraphrase Deuze, had to continually struggle for symbolic power within their respective fields of work. Moore was, to adapt Banks, trying to tip the balance of the work process to favor his own preferential interests within the craft-workshop mode of production.26

making star trek: “that’s where cooperation comes in” The production meetings to which Moore referred were the crucial forum in which compromises between creativity and constraints took place, ensuring that each episode would be brought in on time and within budget and, ideally, meet the high professional standards and quality to which all our interviewees professed allegiance. Taking place, as Moore said, in the week before principal photography began, there were two meetings for each episode, involving all department heads, both above and below the line, as well as other personnel. The first meeting took place early in that week; all concerned read over the script to determine what the craft workers could realize within time and budget constraints and what the writers would have to redraft. The second meeting occurred later in the week in order, as Merri Howard told us, to involve the episode’s director “before they actually take it to the stage to shoot it.” 27 (Directors became involved in the production process only in the week before shooting began as per standard industry practice). By that point, said Peter Lauritson, the writers had made their revisions, and “we’ve talked through some things and things are more ironed out.”28 These meetings were described with varying degrees of enthusiasm—“very tedious” said Brannon Braga. Irrelevant sidetracks often occurred, according to Wendy Neuss, and “if you didn’t get enough sleep the night before, I’m digging my nails into myself just to keep myself awake.” Despite their occasional tediousness, these meetings seem to have

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been for the most part creatively invigorating.29 Creative autonomy often led to ingenious workarounds to save time or money while still as far as possible giving the writers what they wanted. In answer to a question about his creative input, Arp told us, with a laugh, “You know, sometimes my creative input is more ‘This is going to save you money. I’m going to give you almost the same thing, but it’s going to save you a little bit of money.’ ” An example might be a script requiring the interior of an alien spaceship— in Michael Okuda’s words, “inherently an extremely expensive, extremely difficult, extremely time-consuming thing.” In cases such as this, said Okuda, the production team brainstormed a solution to put the writer’s words on the screen without exceeding the pattern budget for the episode: “Herman [Zimmerman] or Louise [Dorton] or one of the others will say, ‘Let’s look at similar sets we’ve built in the past—we did a Vulcan ship and we built some very cool walls. What if we take those walls, strip off the dressing, and do something else to them knowing the stock that we happen to have around, and what can be done with it, and how to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like a cheat to the audience?’ ” Throughout these meetings, and indeed throughout the entire production process, “the most important issues,” as Dan Curry put it, were “to serve the story and entertain the audience.” Department heads and other key workers began preparing for the production meetings as soon as they got the script. Herman Zimmerman told us that the script would arrive a week before the meetings “if I’m lucky,” while Jim Mees said that they sometimes got it only a day before—another example of the extreme time pressures brought to bear on the workers. Tom Arp told us: “I read the script, do a set breakdown, and then go to the meetings and find out what the directors and producers actually want.” In reading the script, each department head had to pay particular attention to his department’s responsibilities in putting the words on the screen. The script gave Dan Curry “a sense of what’s going to be entailed and what challenges we will be facing.” He had to note the particular story points that involved him and his team: “Where there are going to be visual effects is often obvious, such as like where a space ship flies through a nebula . . . obviously we’ll have to do that.” When the script failed to make obvious what was required, department heads consulted with the executive producer or writer in advance of the meeting. Michael Westmore said that the script sometimes gave only “little hints,” and it “was up to me to come up with something.” In this case he would “ask Brannon [Braga] how far he wants me to go. So maybe he’ll say ‘Keep it simple,’ which means, keep it down to something like the forehead and the nose.” At the meetings, said

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Jim Mees, “[w]e read through the script with the producers and we talk about the issues that are our specific issues, and we hear what everybody else is talking about.” Dan Curry explained that these meetings were where many problems were ironed out and issues involving different departments resolved. “For example,” he said, “if we’re having a group of people that are going to be composited into a new background by shooting them against a blue or green screen, wardrobe will help visual effects by not creating costumes [that cause problems]; they can’t wear earth-green or blue outfits,” since this would cause the actors to disappear against the similarly colored screens. By the end of the first production meeting, each department head knew what the episode required of him and his team, said Curry: “What new sets will have to be constructed, how many guest stars and extras they’re going to need costumes for. Mike Westmore will determine how many makeup pieces he needs, and we in visual effects decide what new miniature must be designed, built, and photographed.” Once the scripts had been rewritten to account for budgetary concerns and the line budget for each department established for the particular episode, the department heads began working with their teams on their respective preproduction tasks, always keeping in mind the requirements of the other departments. Said Tom Arp: “We start building, and I coordinate when it goes in with different crafts; the set has to be in first, and then obviously the set dressing has to go in after that, and then [those responsible for the] set lighting have to put their hands on it before it actually gets on camera.” His ultimate goal, said Arp, was to make things “work for the shooting company,” which required thinking ahead to what would happen on the sound stage. “This set piece has to come out, so we have to make it a little bit differently, so it cuts down on the production time. We have the whole company standing there with directors and actors and everything—you don’t want to take a lot of time to take the sets apart, so we try and make it user-friendly.” Judging by what director Winrich Kolbe told us, Arp and his team usually got it right. Quite frequently the director saw the new sets only the day before the start of principal photography on the episode, when “we’ll have a walk-through during lunch.” But he had confidence that the set wouldn’t present problems: “That’s where cooperation comes in. The art department knows by now how we shoot and how it’s lit, so it’s pretty much all preset [for shooting].” While the directors bore the primary responsibility for coordinating the work of those on the sound stage during the seven or eight days of shooting an episode, they still required input from the producers and the craft workers. In the preproduction process, production supervisor Merri Howard,

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postproduction supervisor Peter Lauritson, and the heads of departments had tried to anticipate any difficulties that might arise in the shooting, but their intervention on the sound stage was nonetheless required, sometimes to solve unanticipated problems, such as costume or makeup malfunctions, and sometimes as a matter of routine. As Lauritson told us, “[A]s in all productions, things change daily. You know, there’s things that come up that nobody could foresee. There are definitely some instant decisions that have to be made on the set.” While Lauritson and those he supervised stood by to help make those instant decisions, they were routinely required on the sound stage whenever there was a visual-effects shot in order to ensure that the director captured the “raw elements” that the visual-effects team would later manipulate through their technical “magic.” Dan Curry explained further: “Working with the director of photography, the director explains his or her vision of the shot. The visual-effects team explains what technical limitations may be involved, such as whether or not the camera must be locked down, whether we need a clean plate [a shot without actors], what special interactive light may be needed, how the special-effects team is involved, et cetera. When everyone agrees that the visual-effects shot serves the story and the director’s vision, we do the shot.” Howard and Lauritson were the key coordinators during preproduction, principal photography, and postproduction, with Howard having primary responsibility for preproduction and Lauriston for postproduction, and with both involved in principal photography if needed. While the creative buck stopped with Berman, the budgetary buck usually stopped with the two producers. Said Berman: “I am the arbiter of certain business-related budgetary things, but basically, the business, the money, end of it is pretty much under Peter Lauritson and Merri Howard’s control.” The two producers also coordinated the production schedules, ensuring that at every step from prethrough postproduction the efforts of all the workers efficiently interlocked within the tight time periods available. As managers, it was Howard and Lauritson’s job to make sure that the “idiosyncratic habits” of individuals within the craft workshop did not disrupt patterned behaviors, particularly the patterned behavior of delivering the product on time and within budget. Howard described her job as being “in charge of physical production” and overseeing “the below-the-line people, all the craft people.” She and her team broke down the script, coordinating the work of the various departments within a production schedule so that “all of us know exactly what it’s going to take” to produce an episode. At this point, time rather than money was the primary consideration: how long would it take each department to produce the required props, sets, and costumes, and when

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would they be needed onstage? For example, said Howard, she might ask Robert Blackman whether she could use an actor on the first day of shooting, and he might reply that it would take his staff three days to make a costume for the actor, who would have been cast only the day before shooting commenced. But money soon entered the picture; once the production schedule was finalized, each department head had to give a budget for that episode to Howard, who would then take those budgets, go through them, tell them this is too high, this is too low, we need to correct this. I give that to our auditors, who put it into the computer and come out with a bottom-line figure of what it is going to cost to produce the show, showing me that it’s going to cost six hundred thousand dollars too much or that we’re in a wonderful savings of having three hundred thousand dollars in the good. And that information shows us where we need to go with that particular show. If we’re very much over budget, a decision is made: Do we take a set away and try to incorporate some of the storyline into another set?

Other budgetary adjustments could be required during the preproduction period. For example, said Howard, the director might request a piece of equipment not owned by the studio: The director sometimes says, “I’ve just seen this wonderful piece of equipment and I would love to be able to use that.” Our answer is, “That’s great, but . . . does that work within the environment of Star Trek, will it work within the set, and will it be effective, or is it just a toy that our crews don’t know how to use? Will it take two or three production hours to learn how to use that?”—and that’s the deciding factor as to whether we will use that toy or not.

Often Howard had to say no: “I have to hold my ground in that ‘I appreciate what you’re asking, but I can’t do it at this particular time.’ ” Time and cost permitting, however, Howard sometimes said yes: “A lot of times we’ve opened up our minds because there’s so much flexibility that is out there, so many wonderful tools that will give you a new look.” Despite her primary responsibility for the bottom line, Howard took the same pride in the final product as her colleagues. She appreciated directors who could take a “fresh approach” and “move the camera in different directions and different ways so we’re not just seeing talking heads all the time.” Creativity sometimes requires money, and Howard was sometimes inclined to enable the creative autonomy of those directors, like Winrich Kolbe, who sought to put their individual imprint on an episode. If Howard was in charge of physical production, what actually happened in front of the cameras, Lauritson was, in a sense, in charge of virtual

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production—what happened after the cameras had stopped rolling. Wendy Neuss, who as sound producer worked under Lauritson’s supervision, told us that her boss was “pretty much indispensable to Rick as the person who oversees all the postproduction, including the budget.” She described Lauritson as “absolutely one hundred percent reliable.” For each episode, he had to calculate the cost and time requirements for the music, sound effects, and visual effects that had to be anticipated in preproduction and production but would be added in postproduction. Like the other department heads, Lauritson began the process with the first draft of the script and the production meetings, paying particular attention to “anything that involves postproduction that will not only happen after shooting, but needs to happen before shooting or during shooting.” He gave as examples “musical numbers that have to be prerecorded before we shoot and stock footage of the films watched by the Enterprise crew.” Lauritson also had to foresee things, such as green screens and motion-control units, that would be required on the sound stage and “bring them to the attention of the production unit”—that is, to the attention of Merri Howard in particular. By the end of the second production meeting he had locked in a line-by-line budget for the postproduction work, which began once Berman had “put his seal of approval” on the editorial cut. At this stage Lauritson’s responsibility was to supervise the work of the visual-effects and sound teams to ensure that “everybody’s on the same page.”

stepping back: “what we do is background” Mark Banks makes a distinction between craft workers and “artists.” He acknowledges that “the role of the craft labourer is often as crucial [as that of artists] in ensuring that cultural goods achieve their intended commodity form.” But he suggests that the distinction between art and craft also raises the politics (his italics) of cultural and creative work. Says Banks: “While the majority of artistic labour remains poorly remunerated, the consolation for artists is that they tend to exert (relative) autonomy over their work, can aspire to consecration, and, if commercial success is eventually achieved, expect to receive some significant share of material rewards. In contrast, the craft worker lacks autonomy, the prospect of consecration and the possibility of financial rewards comparable with that of the successful artist.”30 As we have seen, the craft workers all deferred to the “artists” among them—the writers—if only for the pragmatic reason that without the writers they would have had nothing to do. But, as we have also seen, the craft-

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workshop mode of production demanded that the writers also defer to the craft workers. If the writers had the greatest degree of autonomy, our craft workers nonetheless felt that they had their share. They indicated that their voices were heard in the multiple decision-making processes involved in the production of an episode of Star Trek and that their input was reflected in the final product as it eventually appeared on the screen. Our interviewees— most, admittedly, in fairly senior positions in their department hierarchies, with a greater degree of autonomy than, say, a scene painter—suggested that these individuals could indeed make such a difference. Unanimously they acknowledged the constraints of budget and time, while often seeing these constraints as a spur to ingenuity and problem solving (for example, the imaginative recycling of old sets). All asserted that these creative contributions came both from their own individual experience and from team collaboration. Yes, they believed in the importance of their own talent and hard work, but ultimately this had to be subordinated to the overall goal of a technically proficient and professional-looking episode of television drama, as sternly scrutinized by the eagle eye of Rick Berman, the man with ultimate executive responsibility for everything. All the craft workers repeatedly emphasized what Dan Curry told us: the ultimate goal of all their work was “to serve the story and entertain the audience.” Herman Zimmerman, with his considerable design experience, and acknowledged seniority within the production decision-making hierarchy, told us: “When I was first starting out I worked with a fellow named John Shrum, and he said you [as a production designer] provide a do-ityourself kit for the producer and the director. And you step back, because, if what you’re mostly interested in is your art, the thing that you have created, it’ll break your heart. Because what we do, important as it is, is background. All the drama is in front of the scenery.” It was the actors who provided that front-of-the scenery drama. While the writers were internally perceived as the most crucial players in the production process, externally the most high-profile workers were the actors. The next chapter addresses the creative autonomy of those who were the public face of Star Trek.

4. Actors: The Public Face of Star Trek

“Few Hollywood franchises can claim the popularity and durability of Star Trek. From the launch of the first television series in 1966, its various TV and movie incarnations have entertained millions around the world, made pop culture icons of characters like Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and turned actors such as William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Patrick Stewart into stars.”1 So states the Los Angeles Times web guide to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where not only Patrick Stewart (Picard in TNG), William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy (Kirk and Mr. Spock, TOS) but also LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge, TNG), James Doohan (Scotty, TOS), Whoopi Goldberg (Guinan, TNG), DeForest Kelly (McCoy, TOS), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura, TOS), George Takei (Sulu, TOS), and Gene Roddenberry have stars. In effect, the Los Angeles Times equates Star Trek with the actors who constitute the public face of the franchise. With the single exception of Roddenberry, none of the behind-the-scenes personnel whose contributions to the five television incarnations of Star Trek have been documented in the last two chapters has received an equivalent public commemoration. Roddenberry himself believed that audiences more readily recognize the actors’ contributions than those of other television workers: “When Picard makes a wonderful, thrilling statement, the audience will say . . . ‘isn’t he marvelous—isn’t he intelligent?’ And maybe ‘I would like to be like that.’ . . . They don’t say ‘Wow—isn’t that writer John Doe fabulous? . . . I would like to be like that.’ . . . It is the actors who carry the message.”2 But the actors would have had no message to carry without Michael Piller’s, Brannon Braga’s, and other writers’ words; without Robert Blackman’s costumes; without Michael Westmore’s makeup; without Herman Zimmerman’s, Michael Okuda’s, and Jim Mees’s sets; without Dan 106

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Curry’s visual effects; and without the coordinating oversight of Rick Berman, Merri Howard, and Peter Lauritson—to mention just a few of the key behind-the-scenes contributors. If, as Mark Deuze says, creative autonomy is the ability to make “more or less independent decisions in the creative process of producing media,”3 the actors had less creative autonomy than many of their colleagues. The actors garnered the lion’s share of public recognition, but behind the scenes they were often acted upon. While, as chapter 2 argued, all the Star Trek workers’ space for independent decision making depended upon relationships with the studio and the network, and their position in the production hierarchy, the actors’ creative autonomy most directly depended upon the combined inputs of all the above- and below-the-line workers who initially constructed the actors’ characters and contributed to the characters’ evolution across the course of a series. The actors themselves wrote nothing and made nothing; they performed other people’s words, wearing other people’s costumes on other people’s sets. For most of the actors, creative autonomy lay primarily in deciding how to say the words, wear the costumes, and interact with the sets. These decisions could, of course, have a significant impact upon characterization; it was the actors who ultimately had to bring their characters to life. Occasionally, actors did influence the decisions of those who wrote the words, made the costumes, and decorated the sets; below we delineate the circumstances under which this occurred. This chapter discusses the ways in which the constraints and enablers of creative autonomy came to bear on one category of worker at one point in the production process: the shooting of an episode. It addresses factors of particular relevance to the actors: the craftworkshop mode of production, the director, time, cast hierarchies, and the genre. We conclude by considering an enabler of creative autonomy specific to the actors: nonverbal performance.

actors within the craft-workshop mode of production The above-the-line workers, or at least the producers and the writers, have the greatest influence upon the actors’ characterizations. We discuss their interactions with cast members below, but this section focuses on the contributions of the craft workers; it also discusses the director, who in television, by contrast with cinema, does not have much power to affect the actors’ portrayal of their characters. As we demonstrated in the previous chapter, working together over long periods facilitates the collaborative production process. The craft workers’ ability to influence the

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actors can increase over the course of a long run as they become more familiar with the actors and their concerns and requirements. Costume designer Robert Blackman told us that working with the actors on a longterm basis made him very aware of their anxieties about costumes: “I’m very good at getting past things that actors are nervous about, that they’re afraid of, and getting them to see that you think that’s an issue, but it’s really not an issue. It may make you too uncomfortable to wear it but we ought to try once. And if it does, we’ll never do it again. But since we’re doing seven years of twenty-six episodes a year, why not have all of us experiment?” Blackman regularly persuaded the actors to experiment, particularly with new looks for their characters. But the experimental costumes, like all well-designed costumes, had to conform to the requirements of the actors, of television acting, and of the narrative. Blackman’s first task upon joining TNG in its third season was to reconceive the officers’ uniforms, originated by William Theiss, costume designer for TOS and TNG’s first season (Durinda Rice Wood was costume designer on TNG’s second season) and disliked by most of the cast. Blackman met with the actors before they went on their hiatus between the second and third seasons and talked to them about why they hated their “space suits” [the actors’ term for their Starfleet uniforms]. He learned that the costumes’ “jumbo Spandex” was causing problems: it retained odors (both body and cleaning fluid), and its lack of give made the costumes so uncomfortable that Patrick Stewart’s was pulling his back out of alignment. Blackman himself thought the design was not particularly suited to the needs of television acting. The old costumes had “these lines that are radiating out from the center and you’re looking at the lines, you’re not looking at the actor’s face,” he recalled. Televisual acting, as we discuss below, is heavily dependent upon facial expression. Blackman also thought that the uniforms were not suited to the nature of the characters: “I added the collar because I thought [the old ones] just looked like pajamas. They just needed more formality. They needed to be heroes.” A captain played by Patrick Stewart needed a particularly heroic costume: “I thought [this] because of his language, the way he spoke, and who the captain was. He was this very dignified man in pajamas.”4 Stewart confirmed that costume influenced his performance: It makes you feel a certain way. I know [a costume] affects the way I move, the way I sit, my attitudes and so forth, and the uniform for Picard was especially persuasive. You just have to stand in a certain way. And no pockets means you always have to find something for your hands to do or do nothing with them at all, which is usually the best

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thing to do. The costumes required a certain physical attitude all the time, and that helps to produce these appropriate feelings about being the character.5

Stewart’s comment on pockets shows how the small details added by the craft workers affect performance and produce appropriate feelings about being a character. Sets were as significant as the costumes. As set dresser Jim Mees told us, “[I]t was the personal items that developed the character that were much more important to the actors than more impersonal items such as furniture.” Mees told us that he thought his duty was to make the actors look good; for this reason he always consulted with the actors about the personal items in their quarters: “Whenever I’ve got to do a set, even if I’m given quite specific instructions from the producers or from Rick or whoever it is, I do go to the actor. So I remember many times having conversations with Marina [Sirtis] or Jonathan [Frakes] or LeVar [Burton, who played engineer Geordi La Forge], who was supposed to be blind, but, you know, still had to have some sensibility of the space he was in.” Mees worked closely with Brent Spiner (Data) on his character’s development over the show’s seven-year run: “Brent’s character has progressed so much from what it was in the beginning, and we always work that through.” Data’s quarters originally contained only a desk and a computer, but “as he had a quest to become more human, we had to keep bringing in more things.” Mees recollected his initial discussions with the Enterprise actors about their characters’ quarters. He talked at length with Jolene Blalock, who played T’Pol, the Vulcan first officer, and Scott Bakula, who played Captain Jonathan Archer: Her quarters on our ship are only about ten by twelve. It’s a little space. And she is supposed to have been one of these people who doesn’t really care about possessions. The few things that she could have physically brought on the ship with her need to have come from the Vulcan planet. So if you were only allowed to take two things with you, what two things would those be? But that’s how we had to approach all of them. The same thing with Scott [Bakula]’s quarters. Scott’s quarters are very small, they’re very precise, and so I worked with him and Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] over what those things could be. He could have three photographs with him, he could have a personal memento from when he was a kid. Basically we wanted to present him as a person, and each thing has a very specific reason.6

One aspect of the sets—the twenty-fourth-century technology represented by Michael Okuda’s graphics—could prove particularly challenging

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to the actors. Okuda sometimes had to explain the workings of that technology to actors wanting to make their performances more convincing: Patrick Stewart has on a couple of occasions said, “I need to do this, I want to make sure that I’m doing this in a believable way.” I remember one specific time I said, “Well, just punch a few buttons there and there.” And Patrick said, “No, no, I want to know what does this do?” And fortunately, on that particular occasion, it was something where I had actually thought about how you would do this. So I said, “OK, you tap this and then you do this to activate the system and then you enter the coordinates in this.”

Okuda had a similar conversation with Marina Sirtis, who, as the counselor, didn’t often interface with the technology: “Marina Sirtis had a particularly complex thing that she needed to do, and she was afraid that it might not come across credibly. And I explained to her that the control panels were software defined, which means that the panel reconfigures itself to whatever the task at hand is. And she thought about it and said, ‘Oh, OK, that makes sense.’ My giving the help to her—I think it made her feel more at ease with what she was doing.”7

the “traffic director” The craft workers collaborated with the actors in the construction of their characters, as did the producers and the writers to some extent, but there was one above-the-line worker who had less direct impact. In the theater and the cinema, directors have considerable power to shape an actor’s performance, but television directors lack the time or incentive to work with the actors.8 William Shatner told us that a television director’s reputation is based on sticking to a shooting schedule, not on quality of output: Most television directors are traffic directors. If they can bring their show in, on or under budget, or under time, they’ll be rehired. And if the show is lousy, everyone throws up their hands and says, “Well, you know, so-and-so [actor] was really bad in that” or “It was not a very good script.” Nobody blames the director for lack of vision because he doesn’t have time for vision. What he has time for is to set the camera up, “You sit there, I’ll shoot you, now you don’t move, I’ll turn the camera over there, same lighting, I’ll shoot you.”9

Winrich Kolbe, who directed forty-eight episodes of the post-TOS series, including the Voyager pilot, “The Caretaker,” confirmed that directors don’t have much impact on the production process: “Only in the pilot does a director have anything to say. In regular television, you walk on the set, the regular cast is there, the regular writers are there, the standing sets are

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there. The only option I have is whether I want to have one camera or two cameras. That’s a matter of money.”10 The director had no incentive to address details of performance, while the actors believed that, having spent several years playing their roles, they knew their characters better than the directors. Patrick Stewart said: “So far as the seven of us that were with the series through to the end were concerned, there was nothing to rehearse because it would take a brave director to tell us what we should do, because very quickly we knew better than anybody else.”11 Jonathan Frakes directed several TNG episodes; when making the transition from actor to director, he was well aware that his fellow actors thought that they “knew better than anyone else.” He told us: “I often use people’s ideas. I think they make my shows better, because Brent has great ideas, Patrick has great ideas, and LeVar has great ideas. They know these characters. Directors who believe that their way is the only way are missing an opportunity.”12 Frakes also directed two of the four TNG feature films, First Contact and Insurrection, while the first, Generations, was helmed by David Carson, who had previously directed several TNG episodes. But for Nemesis, Paramount, hoping to reinvigorate the franchise, brought in action-film director Stuart Baird (US Marshalls [1998] and Executive Decision [1996]). Our interviewees told us that Baird’s attempts to influence their performances caused some conflicts. Marina Sirtis, although at first inclined to reject Baird’s input, did eventually find it helpful: This time we have a director who really wants to make his mark on the Star Trek universe and he has opinions. I don’t know how the others are dealing with it, but I’m actually having to adapt to his ideas a little. He’s making choices for my character that I wouldn’t necessarily make myself. I’ve decided to kind of go with it and see, because my instinct has been to immediately go, ‘No, that’s wrong.’ But I’ve found that when I started to try what he wanted, it kind of worked.13

Directors of feature films have much greater creative autonomy than television directors; they can use it to override the actors’ creative autonomy by having them make choices for their characters that the actors wouldn’t normally make. But television directors don’t possess the creative autonomy to override the actors, partly because they are constrained by the time pressures faced by all the workers.

time As we demonstrated in chapter 2, all the production personnel had to contend with the dual constrains of time and the budget. Budgetary constraints

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affected the actors only indirectly; decisions as to the allocation of the pattern budget were made by the producers in coordination with the other behind-the-scenes workers. But time constraints had a direct effect upon the actors’ creative autonomy. It takes months to rehearse a play or shoot a feature film and weeks to shoot a television film or miniseries. These relatively long time periods afford opportunities for the actors’ input into their characters’ construction. But the Star Trek shooting schedule of seven to eight days limited these opportunities. In an example of the production continuities between the classic network and multichannel eras, time pressures remained a constant. Speaking in 1968 while TOS was still on the air, Leonard Nimoy said: “Time to cogitate, to digest or to live with an idea before committing it to film is strictly forbidden. . . . On the Star Trek set we’ve actually had rewrites arrive seconds and even minutes after the scene had been shot.”14 While none of our TNG interviewees mentioned getting scripts after a scene had been shot, they nonetheless told us that they had relatively little time to learn their lines. Brannon Braga said, “[The actors] get the script, they’re shooting the script, and then on the last day of that episode, they get the script for the next episode and then they go right into that. When they rehearse it, they’re rehearsing it right before the scene is shot. It’s intensely high-pressure. It’s nonstop.”15 Time constraints make working in television in some respects more challenging than working in the theater or the cinema. William Shatner characterized his three years of TOS as a “workaday struggle, learning all those lines every day, learning the next day’s lines every day. You have to be completely prepared, you have to know every one of your lines, you have to know exactly what you want to do with those lines, where your character’s going, what you’re doing, how you’re going to do it.” If the actor doesn’t know his lines or where his character’s going, he won’t get much help when he arrives on the set. Unlike their theatrical and cinematic counterparts, television actors in long-form series such as Star Trek have minimal rehearsal; unlike their cinematic counterparts they need to get the shot right on the first take since retakes waste time and cost money. Asked about rehearsals for TNG, Patrick Stewart responded: “We would rehearse a scene in that we would walk onto the set and go through the lines and the moves, but basically that would be it. This would be done very, very quickly.”16 Shatner’s and Stewart’s pre–Star Trek careers predisposed them to respond differently to television’s demands. Both actors began their careers in the classical theater, but whereas Shatner soon concentrated on television, Stewart remained primarily a stage actor until getting the Picard role in his late forties. Shatner found televi-

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sion’s pace exhilarating: “There is in television an excitement, an immediacy, a bravura if you will, because you know that if you miss a line, they’ll give you the line right away, you go with it, you stay in the mood, in the tempo, and it can be exciting.” Stewart, by contrast, discovered that the medium’s hectic schedule denied him some of the pleasures of theatrical performance: “I’ve often found, as many actors have, that the rehearsal process was as enjoyable as the performance. Rehearsal was a whole section of my life that ceased to exist . . . that investigative process, that building a character.”17 Television’s fast-paced production means that character building takes place not in rehearsal but through an accumulation of episodes. (Chapter 6 elaborates upon this point.) This is television’s temporal paradox: actors spend far less time shooting each episode than they would mounting a play or shooting a film but, over the course of a long-running series, spend far more time with a character than they would in the theater or the cinema. The sheer length of long-form television drama can create space for the actor’s input. Stewart described television’s character-building process: I began to feel that I was not making individual episodes in themselves. That I was telling a story that had an unknown number of scenes or moments, and that each episode represented a scene. The arc of Picard would not be complete until the camera rolled for the last time and the end of the story would have been told. Wherever you stopped it, that would have been Picard’s story. It was always moving forward—that’s why I was always finding things. I made myself a promise early on that I would try to introduce something original into every single episode, a gesture or an attitude or some aspect of his life that hadn’t been seen before, just to keep something fresh always occurring.

The duration of long-form television drama initially enabled Stewart’s creativity but eventually constrained it. Over the course of TNG’s 178 episodes, Stewart found revealing new aspects of the character increasingly difficult, and finally “there came a point when there really was nothing more to be said about him or new to be done.” Stewart became frustrated at the absence of “the process of investigation and analysis” that he had been accustomed to in the theater and felt relief when Paramount decided to end the series after seven years and transfer the cast to the big screen.18 It’s not only the fear of typecasting or the chance of a film career that causes actors to leave long-running series; it’s sheer boredom. Contributing to a character’s narrative arc helps to alleviate boredom, but it requires access to the writers and producers; Stewart had the power to demand this access, but for the most part, his fellow cast members did not.

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hierarchies As we argued in chapter 2, positioning within workplace hierarchies is a strong determinant of creative autonomy. The same holds true for the actors, although in the case of Star Trek the production hierarchy mapped onto the fictional military hierarchy: captains came first. Herman Zimmerman told us how the very design of the Enterprise’s bridge emphasized the captain’s centrality. Originally, the TNG bridge was oval with “a big oval conference table,” but that lacked dynamism. Worse, “it didn’t give the captain precedence. And one of the things that Gene was really regretting, but then he realized that he had no other choice, was the star of the series had to be the captain. He wanted every one of the crew members to be the star . . . but always the captain has to have the last word, and the captain has to have the bulk of the action or the audience is confused.”19 William Shatner told TV Guide during the first season of TOS, “I’ve gotten great insight into the omnipotence of the series’ lead. . . . It’s an almost unique position few in the entertainment world achieve . . . it’s like absolute power.”20 Stewart put it even more succinctly: “There are aspects of being the captain which benefit me.”21 The actor’s status within the cast is an important determinant of creative autonomy, with those playing the central roles perforce having greater creative input than those playing secondary characters. Accustomed from the theater to the investigative process of building a character, Stewart took full advantage of the star’s/captain’s status to lobby for his version of Picard. In TNG’s second season—marked, as we said in chapter 2, by conflict and turnover on the writing staff—Stewart complained about Picard’s development and the writers’ disregard of previously established traits. A letter to Gene Roddenberry outlined Stewart’s conception of the character: “Picard is leader, negotiator, peacemaker, ombudsman. He thinks, he talks, he assesses, he bluffs.” Stewart felt that Picard should display more humor and get involved in action sequences.22 During our first interview with Stewart, we asked whether he had encouraged the writers to explore different aspects of the Picard character: “In that I used to yell and shout when things weren’t very good, yes, if you can call that encouragement. But I never worked directly with the writers on the scripts. The producers would not have allowed that.” It would seem, however, that he did sometimes work directly with the craft workers. Blackman told us that costume design is always a collaboration with the actors but that the nature of the collaboration changed as the actors got “more confident and more power in their position.” Unlike the other six regular members of the

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ensemble cast, Stewart had the power to ask for specific and distinct costumes for his character. Blackman commented: “Later we went into civilian clothes. We started doing the heroic stuff on him so that he could feel more heroic and less tight.” Production hierarchies determine who most directly regulates the actor’s degree of input into the character; in American television this task falls to the showrunner rather than the writer or the director. Stewart said: “I did talk every day to Rick Berman about the scripts. I don’t think a day passed that he and I didn’t have some conversation about the current script. And he was always tremendously supportive of what I was trying to do, encouraging.” But Stewart couldn’t change his dialogue without Berman’s permission: “You always had to get approval. No director was allowed to roll the camera if there’d been a script change without its being given the Rick Berman seal of approval.” With Berman’s permission, Stewart regularly changed Picard’s dialogue to make it truer to his conception of the character or of Star Trek: “Any scene of any substance that I played throughout the seven years would somewhere in it have some tweakings or fine-tunings from me.” Asked for examples, Stewart mentioned the second-season episode “Measure of a Man” (2:9), in which Starfleet wants to dismantle Data to see what makes him tick. Picard defends the android, arguing that he is a sentient life form entitled to self-determination: “There is a speech in there that I have about slavery, and Whoopi [Goldberg, who played Guinan] and I pretty much put that together between us. Let me be absolutely clear that the subject matter of the scene was the writers’, but the intensifying that theme and the specific words that I said very much belonged to me, and some of it came out of Whoopi as well, as I remember.”23 We interviewed Stewart for the second time during the filming of Star Trek: Nemesis, having a breakfast meeting with him on the morning of the day that he was to film a scene between Picard and Data that takes place after Riker and Troi’s marriage. Stewart had spent the previous night “tweaking” the Nemesis script and was about to seek Berman’s approval for his changes to the “two-and-a-half, three-page scene,” which was “very significant because it anticipates what happens at the end of the movie—in a kind of personal and philosophical way.” Although Stewart was speaking of the feature film, he said that his input into the scene was “actually very typical of the way things at the studio used to go” in the TNG days: I started learning it last night and thought, “I’ve got so much dialogue here.” I started doing tweaks, all the way through, making cuts because I thought the scene was a bit too long. It was to absolutely authenticate Picard’s voice because I realized that it doesn’t feel right for Jean-Luc

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Picard. For instance, when I open the bottle of wine, John Logan [the scriptwriter] has written the line “Batten down the hatches,” and you don’t need to say that. It implies that they’re going to have a heavy night of drinking—absolutely inappropriate. And so today Rick and I will find half an hour or more when we go through all this, as we used to do daily on the series, especially when I had big scenes. And it was always looking for this authentic sound that was Picard and, of course, one that I thought was more interesting.24

Stewart’s example illustrates how the familiarity with a character made possible by the extended run of series television drama affords actors insights that they might not have over the course of a single feature film. When we saw the film, we noted that Berman had green-lighted Stewart’s emendations. The scene worked well on the screen, seeming to us closer to the television characters and their relationships than much of the rest of the film. When asked whether others in the TNG cast had the same opportunities to contribute to their characters, Stewart confirmed that status is a powerful determinant: “I think leading actors in series have done that [changed dialogue] a lot. They can do it because they have the power to do it. It was not always as easy for my colleagues to do that. More often they were told shut up and say what’s in the script. It was easier for me.”25 Lesser ranks also sought to protect their visions of their characters, but lack of clearly defined star status sometimes militated against their success. During TOS’s third season, Leonard Nimoy had frequent conflicts with Fred Freiberger, who had taken over from Roddenberry as executive producer. For example, in the episode “All Our Yesterdays” (3:23), in which Kirk and Spock are transplanted to an ice-age planet, Spock acts in a most un-Vulcan-like manner, not only falling in love with a woman but violating Vulcan vegetarianism and eating meat. Nimoy felt that Spock “would never permit himself to behave in such a manner.” Freiberger agreed, and the writers inserted a few lines explaining that Spock’s transportation to the past had caused him to revert to primitive behavior.26 But relations between actor and producer deteriorated, and the frustrated Nimoy went over Freiberger’s head, writing to Gene Roddenberry and studio head Doug Cramer to complain about efforts to change Spock’s image. A scene in “Whom Gods Destroy” (3:14), in which Spock has to decide which Kirk is real and which an impostor, particularly incensed Nimoy. In the past, said Nimoy in his memo, Spock could have quickly resolved the situation through a Vulcan mind-meld, but now “he is unable to cleverly, dramatically, or fascinatingly arrive at a solution.”27 In “Star Trek” Memories, William Shatner reproduces Nimoy’s memo but also recounts an interview with Freiberger. Freiberger acknowledged

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that Nimoy’s concerns with regard to “All Our Yesterdays” had been valid but felt that the actor’s expectations of control over his character were incommensurate with his position in the cast. At one meeting, Freiberger reminded Nimoy that Shatner was the star, but the actor “insisted that he was a co-star of equal stature.” Nimoy’s belief in his equal stature, thought Freiberger, was the basis of their misunderstandings. As Shatner explains. “Although the Spock character was heavily involved in almost all of our episodes, the ‘star’ of a show would have gotten more emphasis.” After this meeting, Freiberger phoned Roddenberry for clarification. Shatner recalls Freiberger saying, “It was my understanding that Bones and Spock were very important but that Kirk was the star . . . Roddenberry assured me that my original understanding was accurate.”28 Freiberger believed that the desire for more screen time motivated Nimoy. The actor himself asserted that he was simply striving for character consistency: I thought it was my responsibility to look after the character. You see, after a television series has been on the air for a period of time, the staff will undergo a good deal of turnover. Writers, directors and producers all come and go; only the actors, usually, remain. So the actor is ultimately the “keeper of the flame” for his or her character. It often falls to the actor to point out to incoming producers and directors any inconsistencies in the character. . . . If the actor doesn’t take on the responsibility, a character “drift” is likely to take place, and not necessarily for the better.29

Nimoy’s successor as first officer, Jonathan Frakes, also had producer problems, since Gene Roddenberry’s conception of the Riker character did not necessarily play to his acting strengths: “One of the things he wanted was for me not to smile, and for Jonathan Frakes not to smile is really a tough chore. He used to insist that Riker has a military bearing, and a derring-do, and he wanted a Gary Cooper, midwestern stare. And I used to have that physicalization of looking like I had a stick up my ass.” In the second season, perhaps aware that fans disliked the character and had nicknamed him “Will the Stick,” Roddenberry, together with Berman and first-season producer Morris Hurley, “allowed a little more Frakes to slide into Riker. So, I was able to smile. I started to play the trombone in the show. And they wrote to that a little bit. I sort of incorporated a kind of a John Wayne mien, and walk, into it, so I had a little more laconic kind of a cowboy thing going on.” Frakes, like many actors in long-running shows, drew on aspects of his own personality to round out his character and emphasize Riker’s humor and playfulness. These character traits became more pronounced in the two

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Frakes-directed features, First Contact and Insurrection, during the production of which Frakes, as director as well as costar, had greater autonomy than in the television series. Status is determined by not only televisual but cultural expectations, with gender being a key factor. Female characters, even captains, had to exhibit greater conformity with gender norms than did the male characters, particularly with regard to appearance, as Canadian actor Geneviève Bujold found during her brief association with the franchise. Originally cast as the captain of Voyager, Bujold quit a short while into the shooting of the pilot, “Caretaker.” During her brief time in command she had to endure constant changes of hairstyle as the producers sought to solve the culturally imposed conundrum of a female character’s being simultaneously authoritative and attractive. Winrich Kolbe, director of “Caretaker” told us about the “hair problem”: For some odd reason, the gods had not quite figured out what kind of hairdo Captain Janeway would be wearing. I remember one scene where she comes on the bridge with one hairdo, then we shot a close-up with another hairdo, then she leaves and there’s a third hairdo. And then we cut to the following scene where she comes down the hallway, and the fourth hairdo. They were futzing around with her hair, and then finally we got it. I think they switched it later on. I think there must have been just, you know, an assault on femininity, because nobody would have dared do it with a man. But with a woman, [you] always have to futz around with her hair. Is it up, is it down, is it black, is it brown? I think we spent five days to just reshoot for hair.30

Kate Mulgrew, Bujold’s successor, also suffered from the hair problem, her coiffure frequently altering during Voyager’s seven-year run. Marina Sirtis, ship’s counselor Deanna Troi on TNG, had her creative autonomy constrained not only by being lower down the fictional chain of command than Mulgrew, but also by her designation as the show’s “babe,” the female character intended to appeal to the male adolescent (or males with adolescent inclinations). Having felt unattractive as a teenager, Sirtis generally relished being the babe, although she did find one aspect of the role objectionable: “I was happy to be the babe, less happy to be the object in Rick’s office being poked and prodded. I was literally put in the costume, and then, ‘Go and show Rick.’ I stood there like a nonperson almost, while they decided how I was going to look.” Acutely aware of her position in the cast hierarchy, Sirtis rarely fought for input: Pretty early on I realized that there was a pecking order on Star Trek. And I realized that I really didn’t have an awful lot of power. I never

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was comfortable asking for changes—questioning the authority figures, if you like. I kind of left that to Patrick and Brent. I felt they had more clout. The only time that I ever really made a phone call to Rick was if it was so obvious that they’d been going through the script, and they thought, “Oh, look, Troi hasn’t said anything in ten pages, let’s give her one of Data’s lines.” And I would call and say, “Either fix it to make it a Troi line, or just give it back to Data or Geordi or whoever it is.

But lesser status, whether televisually or culturally determined, doesn’t always debar actors from input into their characters; actors with enough interest and initiative can influence producers and writers. Said Brannon Braga: Typically, some actors are more vocal than others. . . . Early on, you hear very little, but as the show progresses, over the season, you hear more and more feedback, because they get more comfortable with their characters and they start coming up with ideas. For instance, on Voyager, I would hear from Bob Picardo [the holographic doctor] every week. I’d sometimes find him lurking outside my office door. But Robert Beltrane [Chakotay] seemed totally disinterested in the show. I tried to get him to talk about his character, but I don’t think he really felt comfortable doing that.

A Star Trek Monthly interview with Max Grodénchik (Rom in DS9) confirmed that even actors playing semiregular characters become comfortable and start coming up with ideas: “As the character expands and the actor keeps bringing something to it, new and more interesting facets can be written. I have sometimes asked the writers what they meant by a certain line, to see how I should play it. They would always take the trouble to discuss it with me, and once I had that understanding it was easier to do the material. Or sometimes they’d say, ‘You know what, Max, you’re right. It doesn’t make sense the way we have it.’ ”31 Sirtis made the rare phone call to Berman, while other actors such as Picardo and Grodénchik talked to the writers; but, as permitted by his status within the chain of command, Stewart regularly talked to Berman about altering his dialogue.

genre The science fiction genre was to some extent an enabler or constrainer of all the behind-the-scenes workers’ creative autonomy. Dan Curry and Michael Westmore delighted in the challenges it presented to their fertile minds, while some of the writers simply couldn’t adjust to its conventions. The

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same was true for the actors. Stewart and Sirtis adapted to acting in science fiction by believing in the universe and making it believable for viewers, but others never felt entirely at ease in the genre. Above, we quoted Brannon Braga saying that Robert Beltrane seemed “disinterested in the show” and didn’t want to talk about his character. The actor explained his attitude in an interview in Starburst: The writers are very open to ideas, but my problem is that because I don’t think in terms of Science Fiction, I’m hindered in being able to come up with inventive ideas. . . . Science Fiction is not one of my favorite genres . . . I prefer to let the writers do the writing, because they seem to be more in the frame of mind than I am. . . . As far as the general arc of my character is concerned, I guess that I should get more involved, but I honestly have very few ideas of my own. In another genre, I’d probably be more creative.32

The complexity of the Star Trek universe may have partly accounted for Beltrane’s reluctance to get involved and certainly accounts for the executive producer’s closely monitoring dialogue changes. Patrick Stewart told us: “I know of shows where there’s a terrific amount of almost improvisation. With science fiction it’s hard. You’ve got to get the technobabble right.”33 The demands upon Star Trek actors to operate the technology in a credible fashion or “get the technobabble right” aren’t necessarily specific to the science fiction genre; ER actors, for example, had to convincingly deliver reams of high-speed medical babble and manipulate life-saving equipment. But Star Trek actors faced a further set of challenges posed by the nonrealist universes of the science fiction and fantasy genres. As Winrich Kolbe put it, “There’s a lot of make-believe. If Picard welcomes a nonexistent alien, it’s kind of tough. How do you act to that person? Is he wider than he is tall?” The nonexistent alien would be realized only in postproduction, but the cast had to imagine his presence and interact with or react to him. The actors got better at this over the run of the series. Kolbe went on: “When I came into The Next Generation all the guys knew already what they had to do with the blue screen [the ship’s view screen] ahead of them. But when you have a new cast, like on Voyager, it’s an interesting challenge to actors, because they now suddenly have to imagine things. It’s my job to tell them what they imagine.” Here, at least, an experienced Star Trek director seemed to have a useful function for the actors, serving as the liaison between them and the visualeffects staff who designed what eventually appeared on the view screen. The director also helped the actors to respond to the impact of photon torpedoes

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and other weapons. All the Star Trek casts, Kolbe pointed out, had to internalize a carefully calibrated set of “ship-shake” staggers to convey their starship’s instability: “If the camera goes this way, the ship goes the other way, so they have to make those movements. The ship shakes. One, two, three.” Conveying a character’s thoughts and feelings while burdened with the elaborate and often cumbersome wigs, makeup and costumes of the science fiction/fantasy genres poses yet another challenge for actors. Michael Westmore—who, as the supervising makeup designer, was responsible for some of the discomfort that Star Trek actors regularly had to go through in being made up as aliens—told us a story about one of his favorite makeup jobs on an actor who had a part as an android in TNG ’s “The Offspring” (3:16): The actor couldn’t see, he had thick contact lenses on. . . . The rubber head that he had came right over his ears, because the character had no ears. He had no nose, so he couldn’t smile. He had a mouth that was down here. . . . He had a rubber chest on, and we built a rubber diaper for him, since he couldn’t go to the bathroom all day once he got put into his appliance. And then once we glued all this on, we painted him all this coppery gold color. And there he was. It took four hours to get him in, he’d work a twelve-hour day, and it would take about an hour and a half to pull it off at night. During that entire time, he wouldn’t eat or drink and he really couldn’t lay down. But he was a dancer, and he was very strong.34

Imaginary aliens and cumbersome costumes made acting in Star Trek different from acting in ER, but there is a more general distinction between acting in science fiction/fantasy and in a realist drama. Performance in most television drama is suited to the intimate, close-up, domestic nature of the medium—cool, low-key, realist. But the epic quality of some science fiction or fantasy programs requires the greater intensity of a theatrical-performance mode.35 In Get a Life, William Shatner reveals the motivation for his oftparodied over-the-top performances: There’s actually a pretty valid reason for all that scenery chewing. . . . When you’re an actor standing around in a cardboard-and-Christmaslight starship . . . you can never be too sure that your scripted lines won’t just seem completely ridiculous. It often seemed to me that without all of Kirk’s emotion, and intensity and high-octane handwringing, our villains of the week might have seemed more ridiculous than frightening; the ship’s crisis of the week might have seemed a lot less threatening were Kirk not up in arms.36

Robert Justman agreed that Shatner’s acting style precisely matched the needs of the original series. In the first pilot, film actor Jeffrey Hunter

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(perhaps best known as Jesus in Nicholas Ray’s 1961 King of Kings) had played Captain Christopher Pike. Justman thought that Hunter “was too brooding, too turned inward. He didn’t have any energy.” By contrast Shatner, who “has incredible energy,” was “a brilliant job of recasting.”37 The “brilliant” recasting may have resulted in part from the fact that Shatner had theatrical experience while Hunter did not. As with the craft workers, the actors’ professional training and experience engendered their creative autonomy; it prepared them for acting in the genre and enhanced the producers’ respect for their capabilities. Patrick Stewart landed the Picard role almost by accident when Justman, then developing TNG with Roddenberry, saw him give a reading at the University of California, Los Angeles. Although Justman was immediately impressed, he told us that “it took months to get to Gene,” who opposed Stewart’s casting. Roddenberry had wanted a hairy Frenchman in the role of the new Enterprise captain, and Justman offered a bald Englishman. Justman tried to persuade Roddenberry to consider Stewart with a memo detailing the actor’s previous experience: “I am enthusiastic about the highly skilled British actor Patrick Stewart, who recently arrived in Los Angeles. I have seen him read Shakespeare and Noel Coward. His abilities are of the highest order. He is totally believable as either warm friend or icy villain. His repertoire experience and classical background, coupled with his personal magnetism, would make him a valuable leading member of the Enterprise crew.” Stewart’s Shakespearean background was one of the factors that persuaded Roddenberry to give him a screen test; it also fed into the characterization of Captain Picard, who frequently quoted Shakespeare and kept a copy of the Globe Shakespeare in his quarters, as Stewart exercised his influence upon the writers and the set dresser. William Shatner told us that his theatrical training contributed to his portrayal of the heroic Kirk because it had taught him “to sustain a scene, learn your lines, discipline, techniques, confidence—all of that is theatrical.” Producer Wendy Neuss, who worked with the actors on postproduction dialogue recording, echoed Shatner’s sentiments: “You need classical training to do well. We got some guest actors who were very iffy, we got some very, very good ones, and we got some very weak ones. And I think the ones who were good were the ones who had technical training, like stage training, and the ones who had trouble with the voice had maybe just done television or film.”38 Numerous actors among the regular casts and the guest stars had theatrical backgrounds: John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox on Enterprise); Rene Auberjonois (Odo on DS9); Avery Brooks (Captain Sisko on DS9); Robert Picardo (the holographic doctor on Voyager); Kate Mulgrew; Nana Visitor (Kira Nerys on

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DS9); and others. Many of the actors have told interviewers that playing Shakespeare was a particularly useful preparation for Star Trek’s epic tone. Patrick Stewart said: “In the early years of the series, it was perpetually suggested to me that I might be slumming or selling out by coming to Hollywood to do this television series—that in some way, I was betraying my Royal Shakespeare Company past. . . . All the time I spent sitting around on the thrones of England as various Shakespearean kings was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain’s chair on the Enterprise.”39 Robert Duncan McNeil, who played Voyager’s Tom Paris, had a great deal of stage experience before entering the Star Trek universe. McNeil has said that he’d “always [been] particularly interested in classic stories: Shakespeare, Greek drama, classical theatre. So when I got on this show, I kind of felt a sense of déjà vu. The style of the show is very classical; the stories are big and mythic in proportion and really exciting to do.”40 A Shakespearean background is apparently especially helpful for actors playing Klingons. Robert O’Reilly, Klingon chancellor Gowron in TNG and DS9, said: “It helps to have done a lot of Shakespeare. Shakespeare lends itself to being a Klingon.”41 Richard Herd, L’Kor in TNG, agreed: “I’d done a bunch of Shakespeare when I was younger. . . . So I found L’Kor very Shakespearean. I wouldn’t say that we were playing the Klingons as Shakespearean characters, but L’Kor reminded me of a Shakespearean character, just in the way he was a warrior, the way he carried himself, and the clothing.”42 Of course, Shakespeare and Klingons have a natural affinity: Hamlet has been translated into Klingon, and Christopher Plummer (himself an iconic former Hamlet) quoted from it in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer, 1991).

nonverbal performance Producers and writers exert great control over actors’ dialogue; only the most privileged or aggressive actors can make changes. But the speed of television production, with no time for retakes, ensures that no one exercises much control over the nonverbal aspects of actors’ performances—meanings they can convey through looks and glances, facial expressions, and gestures not present in the scripts. For example, Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, annoyed by the writers’ dropping the romantic relationship between Riker and Troi established in the first season, kept it going through nonverbal means. Said Frakes: “They had made such a big deal of it in the pilot and then essentially brushed it under the table. Marina and I refused to let it go. We always believed that our two characters were still in love with each other, and that would inform our behavior in scenes, and we’d often have meaningful

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looks, or we’d be together in social functions on the ship. We decided, without the writers’ help, that we would maintain this thing.” In this instance, Frakes and Sirtis exercised their creative autonomy independently of the other workers. Viewers picked up on the visual cues, and the Riker/Troi relationship, according to research that Frakes had seen, became “a very popular element of Star Trek: The Next Generation.”43 Like Frakes, Patrick Stewart wondered why the writers seemed to have abandoned his character’s romantic relationship—in Picard’s case, with ship’s doctor Beverly Crusher: “I know there is a school of thought that a Picard/Crusher relationship never existed, but I am a little puzzled by this as I spent hours in front of the camera last season assuming—and acting—that it did.”44 For example, in the first-season episode “Angel One,” a virus incapacitates most of the crew, including the captain. Crusher comes to care for Picard in his quarters, where he languishes in bed. As she raises his head to the cup to administer the liquid antidote, he gives her what can only be described as a yearning look that alone makes clear Picard’s unspoken feelings. Facial expression is perhaps the most important component of a screen actor’s nonverbal repertoire. Asked about the difference between stage and screen techniques, Stewart replied: What’s interesting about film is that film can record thinking, which the stage can’t do. The camera can show thought processes. The actor has to think. If you think, the camera will see it. The famous instance is of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina when the director told her to think of nothing and so we then superimpose on that nothingness our experience of the entire film, so it’s brilliant. However, I don’t believe that story that the actress was thinking of nothing, because it’s not possible. He was encouraging her not to do something.45

The smaller screen size makes facial expression even more important in television than in the cinema; much of television consists of close-ups of the actors’ faces. As has been the case since the classical editing system’s establishment in the silent cinema, narratively central characters are accorded the greatest number of close-ups. Star Trek priveleged the captains over all other characters; many scenes, particularly those before commercial breaks, ended with a reaction shot of the star. Whatever the actor was thinking or not thinking, the viewer probably inferred that the captain was planning a course of action, since that’s the character’s narrative role. Other character’s narrative roles warranted reaction shots as well. Marina Sirtis didn’t ask for more dialogue partly because she knew that her character would get a fair number of reaction shots; these dialogue-less shots showed captains planning and empathic counselors feeling: “I did a lot of what we call, jokingly, face

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acting. Reacting acting. I got a lot of screen time making faces, so it didn’t matter to me so much that I wasn’t actually saying anything.” Experienced and accomplished actors such as Patrick Stewart use nonverbal performance to augment the script and round out their characters. In scenes set in the captain’s ready room, for example, Picard would often toy with a stylus-shaped crystal. Stewart used this and the other small props on the captain’s desk to convey the captain’s state of mind. Said Stewart: “I used to make those choices if I was trying to show some sort of state of mind because for the most part Picard tended to be rather passive—or focused really, rather than passive.” Stewart told us that he did this to make [Picard] seem more complex than perhaps he really was. I think that’s quite a commonplace technique—that if there is a tendency in a character, it’s more interesting to conceal the tendency and disguise it as something else which may not be as authentic as the tendency itself and so something immediately becomes multilayered. When I go to watch actors act, the kind of people I like to watch are those who are all suggesting that there’s more than one thing going on, which there always is in all our lives. I tended to be very secretive with Picard— often not show what he was thinking or feeling but . . . submerge behind duty and responsibility and so forth.46

This chapter began by quoting Gene Roddenberry: “It is the actors who carry the message.” That message would not have existed without the combined efforts of all the behind-the-scenes personnel, but the performances of Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, and the other actors added extra dimensions to that message. The scriptwriters had not dictated that Picard be “very secretive”; it was Stewart’s choice to conceal the character’s thoughts behind the facade of duty and responsibility. The actors as themselves were (and still are) the public face of Star Trek; the actors as their characters drew millions of viewers to the various Star Trek series each week. Those viewers did not watch to see more of Blackman’s costumes or Okuda’s graphics but to spend time with familiar and beloved characters within the familiar and beloved Star Trek storyworld. The following two chapters explore the narrative operations of that storyworld and the narrative construction of those characters. Having analyzed the production process, in chapters 5 and 6 we will conduct a close textual analysis, grounded within knowledge of that production process and aided by theories of narratology.

5. World Building

“We build planets, we build spaceships, we build everything,” construction coordinator Tom Arp told us.1 Arp meant this literally: the construction crews built planets from wood, plaster, and paint, but only after the writers had first built those planets in words. The writers built not only planets but a narrative world encompassing several centuries, four “quadrants” of the galaxy, and alternate universes and timelines. Jeffrey Sconce notes the importance of world building to contemporary American television: U.S. television has devoted increased attention in the past two decades to crafting and maintaining ever more complex narrative universes, a form of “world building” that has allowed for wholly new modes of narration and that suggests new forms of audience engagement. Television . . . has discovered that the cultivation of its story worlds (diegesis) is as crucial an element of its success as storytelling. What television lacks in spectacle and narrative constraints, it makes up for in depth and duration of character relations, diegetic expansion, and audience investment. A commercial series that succeeds in the U.S. system ends up generating hundreds of hours of programming, allowing for an often quite sophisticated and complex elaboration of character and story world.2

Matt Hills, in an attempt to define “cult television,” makes a similar point. Cult texts typically create “detailed, expansive diegetic worlds (or even universes). . . . There is a sense in which what we see on screen is only a part of a much wider narrative world, always implying further events and developments.”3 Hills labels the expansion of diegetic worlds “hyperdiegesis,” but we prefer Sconce’s more evocative “world building.” Many television shows now make a conscious effort to build worlds that, as Sconce says, “viewers gradually feel they inhabit along with the characters.”4 126

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Sconce dates this world building to the 1980s, but if, as chapter 1 demonstrates, Star Trek was often an industrial trendsetter, it was also a narrative trendsetter. Roddenberry and the TOS scriptwriters began building the Star Trek world in the 1960s; as so often, Star Trek both got there first and rendered the typical atypical.5

sustaining a narrative world Gene Coon, a coproducer and writer on TOS, spoke of Roddenberry’s world building in words that, consciously or not, sound like the book of Genesis: Gene created a totally new universe. He invented a starship, which works, by the way, and is a logical progression from what we know today. He created customs, morals, modes of speaking, a complete technology. . . . We know how fast we can go. We know what we use for fuel. We know what our weapons will do. And Gene invented all these things. . . . He created an entire galaxy and an entire rule book for operating within that galaxy, with very specific laws governing behavior, manners, customs as well as science and technology. He created a universe and it works, and it works well. This was a massive titanic job of creation, one of the most impressive feats of its kind that I’ve ever seen.6

Roddenberry’s successors expanded his storyworld over four decades, four television series, and twelve feature films. To illustrate the complex interweaving of the elements of a storyworld built over four decades, we return to the example of Zefram Cochrane, the iconic inventor of the warp drive that powers interstellar travel. The character of Cochrane (played by Glenn Corbett) first appeared in 1967 in a second-season TOS episode, “Metamorphosis” (2:9). In 2117, 150 years prior to the events of this episode, an elderly Cochrane had decided to die alone in space but was rescued and rejuvenated by an alien. In the 1996 feature film First Contact, the TNG crew, having traveled back to 2063, also met Cochrane (now played by James Cromwell), who, with the help of Riker and La Forge, launches the warp-powered ship that initiates Earth’s true space age. The 2001 Enterprise premiere episode, “Broken Bow,” set in the early twenty-second century, includes video footage of a very old Cochrane giving a speech at the dedication of the first warp-drive facility. Cochrane is mentioned, but does not appear, in the Enterprise episode “Regeneration” (2:23). Assigned to capture two Borg drones who have been cryogenically frozen since crashing on Earth in the twenty-first century in the events depicted in First Contact, Captain Archer remembers that Cochrane had once told a strange story

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about cybernetic creatures from the future who tried to stop his first warp flight but were thwarted by humans from that same future. In another Enterprise nod to First Contact, in the 700th and 701st Star Trek episodes, “In a Mirror, Darkly” (Enterprise 4:18 and 4:19), Cochrane (played by James Cromwell in footage from the feature film and by a look-alike double in the television episode) appears in the Star Trek mirror universe (about which more below) as an evil version of himself, who, rather than extending the hand of friendship to Earth’s Vulcan visitor, shoots him dead. Cochrane links together TOS, First Contact, and Enterprise, three centuries of Federation history, the mirror universe, and “our” universe. The character connects different installments of a serial narrative that has spun out over several decades of storytelling time in an example of what we call Star Trek’s “extended seriality.” This resembles, but should not be confused with, transmedia storytelling. We use the term “extended seriality” specifically to refer to Star Trek’s capacity to form narrative links among the five television series and, occasionally, the feature films. Since this book focuses on Star Trek as television, it does not consider the myriad other instantiations of the storyworld on platforms from comic books to novels to games; such consideration would require an additional volume. As the Cochrane example shows, a serial narrative is the form best suited to building extensive worlds by virtue of the number of individual narrative installments and the potential relationships among them. Serial narratives of course occur in other media—novels, films, and comic books—but seriality is one of the key characteristics of long-running American television dramas and therefore an appropriate starting point for an investigation of Star Trek’s world building. The definition of “seriality” depends upon the definition of “narrative”—a vexed theoretical issue continually debated by narratologists. We don’t have the space to engage in the narratological debate, so for the purposes of our argument we offer a very simple and minimal definition: fictional narratives arise from the combination of characters, settings, and events. In nonserial narratives such as the majority of novels and films, events form a chain of cause and effect resolved at the text’s conclusion, and characters and settings do not carry over to other texts. Serial narratives in television take two forms, the series and the serial. A series consists of individual episodes linked by the same characters and settings, with the chain of cause and effect resolved at the end of each episode. Series are marked by stability rather than change. Says John Ellis: “The fictional series . . . repeats a basic problematic or situation week after week, [returning] to the stability of the basic dilemma at the end of the week’s episode. There is no development at all across series.”7 In a serial,

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events continue to generate effects across the boundaries of individual episodes, sometimes across the boundaries of individual seasons, and, as we have seen with the Cochrane example, in some instances across the boundaries of different series and feature films. In Jason Mittell’s words, “a television serial creates a sustained narrative world, populated by a consistent set of characters who experience a chain of events over time.”8 Comparing the series and serial formats, Marc Dolan says: “In an episodic series, narrative change is minimized; in a continuous serial, narrative change is all.”9 The difference between series and serial, however, is not an absolute binary but rather a continuum. From the 1980s on, many American television shows have adopted a hybrid narrative form that Robin Nelson has dubbed the “flexi-narrative”: “mixtures of the series and the serial form, involving the closure of one story arc within an episode (like a series) but with other, ongoing story arcs involving the regular characters (like a serial).”10 From the 1990s on, many programs have exhibited what Mittell terms “narrative complexity”; narratively complex programs such as Lost (ABC, 2004–10) and Homeland (Showtime, 2011–present) position themselves toward the serial side of the series/serial continuum, requiring viewers to watch each episode to follow the ongoing story. Says Mittell: “Narrative complexity redefines episodic forms under the influence of serial narration—not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms, but a shifting balance. Rejecting the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form, narrative complexity foregrounds ongoing stories.”11 Series, serials, and narratively complex programs can be roughly mapped against the classic network, multichannel, and postnetwork eras respectively. The series format matched the industrial requirements of the classic network era. Producers, wedded to the conception of the mass audience and of least objectionable programming, as discussed in chapter 1, saw little need for narrative innovation. And, as Mittell says, “network research departments believed that even the biggest hit series could be guaranteed a consistent carryover audience of no more than 1/3 from week-to-week, meaning that the majority of viewers would not be sufficiently aware of a program’s backstory to follow continuing storylines.”12 Syndicators could air episodes in any order rather than adhering to the original broadcast sequence. Audiences for syndicated programs could dip in and out at will rather than having to commit to watching an episode every single weekday at a set time. The serial format emerged from the shift toward demographic thinking described in chapter 1: niche audiences were seen as smart and dedicated viewers, capable of following a plotline from one episode to

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another and willing to commit to viewing an entire season. Dallas (CBS, 1978–91) paved the way for prime-time serials, but the program most often credited with breaking with the series format is Hill Street Blues, the Steven Bochco–produced cop show that debuted on NBC in January 1981. NBC green-lighted the show and (for the most part) tolerated its unconventional narrative structure because, running dead last in the ratings race, the network had nothing to lose. Hill Street was never a smash hit, but it attracted a younger, more upmarket audience than did much conventional network fare. This audience’s obvious enjoyment of Hill Street’s multiple and ongoing story lines encouraged other producers to follow suit. Serial programs proliferated and are now seen as one of the hallmarks of the multichannel era, often associated with the trend toward “quality” programming during that period. Intensified seriality, or what Mittell calls narrative complexity, began emerging in the 1990s with shows such as The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002). Viewing practices associated with the postnetwork era— DVD box sets, DVRs, time shifting, and online access—accelerated the trend toward complexity, enabling audiences to both watch and rewatch as they liked—the rewatching particularly crucial with dizzyingly complex programs such as Lost and The Wire (HBO, 2002–8).

the rise of seriality Whereas Star Trek’s deployment of extended seriality atypically built worlds across four decades, five series, and the feature films, the individual series more typically conformed to the prevalent narrative formats of their historical periods. TOS consisted of self-contained episodes, the only exception being the two-part “The Menagerie” (1:11 and 1:12), which incorporated the first, and never-aired, 1964 pilot, “The Cage,” into a story framed by Spock’s commandeering the Enterprise to return a horribly injured Captain Pike to Talos 4. This violation of the series format resulted not from a desire for narrative innovation but from the budgetary constraints that, as we demonstrated in chapters 2 and 3, so often give rise to inspiration: it cost less to repurpose the pilot than to shoot a new episode. While not a two-parter, the episodes “Mudd’s Women” (1:6) and “I, Mudd” (2:8) were linked by the character of the lovable intergalactic rogue Harcourt Fenton Mudd, although “I, Mudd” would have been fully comprehensible to a viewer who had not seen “Mudd’s Women.” But, despite Ellis’s assertion above that there is no development at all across series, TOS is proof that a series can develop worlds. Says Angela Ndalianis of the series form:

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Each episode repeats the same main characters and remains selfcontained, sacrificing overall serial development for the sake of the closed, self-sustained narrative episode. . . . A complete story is enclosed by each episode, and no serial effect is produced because no episode story branches beyond or reveals an awareness of events occurring in prior episodes. Nevertheless, seriality is implied in the repetition of characters and narrative patterns beyond single episodes.13

For TOS, these narrative patterns involved world building by, for example, the filling in of Starfleet history, as in the Zefram Cochrane episode discussed above; the development of Vulcans and the Vulcan home world in the episodes “Journey to Babel” (2:10) and “Amok Time” (2:1); and the accrual of different and distinct alien races (Klingons, Romulans, and so forth) with their own cultures and histories, as well as further elaboration of the Enterprise’s spatial layout and technological capacities. Originating in the multichannel era, TNG followed the flexi-narrative format, although it tended toward the series end of the series/serial continuum. While TOS had only one two-parter, TNG routinely ended one season and began another with a two-part cliffhanger, starting the practice with “The Best of Both Worlds,” which bridged seasons three and four. Harry Mudd appeared in two TOS episodes, but recurring characters appeared in several TNG episodes as well as in other Star Trek series. For example, the omnipotent entity Q appeared in eight TNG episodes, as well as on DS9 and Voyager, and the nerdish Lieutenant Reginald Barclay appeared in five TNG episodes, seven Voyager episodes, and the eighth film, First Contact. TNG also featured multiseason narrative arcs, centered around, for example, Klingon Empire politics or the unresolved sexual tension between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher. Voyager was a flexi-narrative much like TNG, with two-parters, occasionally recurring characters such as Q and Barclay, and narrative arcs tied to villains such as the Kazon, species 8472, and the Borg or to the relationships between characters such as Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres. DS9, which premiered in 1993, two years before Voyager and while TNG was still on the air, adopted the flexi-narrative format but tended toward the serial end of the series/serial continuum. DS9’s writers and producers consciously decided to intensify seriality both because of an innate preference for this mode of storytelling and in order to distinguish this version of Star Trek from the other versions with which it overlapped. Ron Moore recalled: “The continuity got tighter as we went on. That was a choice that we all liked, and I was always advocating pushing the continuity more and more. I was the big advocate of the Dominion War. Given my

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druthers, I would have made the whole thing into a serial. I wouldn’t have even cared about giving a middle and end to each episode. It would have been one long continuous serial.”14 Here the creative autonomy of the writer-producers was enabled by specific conditions of production: the spin-off’s need for distinctiveness and the generally more favorable attitude to the seriality conventions of the multichannel era. But Moore was still constrained by commercial concerns; he was not able to indulge his “druthers” and write one long continuous serial because of the producers’ fears that more casual viewers would desert the show. Kerry McCluggage confirmed this, telling us that while complex narrative arcs had been “a big part of a lot of the shows,” he believed that the audience didn’t really appreciate narrative arcs that “get in the way of their appreciation of the individual hour. We try to tell self-contained stories and keep the arcs related more to our characters as opposed to our plot. You’ll see growth in characters and arcs that they go through over a season, but while we do occasional two-parters, we try not to make too many, or too many arcs, which really affect the order in which you’d air the show or your ability to appreciate them.”15 Despite McCluggage’s view, Moore and the other writers succeeded in making DS9’s continuity tight enough that many episodes would at the time of their first broadcast have made no sense to the uninitiated viewer and would not now make sense viewed out of their original broadcast order. For example, DS9’s seventh and final season climaxed with an immensely complicated ten-episode narrative arc that resolved the fates of all the major characters and several of the occasionally recurring characters as well as ending the Dominion War. (Of course, by that point it was likely that the show had already lost casual viewers and unlikely it would attract new ones.) Some prefer DS9 to the other Star Trek series precisely because of its narrative complexity. Roger Hagedorn says that DS9 creates “a sense of fictional space, history, and character development that is far more sophisticated and intricate than that of classic series programming.”16 Chris Gregory considers that DS9’s intense seriality renders it “Star Trek’s major dramatic achievement”: “The movement away from ‘closure’ of narratives that had begun during the third season of TNG reaches its climax in a series which continually presents its characters with challenging political and personal choices, emphasises the relative perspectives of different alien races, and grasps the ‘epic’ form in a way unparalleled in TV history.”17 If DS9 partook of the 1990s trend toward greater narrative complexity, Enterprise, debuting at the start of the new century and the emergence of the postnetwork era, fully embraced it. For example, the entire third season

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(by which point McCluggage had left Paramount) tells the story of the Enterprise’s defeat of the alien Xindi, who had launched a devastating and unexpected attack on Earth and intended to complete their mission of total destruction. As with the TOS two-parter and DS9’s intensified seriality, specific conditions of production account for this narrative structure. The producers responded to both falling ratings and actual world events by ending the second season with the Xindi’s 9/11-like attack in the hope that a season entirely structured around the Earth–Xindus conflict would revive the show’s flagging fortunes. The gamble did not pay off as ratings continued to decline, perhaps because the intensified seriality dissuaded the more casual viewer who did not wish to commit to watching every episode. Enterprise exhibited greater seriality than its predecessors both within its own narrative world and through connecting to the narrative worlds established by previous series, engaging in this linking world building most prominently in the two-part mirror-universe episode “In a Mirror, Darkly” (discussed above and again below) and in the series finale, “These Are the Voyages” (Enterprise 4:22), which connects to the seventh-season TNG episode “The Pegasus” (7:12). In the TNG episode, First Officer Will Riker must choose between an oath sworn to his previous commander, Admiral Pressman, and loyalty to his current commander, Captain Picard. In the Enterprise episode, which begins aboard the TNG series’s Enterprise NCC-1701-D, Counselor Troi has persuaded Riker that reviewing the history of the last mission of the (Enterprise series’s) Enterprise NX-O1 will help resolve his moral dilemma. The NX-01’s mission is restaged in the NCC-1701-D’s holodeck (a virtual-reality environment); Captain Archer and his crew, presumably by now long deceased, appear only as holograms in their narrative future of the twenty-fourth century rather than as people in their narrative present of the twenty-second century. At the episode’s conclusion, Riker and Troi end the NX-01 program and exit the holodeck, walking directly from the narrative world of Enterprise to the narrative world of TNG. There is then a cut to an exterior shot of the TNG series’s Enterprise NCC 1701-D, followed by an exterior shot of the TOS series’s Enterprise NCC 1701 and then an exterior shot of the Enterprise series’s Enterprise NX-01. Over these shots of three different Enterprises from three different centuries, three different Enterprise captains from three different centuries—Picard, Kirk, and Archer—recite the familiar opening mantra, Picard beginning with “These are the voyages” and Archer ending with “where no one has gone before.” The shots of the starships and the beloved Star Trek credo link together the narrative worlds of the three different series, as the producers end the last series with a highly self-reflexive invocation of the Star Trek mythos.

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“These Are the Voyages” is an example of narrative complexity, or more specifically what Mittell terms operational reflexivity—a storytelling mode that invites viewers to care about the storyworld while simultaneously appreciating its construction. This reflexivity is akin to a narrative special effect, “calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off.”18 Narrative special effects are not always allied to seriality but can occur in single episodes that violate “storytelling conventions in spectacular fashion.” Among examples of special-effects episodes, Mittell lists TNG’s “Frame of Mind” (6:21) and the episode about which we quoted Michael Piller in chapter 3, “The Inner Light” (5:25), in which Picard experiences an entire virtual lifetime on planet destroyed by a supernova a millennium ago. (We say more about this episode in the following chapter.)19 We could augment this list with many other examples of operational reflexivity in single episodes from TNG, Voyager, DS9, and Enterprise, and we do discuss one such DS9 episode, “Far Beyond the Stars” (6:13), below. But Star Trek’s narrative special effects often derive from the extended seriality of a text composed of hundreds of narrative installments across five television series—causing us, to use Mittell’s formulation, to marvel at how the writers pull off linking together series set in different centuries and different quadrants of the galaxy. We need not, however, marvel as to why the writers engaged in such spectacular stunts; these episodes resulted from serving the mutual demands of art and commerce that chapter 2 discusses. Character-crossover episodes such as “These Are the Voyages” were used to legitimate the premieres of spin-off shows; to boost the audiences for premiere and final episodes of established shows; to ensure good ratings for the all-important sweeps episodes, in February, May, and November, that determine a program’s advertising charges; and to commemorate Star Trek anniversaries. In 1996, producers celebrated TOS’s thirtieth anniversary by linking episodes of Voyager and DS9 to the TOS narrative world in a ratingsboosting and attention-getting ploy that exploited extended seriality. In Voyager’s “Flashback” (3:2), Lieutenant Tuvok (Tim Russ) experiences eighty-year-old repressed memories of his first mission, which took place in the twenty-third century. (Vulcans are exceptionally long-lived.) Tuvok served under the command of Captain Sulu (George Takei) on a mission to rescue Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy from the Klingon captivity they experienced in the sixth Star Trek feature film, The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer, 1991). The mission is aborted when the ship is attacked by the Klingon Kang (Michael Ansara), who featured in the TOS episode “Day of the Dove” (3:62). Captain Kirk’s yeoman, Janice Rand (Grace Lee

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Whitney), now a lieutenant commander, also appears. The primary action of the DS9 episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” (5:6) also takes place in the TOS world. Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) and several of his crew travel into the past and land in the midst of the much-loved TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (TOS 2:44), where they must foil a plot to assassinate Captain Kirk. The wonders of editing and digital manipulation put the casts of TOS and DS9 together on the original Enterprise NCC1701. The producers invite the audience into the game as the DS9 characters experience difficulties with the “old” technology and with the layout of the “old” ship while the Star Trek fan is well aware of how the Enterprise operates.20 The producers had four years previously linked TNG to TOS in the episode “Relics” (TNG 6:4), in which the TNG crew find Engineer Scott (James Doohan) in suspended animation in a transporter beam and take him aboard the Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Scotty feels a bit of a fish out of water in the future and to cheer himself up has the new Enterprise’s holodeck replicate the old Enterprise’s bridge. Working without a twentyfourth-century holodeck or even twentieth-century computer-generated imagery, the set designers physically re-created the original bridge, which involved tracking down a replica of the captain’s chair owned by a fan and rebuilding a portion of the set. Both “Trials and Tribble-ations” and “Relics” were scripted by Ron Moore, who told us that the writers of these kinds of episodes had to make sure that they weren’t so dependent on extended seriality as to exclude viewers: You can get too insulated. You can write too far inside the box, writing in-jokes within in-jokes, just for the core fans that know the show like we do, backwards and forwards. The opportunities where I got a chance to indulge my fannish instincts [were] when I got to write “Relics” and “Trials and Tribble-ations.” And those were a [homage] to the original series. . . . I tried to walk that line a lot—that you could enjoy the episode without knowing the original series, but if you knew the original series, it would mean more.21

Moore curbed his fannish instincts; these episodes represent a happy marriage of commerce and art. Moore’s indulgence gave rise to episodes that contributed to Star Trek’s extended seriality while simultaneously boosting ratings and generating publicity. Extended seriality made character crossover fairly common—useful in particular for legitimating new series and new characters as part of the storyworld. Many fans (including the authors) regarded the idea of a “next generation” of Star Trek characters with skepticism and awaited the premiere of TNG with trepidation, never expecting that the new series could

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equal or, even more remarkably, surpass the original. The sight of an aged Dr. McCoy chatting with Data in a corridor of the new Enterprise reinforced the reassurance provided by the prominent inclusion of Gene Roddenberry’s name in the opening credits. But the producers, wary of too close a dependency on TOS, made fans wait two more seasons for another glimpse of an old favorite. Even then, it was a secondary, not primary, character who crossed over: Spock’s father, Sarek, featuring in a third-season episode in which viewers learned more of the vexed relationship between father and son (“Sarek,” TNG 3:23). The famous son and beloved character himself did finally make an appearance in the fifth season two-parter “Unification.” Just as TOS characters lent their imprimatur to TNG, so did TNG characters to all the subsequent series, although, in the case of Enterprise, waiting until the final episode to do so. Captain Picard visited DS9 in the series’ premiere, while Chief O’Brian and his wife, Keiko, permanently transferred to the space station, followed later by Worf. Jonathan Frakes guest-starred in the character of Tom Riker, William Riker’s transporter-created clone. The Enterprise visited the deep-space station once more in the TNG episode “Birthright” (TNG 6:16 and 6:17), but only Julian Bashir from the DS9 crew crossed over. The Voyager writers found ways to include TNG characters, despite Voyager’s exile in a distant quadrant of the galaxy. The omnipotent entity Q whisked Riker to Voyager for a very brief visit in “Deathwish” (Voyager 2:18). LeVar Burton appeared as Captain La Forge in “Timeless” (Voyager 5:6), an episode set in a future timeline in which Ensign Harry Kim has to change the past to prevent everyone on Voyager dying in an attempt to reach the Alpha Quadrant. Reg Barclay (Dwight Schultz) and Deanna Troi regularly appeared in scenes set on Earth after Voyager managed to establish a two-way communications link with Starfleet Command. Presumably the DS9 writers would also have been ingenious enough to cross characters over the vast distance separating their quadrant of the galaxy from Voyager’s, but no DS9 character set foot on Voyager, nor did any Voyager character appear on DS9. The problem was not a narrative but an industrial one: DS9, like TNG before it, aired in firstrun syndication while Voyager launched and continued to air on UPN; crossover in this instance would have been a potential conflict of interest.

alternate possible worlds Star Trek’s world building is enabled not only by the extended seriality deriving from the longevity, multiple series, and feature films that distinguish it from most television shows, but also by the genre that it shares

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with other television shows—another instance of the mix of the atypical and the typical. We have not so far addressed the issue of genre and can now fairly quickly dispense with it, since by any measure—textual, industrial, or audience—Star Trek, while incorporating other genres, is primarily science fiction. Film scholars initially predicated genre upon intertextuality, forming classifications by grouping together films perceived to have certain textual commonalities. Westerns, it was said, could be identified visually by their settings (dusty frontier towns, monumental landscapes), their costumes (Stetsons, chaps, dusters), and their props (guns, horses); and narratively by recurring tropes (good guys versus bad guys, cowboys/cavalry versus Indians, civilization versus wilderness). This method works well for westerns and crime films but less well for other genres. Textual markers such as futuristic settings, costumes, and props conclusively identify some, if by no means all, science fiction films and television programs. Films lacking these visual icons prove harder to classify and reveal the limitations of the textualist approach. Nevertheless, Star Trek, with its space colonies, twenty-fourth-century cities, spaceships, spacesuits, Starfleet uniforms, phasers, tricorders, “techno-babble,” and rationalist explanations—even for bizarrely unrealistic phenomena such as the Greek god Apollo appearing in the TOS episode “Who Mourns for Adonais”22 (2:31)—is clearly science fiction. Star Trek is also clearly science fiction when judged by industrial discourse and audience reception. In his book on genre, Jason Mittell says that genre is “best understood as a process of categorization that is not found within media texts, but operates across the cultural realms of media industries, audience, policy, critics, and historical contexts.”23 He asks: “Does a given category circulate within the cultural spheres of audiences, press accounts, and industrial discourses? Is there a general consensus over what the category refers to in a given moment?”24 The press has agreed that Star Trek is science fiction ever since Variety’s review of the first-broadcast episode of the original series, “The Mantrap,” referred to the program’s “sci-fi frame of reference.”25 TV Guide and other television listings routinely identify the television series and films as science fiction. The Syfy Channel has featured Star Trek on its website and has broadcast the digitally remastered TOS and TNG episodes. Audiences have agreed that Star Trek is science fiction ever since Gene Roddenberry premiered TOS at the World Science Fiction Convention and continued to cultivate science fiction fans during its first run. As John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins show, many Star Trek fans consider themselves more generally fans of other science fiction (and closely allied genres such as fantasy) programs.26 We have anecdotally

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observed that many people, some of our students included, reject Star Trek simply because they classify it as science fiction. And of course myriad web fan sites include Star Trek in more general overviews of science fiction. While Star Trek is undoubtedly science fiction television, it shares much with the related genres of fantasy and horror television. These shared propensities justify a shared designation, and we borrow the inclusive label of “telefantasy” from Catherine Johnson, who in turn borrowed it from fans who used it “as a broad generic category to describe a wide range of fantasy, science-fiction and horror television programmes.”27 Telefantasy has a particular propensity to narrative complexity; it also tends toward what John Thornton Caldwell calls “televisuality,” a self-conscious enhanced style that has marked American television from the 1980s onward. Caldwell’s analysis of televisuality centers primarily on the visual, but in an intriguing passage he expands the concept to narrative: Beauty and the Beast, The X-Files, Quantum Leap, Star Trek and Max Headroom utilized self-contained and volatile narrative and fantasy worlds, imaginary constructs more typical of science fiction [than television]. Their preoccupation with alternative worlds . . . justified and allowed for extreme narrative and visual gambits and acute narrative variations. Like sci-fi, televisuality developed a system/genre of alternative worlds that tolerated and expected both visual flourishes— special effects, graphics, acute cinematography and editing—and narrative embellishments—time travel, diegetic masquerades, and outof-body experiences.28

Sidestepping the generic complexities of the telefantasy label that Johnson herself acknowledges, we argue that telefantasy can be better understood from a narratological than from a generic perspective. Telefantasy writers can build an almost infinite number of fictional possible worlds, while those working in more realist genres have their possibilities limited by what narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan calls the fictional world’s “accessibility relationship” to the actual world. Ryan explains the concept of possible worlds, which originated in linguistics and philosophy, in an entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory: The basis of the theory is the set-theoretical idea that reality—the sum of the imaginable—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct elements. This universe is hierarchically structured by the opposition of one well-designated element, which functions as the centre of the system, for all the other members of the set. . . . The central element is commonly interpreted as “the actual world,” and the satellites as merely possible worlds. For a world to be possible it must be linked to

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the centre by a so-called “accessibility relation.” . . . A typology of narrative worlds can be obtained by narrowing down the criteria of possibility and by varying the notion of accessibility relations.29

These accessibility relations depend upon various similarities/dissimilarities of logical principles, physical laws, material causality, geography or history, populations of natural species, stages of technological development, human inventory, and the like. The nature of the accessibility relationship determines the satellite possible worlds’ greater or lesser resemblance to the actual world and, argues Ryan, can therefore be used to define genres.30 Possible worlds easily accessible from the actual world tend to be more realist in nature, whereas those less easily accessible tend to be more fantastic. For example, a realist historical novel about the Napoleonic Wars such as War and Peace might link to the actual world by all the above criteria, differing only in a human inventory that includes fictional as well as historical characters. But in the Temeraire series of Napoleonic Wars novels by Naomi Novik, for example, in which both the French and British employ aviator corps of intelligent, talking dragons, the violation of the physical laws of the actual world classifies the text as fantastic. Possible-worlds theory also deals with the accessibility relations between fictional worlds—that is, between the textual actual world and its alternative possible worlds. In realist genres, in which the textual actual world is tightly linked to the actual world, these alternative possible worlds can emerge only from the mental activities of the characters. As Ryan says, “The mental representations produced by the characters (beliefs, wishes, plans, obligations, dreams, fantasies and literary productions) function as the APWS [alternate possible worlds] of the textual system of reality.”31 The alternate possible worlds of these mental representations can diverge from the textual actual world in all the ways in which textual actual worlds can diverge from the actual world. The talking fish that addressed a hallucinating Tony Soprano in the voice of the deceased Pussy Bompasaro violated the natural laws of The Sopranos’ textual actual world, which comply with those of the actual world. The marriage with Christian conjured up by Nip/Tuck’s Julia under the influence of anesthesia violated the history of the program’s textual actual world in which she had married Sean. In a relationship of inverse correlation, a high degree of accessibility between the actual world and the textual actual world limits, and a lower degree enhances, the generation of alternate possible worlds. Scriptwriters constrained by a relatively high degree of accessibility between the actual world and the textual actual world can resort only to some alteration of a character’s consciousness (dreams,

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intoxication, hallucinations) to introduce the novelty derived from violating the laws of the textual actual world. Since the textual actual worlds of telefantasy link less strongly to the actual world than do those of realist genres, alternate possible worlds can arise from numerous factors—alien intervention, rogue technology, time travel, parallel universes, and so on.

star trek’ s use of alternate possible worlds Star Trek exploits science fiction’s capacity for developing alternate possible worlds as a crucial component of its world building. Alternate possible worlds generated by the mental activities of characters in realist genres do, as Ryan says, circle the textual actual world like satellites, with one welldesignated element functioning as the center of the system. But the alternate possible worlds generated by the multiple causes of telefantasy can sometimes overlap the textual actual world like a Venn diagram rather than remaining entirely apart from it. Telefantasies, given the high degree of inaccessibility between the actual world and their textual actual worlds, can easily encompass other genres. The Enterprise’s voyages in TOS included several planets that replicated different periods in Terran (Earth’s) history—or, more accurately, replicated the genre of historical fiction. In “A Piece of the Action” (TOS 2:46), the Enterprise visits the planet Sigma Iotia II, previously contacted one hundred years earlier by the Starfleet ship the Horizon. One of that ship’s crew accidentally left behind a book, Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and the Iotians, a highly imitative people, modeled their entire culture on this text, known to them as “The Book.” The scriptwriters, however, undoubtedly modeled the episode on the gangster film, and even more closely on their Desilu stablemate The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63), in which the incorruptible hero, Eliot Ness, struggled to defeat the powerful gangsters of Chicago. Kirk and Spock must switch gears from the science fiction genre to the gangster genre, trading their technobabble, Starfleet uniforms, starship, and phasers for criminal jargon, pinstriped suits, wide-brimmed hats, fast cars, and tommy guns. But this adoption of the conventions of the gangster film is done in parodic fashion: Kirk becomes “Koik” and Spock “Spocko;” Kirk can’t drive a manual gearshift; Spock has difficulty with the criminal jargon; Kirk worries about explaining his “piece of the action”—the solution that resolved the planetary crisis according to its inhabitants’ norms—to Federation authorities. As is typical of genre parodies, generic conventions are played for laughs. The competent viewer is in on the game by virtue of familiarity with gangster films and The Untouchables.

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While the historical fictions of “A Piece of the Action” and similar episodes such as “Patterns of Force” (Nazi Germany) (TOS 2:21) and “Bread and Circuses” (ancient Rome updated to the television age) (TOS 2:25) occupy the same time-space continuum as the Enterprise, they don’t literally intrude into the textual actual world’s everyday reality. To return to the metaphor of the Venn diagram, the episodes’ action takes place in the overlap between the circles of the textual actual world and the alternate possible worlds. In other episodes, the alternate possible world intrudes directly into the textual actual world. Take, for example, the oft-used plot of the doppelgänger. This is a nonnaturalistic convention borrowed from Gothic horror, but the different nature of the accessibility relations between actual world and textual actual worlds of science fiction and horror require the scriptwriters to invoke a “scientific” cause such as a transporter malfunction or a spatio-temporal distortion. The TOS episode “The Enemy Within” (TOS 1:5) restages Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the twenty-third century, a transporter accident splitting Captain Kirk into good and bad versions. In the TNG episode “Second Chances” (TNG 6:24), another transporter accident creates a duplicate of Will Riker, who was stranded on a planet for eight years before rejoining the Enterprise. In another TNG episode, “Time Squared” (2:13), a duplicate shuttlecraft and a duplicate Picard show up from six hours in the future, when the Enterprise will be drawn into an energy whirlpool and destroyed. These episodes pose the “what if?” of the alternate possible world: what if there were an evil Kirk who assaulted his crewwomen; what if Riker had valued his relationship with Troi over his career; what if Picard were forced to abandon his ship and crew to certain death in order to return to the past to warn them? As the above examples illustrate, alternate-possible-world episodes permit writers to explore character—a topic to which we return in the next chapter. They can also permit writers to address broader social and cultural issues. As we reported in chapter 1, Roddenberry often said that Star Trek used the cloak of science fiction to engage with the public sphere; TOS, for example, critiqued American racial relations in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (3:15), in which a racial conflict destroys an entire civilization. Three decades later DS9 again took up this critique, although making it within an alternate possible world set in the American 1950s. The sixthseason episode “Far Beyond the Stars” (6:13) takes place at the height of the Dominion War, when the beleaguered Federation fears losing to the changeling shape shifters from the Gamma Quadrant. Captain Sisko, starting to buckle under the pressure of the ongoing conflict, is contemplating resignation when he begins to see illusions: Worf dressed as a baseball player; actor

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Rene Auberjonois, who plays the changeling Odo, as a human in 1950s suit and hat. As Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig) examines Sisko, the captain transitions completely into the alternate possible world from which his hallucinations hailed. Sisko becomes Benny Russell, living in New York City in 1953 and writing for the pulp science fiction magazine Incredible Tales. Inspired by a sketch from one of the magazine’s illustrators, Benny/Sisko writes a story about a “Negro” captain commanding a deep-space station in the twenty-fourth century. The editor, sympathetic but pragmatic, worries about the story’s impact on his readers, running it only after Benny agrees to another staffer’s suggestion that the hero be a twentieth-century black man, a shoeshine boy or a convict, dreaming of a better future. But the magazine’s owner, fearful of reader backlash, pulps the issue and fires Benny. Already mentally fragile as the result of a vicious beating from two racist policemen incurred for protesting their shooting down of an unarmed young black man, Benny breaks down completely. Taken away in an ambulance, he awakens as Captain Ben Sisko on DS9. Sisko’s experience of the racist past persuades him to retain his command—perhaps as the wormhole Prophets, who may have generated the alternate possible world, intended. Like “Flashback,” “Relics,” and “Trials and Tribble-ations,” “Far Beyond the Stars” is an example of what Jason Mittell calls “operational reflexivity”; it self-consciously celebrates Star Trek’s history, but in this case it does so not through linking together individual series but through more generally commemorating thirty-two years of Roddenberry’s vision of a better future while at the same time honoring Star Trek’s generic roots in pulp fiction science fiction. Incredible Tales is an homage to the many pulp science fiction magazines of the period such as Galaxy, a copy of which is briefly seen at the start of the alternate-world sequence. Ron Moore told us that he thought Roddenberry would have liked the episode because “it would have spoken to something that he remembered. He lived through that era, and he knew those writers.” Science fiction’s potential for ideological critique is invoked in literally preachy fashion. A black street preacher (in the textual actual world, Sisko’s father, Joseph) encourages Benny to “write those words, Brother Benny, let them see the glory and what lies ahead” and to “write the truth that’s in your head, the truth that shall set them free.” The glory that lies ahead is of course the utopian twenty-fourth century, which in 1953 can be manifested only through the truth that’s in Benny’s head in the form of a science fiction story. The episode’s writers (staff regulars Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler) are at pains to delineate the contrasts between the textual actual world of the twenty-fourth century and the realities of the American mid–twentieth

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century in which they construct their alternate possible world. TOS, produced at the height of the civil-rights movement, promulgated inclusivity with its multiracial and multinational crew. “Far Beyond the Stars,” set in a racist culture that predates by a mere thirteen years the TOS premiere, documents exclusion and discrimination. When Benny first presents his story, the editor says: “Your hero’s a Negro captain, the head of a space station. People won’t accept that. It’s not believable. You can either burn it or stick it in a drawer for the next fifty years or however long it takes the human race to become color-blind.” But, with the dramatic irony regularly employed by the series’ literate writers, the viewer knows there’s hope for progress, because just a few decades later we are watching a story about a Negro captain, the head of a space station. Even in 1953, the Incredible Tales staff is, by the standards of the time, a liberal and tolerant community whose inclusivity mirrors that of the original series crew: a querulous, garrulous New York Jew (Quark/Armin Shimerman); a pipe-smoking Irishman (O’Brian/Colm Meaney) who suggests the narrative frame for Benny’s story; a dapper, cravat-wearing Englishman (Bashir); a hard-boiled female writer, K. C. Hunter (Kira Nerys/Nana Visitor); a working-class, gum-chewing female secretary from Brooklyn (Jadzia Dax/Terry Farrell); and of course the “Negro” writer. This relatively utopian community is contrasted with the larger world where racism severely constrains and sometimes ends the lives of black people. But the utopian community has to bend to the pressures of that larger world, as we see when the magazine’s owner decides to run pictures of the writers in the next month’s issue. The editor tells K. C. Hunter that she can sleep late the day the photographer comes. When Benny asks if he, too, should sleep late, the editor replies: “As far as our readers are concerned, Benny Russell is as white as they are.” The New York Jew (perhaps Communist) comments: “If the world isn’t ready for a woman writer, imagine what would happen if it learned about a Negro with a typewriter. Run for the hills. It’s the end of civilization.” Benny asks: “What about W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright? Did you ever hear of Native Son?” The editor responds: “That’s literature for liberals and intellectuals. The average reader’s not going to spend his hard-earned cash on stories written by Negroes.” Other DS9 characters also confront the prejudices of the past in this episode. Jake Sisko, the normally dutiful son, has become a small-time crook. When Benny asks him, “Why don’t you get a job?” his answer sums up the career choices for black males: “As what? A delivery boy or a dishwasher?” Later, when Benny tells him about his DS9 story, Jake responds: “The only

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reason they’ll let us in space is if they need someone to shine their shoes.” Worf, the Klingon officer who transferred to the station in DS9 from Picard’s crew in TNG, has transformed into a famous baseball player. He’s asked why he lives “uptown”—that is, in a black neighborhood—when he can live anywhere he wants. He responds: “The hell I can. They can hardly get used to the idea of me playing alongside them. Living next door to them, it’s a whole nother story. Besides, around here when people look at me they admire me. To them I’m just another colored that can hit a curve ball.” But, as Worf indicates, living uptown doesn’t just mean escaping from white repression; it also means living in the thriving African-American culture that the episode honors. Worf’s 1953 counterpart is called Willie, undoubtedly a tribute to the baseball player Willie Mays, one of the first generation of black players in the major leagues. Benny refers to black writers now enshrined in the literary canon, acknowledged once more in a pan past the books on his desk. His girlfriend advises him to publish his story in the black-owned paper, and a preacher character in the episode speaks in the southern religious oratorical style so successfully exploited by Martin Luther King. Benny listens to jazz on his radio and walks down the street with three kids doing a doo-wop chorus. The episode’s dense intertextuality celebrates a range of AfricanAmerican achievement far beyond the contemporary hip-hop, gangsta, hood culture often seen in films and television; in doing so it also celebrates a storytelling mode that permits a program set in the twenty-fourth century to directly engage with the social and political concerns of the mid– twentieth century and, of course, the later period when the episode was made.

extended seriality and alternate possible worlds Like textual-actual-world episodes, alternate-possible-world episodes can integrate with Star Trek’s extended seriality. Enterprise, more than any of the other post-TOS series, most consistently and self-consciously tied individual episodes to the past and future history of Star Trek’s textual actual world and even of its alternate possible worlds (rather ironically, given the producers’ desire to bring in new audiences, which we discussed in chapter 2). We began this chapter by discussing the career of Zefram Cochrane, mentioning his appearance in the Enterprise episode “In a Mirror Darkly” (4:18 and 4:19). We now take a closer look at this episode to illustrate how Star Trek’s atypical extended seriality combines with Star Trek’s typical

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telefantasy generation of alternate possible worlds to produce world building on a grand scale that other television programs would struggle to emulate. “In a Mirror Darkly” commemorated another Star Trek milestone, the seven-hundredth episode, this time in a spectacular narrative that brought together not only different textual-actual-world timelines but alternatepossible-world timelines as well. The mirror universe was first encountered in the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” (2:4), in which an ion storm coupled with a transporter malfunction sends Kirk, McCoy, Scott, and Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) into an evil mirror universe, ruled by the dastardly Galactic Empire, in which officers achieve promotion by assassinating their superiors. Four DS9 episodes (“Crossover” [2:23], “Through the Looking Glass” [3:19], “Shattered Mirror” [4:20], and “The Emperor’s New Cloak” [7:12]) take place in the twenty-fourth-century mirror universe, the DS9 characters discovering that Kirk’s twenty-third-century visit had altered the mirror universe’s history. The captain’s attempt to persuade the mirror Spock to undermine the Galactic Empire and establish a United Federation of Planets resulted instead in humanity’s enslavement by a powerful alliance of Bajorans, Klingons, and Cardassians. In “The Tholian Web” (TOS 3:9), the USS Defiant, a twenty-third-century starship, becomes trapped in an unstable region of space. It disappeared in the Star Trek textual actual world of the twenty-third century and reappeared in the alternate possible world mirror universe of the twenty-second century. In the actual, actual world of television production, it disappeared in the 1968 television episode “The Tholian Web” and reappeared thirty-three years later in the 2005 television Enterprise episode “In a Mirror Darkly.” This is world building of such a scale that no other television series could hope to equal it. TOS’s “Mirror, Mirror” did not establish the origins of the Galactic Empire, but “In a Mirror Darkly” shows the divergence of the history of the mirror universe, the alternate possible world, from that of the Star Trek textual actual world. The episode’s precredit sequence uses footage from the climax of First Contact for an alternate restaging of humanity’s first contact with an alien species. In First Contact, this had been a hopeful, visionary moment. As humans look skyward in awe, a spacecraft slowly descends and lands. A door opens and a white-robed figure emerges, throwing back his hood to reveal a Vulcan’s pointed ears. Zefram Cochrane advances to greet him, and the Vulcan holds up his hand in his race’s traditional split-fingered greeting. In First Contact, Cochran essays the Vulcan salute but fails and extends his hand in friendship. In “In a Mirror Darkly” ’s alternate history, new intercut footage makes it seem as if Cochrane instead reaches into his coat, takes out a gun, and shoots the Vulcan. In further new footage, one of

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the onlookers pulls a gun and shouts, “Board the ship, take everything you can.” The scene ends with the humans storming onto the Vulcan craft. Despite the writers’ desire to attract new viewers unfamiliar with Star Trek’s preceding narrative worlds, the powerful dramatic irony of this scene relies on viewers’ knowledge of the canonical friendly relationship between humans and Vulcans, first portrayed between Kirk and Spock, of which such violence is a shocking violation.

the alternate backstory: enterprise ’s alternative credit sequence The following credit sequence further reinforces the divergence between the textual actual world and the alternate possible world of the mirror universe. Enterprise’s usual credit sequence merges a selective history of the actual world with a history of the Star Trek textual actual world to celebrate science and technology in the service of exploration. The sequence postulates the Enterprise NX-01 and the Star Trek textual actual world as the culmination of a heroic and humanist quest. Here’s a shot-by-shot:32 1. Polynesians in a Kon-Tiki–like craft crossing the Indian Ocean; 2. the Royal Navy sailing ship HMS Enterprise [which exists only in the textual actual world, not in the historical actual world]; 3. Enterprise nameplate; 4. Auguste Piccard (with two c’s), French balloonist (and namesake, of course, of Captain Jean-Luc Picard); 5. Amelia Earhart; 6. The Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh’s plane; 7. the space shuttle Enterprise, so named in response to a write-in campaign by Star Trek fans; 8. the Wright brothers; 9. NASA explorer submarine; 10. the X-1 jet and test pilot Chuck Yeager; 11. Alan Shepard and Apollo 14; 12. John Glenn in 1998 aboard space shuttle Discovery; 13. Dr. Robert H. Goddard, rocket pioneer; 14. Apollo 11 moon landing;

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15. Sojourner, the robotic Mars rover; 16. the international space station; 17. the Lunar Orbiter, 2039 [textual actual world] 18. the first test run of the Phoenix, Cochrane’s ship, in 2063 [textual actual world]; 19. the NX-01 Enterprise, 2151 [textual actual world]. By contrast, “In a Mirror Darkly”’s credit sequence celebrates science and technology in the service of war and conquest, ironically constructing an alternate possible world that is the antithesis of Star Trek’s secular humanist philosophy. The sequence begins, as always, with the series’ name, “Star Trek: Enterprise,” superimposed upon a globe. But the lettering transforming from its usual white to black signals subsequent equally ominous changes. As forbidding music replaces the upbeat (and loathed by many) theme song, we see the Kon-Tiki and HMS Enterprise. The transition to war and conquest happens almost immediately, with a close-up of the mouth of a firing cannon and then a shot of another sailing ship delivering a broadside. We then see First World War battle scenes, the Galactic Empire symbol, a sword thrust through a globe, superimposed over shots of marching soldiers, Second World War battle scenes, a mushroom cloud, a jet taking off from a carrier, a submarinelaunched torpedo sinking another submarine, a futuristic tank rolling through burning streets, and a bomber. The sequence momentarily reverts to the usual, with a shot of a rocket followed by a shot of rocket pioneer Goddard writing on a blackboard. But instead of the Apollo 11 crew planting the Stars and Stripes on the moon, an astronaut unfurls the Galactic Empire flag, indicating that the alternate possible world’s history had diverged from the textual actual world’s at least as early as the 1960s. A shot of the Phoenix’s test flight reverts momentarily to the normal credit sequence, but the next shot shows the craft attacking the moon. In the following shot, three Enterprise-like starships attack a futuristic city and then a Vulcan ship. The sequence closes with a fully modeled 3-D version of the Galactic Empire symbol, the globe revolving around the sword. The Galactic Empire’s alternate history as presented in this alternate credit sequence derives its chilling resonance from the contrast with the brighter and more optimistic history of the Star Trek textual actual world that regular viewers know so well from the preceding 699 episodes. These episodes have, by virtue of extended seriality, built a vast and narratively complex world that, as we said at the chapter’s outset, encompasses several centuries, four quadrants of the galaxy, and alternate universes and timelines.

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Yet even with the advantage of drawing upon extended seriality, Star Trek producers still faced the challenge common to all producers of longrunning television series: avoiding predictability. One way to do this is to find what Jeffrey Sconce refers to as “novel and diverting variations” within the weekly repetition of the series or serial format.33 This is why, Sconce argues, producers often have recourse to passing “extraordinary circumstance” to motivate temporary and often quite dramatic character deviations. Hypnosis, misunderstood conversations, peer pressure, overmedication, near-death experiences . . . can give a character license to inject striking difference into usually staid repetition, all without long-term diegetic consequences. In the realm of science fiction, meanwhile, there are unending opportunities for such variations. Transmigration, alien possession, robotic implants, cloning, time travel, and space madness are but a few such pretexts, as is the parallel universe plot.34

Sconce hints here at a crucial difference between realist drama and the telefantasy: the unending opportunities for character variation provided by the latter. As we said above, the alternate possible worlds of realist genres can be generated only by the mental states of the characters, which must be precipitated by hypnosis, overmedication, and the like. But in telefantasy the textual actual world’s already-established divergences from the actual world permits alternate possible worlds to arise from causes such as Sconce identifies—alien possession, time travel, parallel universes, and the like. The infinite variety of alternate possible worlds causes telefantasy characters to be developed in quite different fashion from the way in which their realist counterparts, who inhabit a much more limited textual actual world, are developed. We hypothesize that the infinite variety of alternate possible worlds in combination with seriality makes telefantasy one of the televisual forms most adept at the cultivation of character. Elaborating upon this hypothesis requires first coming to terms with the vexed concept of character, one of the most central yet least understood elements of fictional narratives. We take up the challenge in the next chapter.

6. Character Building

Recurring and familiar characters have dominated American television drama since the three networks abandoned the anthology format in favor of the episodic-series format in the mid-1950s. Chapter 1 quoted Roddenberry’s TOS pitch, which, among other reassurances to NBC as to the program’s commercial viability, promised that Star Trek would offer characters with whom viewers could readily engage: “Star Trek . . . stays within a mass audience frame of reference . . . by . . . concentrating on problem and peril met by our very human and identifiable characters.”1 Years later, in an interview shortly before his death, Roddenberry repeated the point that character was the essential component of his creation: “Star Trek was not about science fiction. Star Trek was about people. . . . Do the characters go from A to B to C in a logical, believable manner? . . . I’ve always thought a thing must be basically logical to believe it—if you are to count on it . . . for a character.”2 Roddenberry here espoused the concept of the psychologically credible character to which television scriptwriters adhered in the classic network era and to which they continue to adhere in the postnetwork era.3 Roddenberry’s successors, well aware of the tradition and the medium in which they worked, also valued character above science fiction. In an interview shortly after leaving the franchise, Michael Piller said: The whole idea of exploring space is a metaphor for exploring ourselves. When Voyager did that, I think it did very well. I think Seven of Nine stories gave us some insight into humanity and the meaning of humanity that the series sorely wanted. . . . But when it did the exploding spaceships and space-monsters and so forth, the problem is that that’s what everybody does in science fiction. I think that reduces Star Trek to being no better and worse than other science fiction shows. I have always encouraged the writers to try to find the human elements, the moral and ethical dilemmas.4

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Unlike television writers, television scholars have had very little to say on the subject of character.5 Literary theorists have had more to say on the subject, but since it is their business to deconstruct, not construct, they are more skeptical about the relationship between characters and readers/ viewers than the Star Trek producers. But Marie-Laure Ryan makes a bold claim that supports the producers’ position: “If readers are caught up in a story, they turn the pages without paying too much attention to the letter of the text. . . . And if readers experience genuine emotions for the characters, they do not relate to these characters as literary creations nor as ‘semiotic constructs’ but as human beings.”6 Readers might relate to characters as human beings, but even the most beloved of literary, cinematic, or televisual creations ultimately exist only as words on a page or images on a screen. This poses a problem for literary theorists. Structuralism and poststructuralism have ended the days when A. C. Bradley could psychoanalyze Hamlet as if a live flesh-and-blood Danish prince were stretched out on the couch in his university office, but, as Ryan indicates, the semiotic constructs that replaced the flesh-and-blood Danish prince don’t seem to accord with most people’s—or even, it must be said, most literary theorists’—experience of reading. Says Seymour Chatman: “Too often do we recall fictional characters vividly, yet not a single word of the text in which they came alive; indeed, I venture to say that readers generally remember characters that way.” We would venture to say that viewers recall televisual characters vividly but not necessarily the codes—dialogue, editing, performance, and so forth—that construct them. Hence, says Chatman, “[a] viable theory of character should . . . treat characters as autonomous beings, not as mere plot functions.”7 Following Chatman, we wish to treat Star Trek characters as autonomous beings, not as mere combinations of televisual codes. Yet we must do so in the face of a leading narratologist’s pronouncement that, despite its being “the most crucial category of narrative,” there is “no satisfying, coherent theory of character.” Mieke Bal attributes this lack to the central conundrum of the fictional character: “The character is not a human being, but it resembles one. It has no real psyche, personality, ideology, or competence to act, but it does possess characteristics which make psychological and ideological descriptions possible.”8 Another leading narratologist, Shlomith RimmonKenan, may fail to provide a satisfying, coherent theory of character according to Bal’s standards, but she does offer helpful guidance on steering between the Scylla of realism and the Charybdis of semiotics: Whereas in mimetic theories . . . characters are equated with people, in semiotic theories they dissolve into textuality. . . . The two extreme

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positions can be thought of as relating to different aspects of narrative fiction. In the text characters are nodes in the verbal design; in the story they are—by definition—non (or pre-) verbal abstractions, constructs. Although these constructs are by no means human beings in the literal sense of the word, they are partly modeled on the reader’s conception of people and in this they are person-like. Similarly, in the text, characters are inextricable from the rest of the design, whereas in the story they are extracted from their textuality.9

Using Star Trek as a case study, we want to offer a theory of character as it works in television fiction. First we explore the utility of a rigorous semiotic analysis that treats the characters as a combination of televisual codes inextricable from the overall design of the text. We do this through a close analysis of the immediate postcredit scene—a dialogue between Riker and Troi—from the final episode of Enterprise, “These Are the Voyages,” discussed in the last chapter. How might a hypothetical viewer, unfamiliar with Star Trek in any of its incarnations, construct the character of Riker using only prior knowledge of televisual codes and of cultural norms? The scene begins with an exterior shot of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D, immediately establishing the as-yet-unknown character’s location (aboard a spaceship) and time period (sometime in the future). A voice-over says, “First Officer’s personal log, star date 47457.1. With the unexpected arrival of Admiral Pressman, my former CO, I find myself in an awkward position.” The pitch/timbre of the voice establishes that the character is male. The dialogue establishes that he is a senior military figure (hence probably at least middle-aged) and that he has a problem, while the reference to a star date reinforces the futuristic setting. The scene cuts to two glasses. Hands reach in to pick up the glasses, and the camera pulls back to show a man handing them to a woman, who puts them on a tray and walks into the depth of the shot. The televisual convention of cutting from exterior to interior identifies this second location as the interior of the spaceship, the editing confirming that the character is aboard the spaceship seen in the first shot of the sequence. The mise-en-scène—a bar (albeit with some very advanced technology)—and the action—extras sitting and drinking, or standing in a conversational group—indicate that the character is likely to be off duty and engaged in leisure activity. The narration continues over this shot: “Counselor Troi has suggested that I might get a few insights by calling up an historic holoprogram.” The dialogue thus reveals that the narrator is interacting with at least one other character on board the starship. It also establishes that Troi is trying to help the narrator with the awkward situation, although the exact nature of the relationship between the counselor

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and the narrator is unclear. The scene cuts to a long shot of two characters whom even our inexperienced viewer, given the previous clues, can easily identify as the narrator and Troi. Both are dressed in what the viewer can assume are uniforms, confirming that Riker and Troi are part of the same military institution. Both are middle-aged, confirming a fact that the viewer may previously have inferred about Riker and suggesting that the relationship between the two may be one of relative equality. Troi is female, which, given the hetero-normativity of most American television, suggests the possibility of a romantic attachment. The camera pulls closer as the narrator says: “I’ve told you everything I can,” and Troi responds, “If it’s a question of breaking a promise . . .” The scene cuts to a medium close-up of the narrator as he says, “It’s not a promise. It’s an order.” The dialogue gives further information about the character’s awkward situation, the key narrative point conventionally emphasized by the cut to a closer shot. The character is under orders not to divulge some information, perhaps a military secret. Following conventional television shot–reverse shot editing, the scene cuts to a matching medium close shot of Troi, who says, “Have you learned anything on the holodeck about breaking orders?” The dialogue’s delivery, in the classic patient interrogative of the analyst, implies that the relationship between Troi and the narrator might be a professional rather than a personal one, although the setting—the bar—and the relaxed postures of the two actors work against this inference. The scene cuts back to the narrator: “Not yet [ sigh]. I’ve gone back a couple of days earlier to get some perspective [ shakes head]. But I really don’t see that this is going to help.” Another cut to Troi, who smiles and says, “That’s why you run a starship and I’m the counselor.” Another cut to the narrator, who raises his glass, smiles, and drinks. Troi’s smile and teasing dialogue and the narrator’s answering smile and sipping of his drink confirm the hypothesis that the two have a personal, if not necessarily a romantic, relationship, although the references to running a starship and being the counselor underline their professional roles. Our dissection of a short scene requires a fair amount of space and, in common with much close textual analysis, can make for rather tedious reading. It also may not be very useful, as we can show by contrasting our hypothetical inexperienced viewer’s knowledge with that of a hypothetical competent viewer who can place the scene within the context of Star Trek’s extended seriality. The inexperienced viewer may correctly infer Riker’s dilemma, having sufficient information to grasp the immediate hermeneutic, and may hypothesize as to the nature of the narrator/Troi relationship, although he or she lacks sufficient information to resolve the question

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of the relationship’s being romantic/nonromantic. The competent viewer, however, knows that Riker and Troi were lovers before serving together on the Enterprise-D, had a very close and caring friendship during the TNG years, and will finally, in the tenth Star Trek film, Nemesis, get married. The competent viewer may also recollect the TNG episode in which Admiral Pressman appeared (“The Pegasus” [7:12]) and will more fully understand Riker’s moral dilemma, knowing that the strong bond between him and his current commanding officer, Picard, causes Riker’s uneasiness at concealing facts from his captain. The inexperienced viewer must construct the character of Riker from the design of the text—from, that is, the deployment of televisual codes in the scene—whereas the competent viewer has extracted the character of Riker from the textuality of dozens of episodes. As the series format demands, she or he knows the character through his story.

the components of the televisual character Television characters are not like holograms. Each tiny fragment does not contain the sum of the whole, but rather becomes fully intelligible only when juxtaposed with all the other tiny fragments in all the other scenes in which the character appears.10 Television characters are to some extent autonomous beings, independent of the televisual codes and individual scenes that construct them, existing as a whole only in the minds of the producers and the audience. It is here that the characters take on the quasihuman—or, to be politically correct by twenty-fourth-century standards, quasi-sentient—status so baffling to literary theorists. Consider, for example, the official Star Trek website, which includes biographies not only of the principal actors but of the principal characters as well. The entry for Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise includes the bare “biographical” facts (date and place of birth, parents’ names, marital status), a Starfleet career summary, a medical history, and an extensive psychological profile in which Counselor Troi reports on Picard’s relationships and emotional makeup. The counselor writes about Picard’s strained relations with his father and his brother, his difficulties in forging sustained romantic relationships, his tendency to suppress his feelings. Troi’s report includes significant incidents from Picard’s childhood, adolescence, and pre-Enterprise Starfleet career.11 Literary theorists may have difficulties conceiving of characters as autonomous beings, but Star Trek producers and audiences do not. Rather than conducting a close textual analysis of individual scenes, we must identify the elements that constitute a character abstracted from the design of

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the text and existing in the storyworld—that is, in the minds of producers and audiences. We do this with Picard—whom Chris Gregory describes as “arguably the most fully-realized character in all of Star Trek”12 and who, most would agree, was played by the best actor in all of Star Trek—for our in-depth analysis of the construction of a main character of a television drama. Captain Picard’s primary narrative function in the 178 TNG episodes is to command the ship—to give the orders that set other actions in motion and progress the narrative. This might prove an adequate explanation of the Picard character for some structuralists and narratologists, but not for the Star Trek producers, who were fully committed to the psychologically realist mode of American television drama. The writers consider not just what Picard does, but why he does it. As Tzvetan Todorov tells us, “We may imagine texts … in which the “characters” are no more than … the agents of a series of actions. But as soon as psychological determinism surfaces, the “character” is transformed into a character: he acts in a given way because he is timid, weak, courageous, and so forth.”13 In a psychologically realist text, psychological motivations appear to drive the action, but in practice actions and psychological traits are two sides of the same character: traits motivate actions, and actions connote traits. According to H. Porter Abbot, “Characters . . . have agency; they cause things to happen. Conversely, as these people drive the action, they necessarily reveal who they are in terms of their motives, their strength, weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love, hate, cherish, adore, deplore and so on. By their actions do we know them.”14 In one of the few filmstudies texts that touches on the topic of character, David Bordwell acknowledges the intertwining of character and action. He defines a character as “a bundle of qualities, or traits” but continues: “Their traits must be affirmed in speech and physical behavior, the observable projections of personality. . . . Even a simple physical reaction—a gesture, an expression, a widening of the eyes, constructs character psychology in accordance with other information. . . . Hollywood cinema reinforces the individuality and consistency of each character by means of recurrent motifs. A character will be tagged with a detail of speech or behavior that defines a major trait.”15 What traits, physical behavior, and speech does the character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard exhibit? What’s missing from Bordwell’s typology? Here are the six key elements that we think construct television characters. 1. Psychological Traits/Habitual Behaviors The long run of a television series permits writers and actors to flesh out their characters with behaviors

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repeated over several episodes, making them habitual, a part of the series’s and the character’s familiarity. Picard drinks Earl Grey tea; quotes Shakespeare and other classical authors; listens to and plays classical music; reads (including Homer in the original Greek); knows about history and archaeology; fences and rides horses. These recurrent motifs serve to construct Picard as the consummate cultivated, intellectual European, a repository of the virtues of Western civilization. In a television series, characters can be made to face decisions that reveal other, more dynamic aspects of their personality. Picard’s consistent and accumulated choices of action reveal him as a man of courage, integrity, compassion, courtesy, reason, and rigid self-control. Our very language here reveals the difficulty of analyzing a character constructed according to the conventions of psychological realism without recourse to terms normally employed to describe “real” human beings. The producers have, of course, constructed the character’s behaviors and actions precisely to elicit these general descriptors. Just as the character’s complete story exists only as a mental construct of producers and audiences, so does his character. We could point to individual instances of behaviors and actions in individual scenes, and could even analyze the interplay of televisual codes around each of these individual instances, but doing so would reduce us once more to the level of close and minute textual analysis that has already proved fairly unsatisfactory. It is possible to unweave the rainbow, but in this case it would be a rather fruitless and unenlightening task. 2. Physical Traits/Appearance We broaden Bordwell’s category of physical behavior to acknowledge a key distinction between the construction of character in literature and characters in the moving-image media of cinema and television being embodied by specific actors. Roles are certainly cast with certain physical specifications in mind; Gene Roddenberry wanted a hairy French actor for the Picard role, but, as we noted in chapter 2, his fellow producers persuaded him to accept a bald English one. Once selected, an actor endows a character with traits beyond the immediate control of the producers, which may then feed back into the collaborative construction of the character. The reader may recall from chapter 4 that costume designer Robert Blackman wanted to change the TNG uniforms in part because they were particularly unsuitable for Picard/Stewart, who “was this very dignified man in pajamas.” Stewart’s physical appearance and voice convey meanings derived from preexisting cultural categories, his high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and thin lips signaling “aristocratic,” or his resonant baritone, “authoritative.” In addition to his innate physical characteristics, Stewart

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constructed Picard through posture, his erect military bearing, and repeated gestures: a downward movement of the hand to accompany the command “Engage”; a tugging down of the uniform tunic that fans have affectionately dubbed “the Picard maneuver”; the steepling of the fingers or the rubbing of the lower lip in thought. Other production personnel contributed to the construction of the Picard character through the manipulation of external appearance (costume, makeup, hair length, and facial hair) to give crucial clues to the character’s narrative role and state of mind. For example, the last TNG episode, “All Good Things,” switches from the past to the present to the future as Picard attempts to resolve a conundrum that could destroy humanity. The pajama uniform that Blackman found so unsuitable signals the narrative past, while Blackman’s redesigned uniform signals the narrative present. In the future, Picard’s civilian clothes detract from his authority, and his wild hair and beard reinforce the impression that the aged captain might no longer be fully in control of his mental faculties. 3. Speech Patterns and Dialogue Again there is a split between that which is innate to the actor and that which results from the collaboration of actor and other production personnel. Stewart’s received-pronunciation English accent, with its connotations for American audiences of high social origin, is one of Picard’s defining characteristics. This connotation may have provided cues to the scriptwriters, for Picard has a rather more elevated, formal pattern of speech than the other characters, together with a pattern of wry humor and understatement. He also has certain tag phrases (“make it so,” “indeed,” “so it would seem,” and, of course, “tea, Earl Grey, hot”) and is given to delivering eloquent speeches, including occasional Shakespearean recitations—an homage, as we said in chapter 4, to Stewart’s stage experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company. 4. Interactions with Other Characters All fictional characters are partially defined by other characters with whom they interact. Even Robinson Crusoe had Friday. The potentially long run of a television series, coupled with a stable ensemble cast of characters designed to complement each other, multiplies the opportunities for interactions that reveal different aspects of a character. Workplace dramas—those with ensemble casts in professional settings, most famously the “cop and doc” shows16—also partially define characters by their role in the workplace, as does, of course, the military hierarchy of all the Star Trek series. Picard’s interactions with particular members of the crew disclose different aspects of his personality. He serves as mentor to several of them: the first officer Riker, learning the ways

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of command; the boy Wesley, learning to be a man; the caught-betweencultures Worf, learning to reconcile his Klingon inheritance with his human upbringing; and the android Data, learning to be human. These relationships highlight Picard’s sensitivity and compassion, reinforcing his position as the crew’s moral compass, the man to whom all the others look for orders and guidance. His strong friendships with Counselor Deanna Troi and Dr. Beverly Crusher, to whom he turns in moments of emotional crisis, reveal his more vulnerable aspects. Occasionally recurring or one-off characters allow the writers to flesh out aspects of the character that might otherwise remain unexplored: for example, the adolescent boy and the young man with whom Picard has at different times to assume a paternal relationship (“Suddenly Human” [4:4], “Bloodlines” [7:22]); the women with whom he is unable to establish a stable romantic relationship; the omnipotent entity Q, whom Picard at first loathes and then gradually begins to trust. A few episodes remove Picard from his command function, exploring the man apart from his social role, as in “Chain of Command” (6:10 and 6:11), discussed below. In “Conundrum” (5:14) the crew suffers collective amnesia and doesn’t know who among them should command, while in “Tapestry” (6:15), an alternative-possible-world episode, Picard temporarily serves as an aging lieutenant in the Enterprise’s astrophysics department. In both instances his displacement from the top of the hierarchy affects his relationships with all the other characters. 5. Environment Just as “real” human beings behave differently in different settings, location inflects character behavior. On the bridge, Picard must play the role of the totally-in-control commander, in the Ten Forward bar he can be more relaxed and informal, and in his quarters he can disclose his most intimate thoughts and feelings. Aspects of the mise-en-scène, particularly props, are intended as revelatory of character. Picard’s sextant, Globe Shakespeare, and archaeological relics help to construct him as scholar and explorer. Like one-off or occasionally recurring characters, a change of location helps the writers to explore a character’s other dimensions; in his family’s ancestral home or on the pleasure planet Risa , he can express feelings and indulge in behaviors repressed on the Enterprise. 6. Biography By “biography” we mean the character’s backstory, the events that occurred before the series’s time and during previous episodes. Competent viewers of TNG know many things about Jean-Luc Picard: that his ancestors include an admiral who fought at Trafalgar; that he was born in Lebarre, France, to Maurice and Yvette Picard; that he has a brother

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called Robert; that he was the only freshman to win the Starfleet Academy marathon; that his first command was the Stargazer. Just as a “real” human being’s biography ends only with death, that of a television character ends only with cancelation, while the judicious introduction of new elements provides that novelty so crucial to the series/serial form. We recall what Patrick Stewart told us—that Picard’s arc was not complete until “the camera rolled for the last time”; up to that point he was continually trying to introduce original gestures and attitudes or some unknown aspect of his character’s life. This analysis of the Picard character is primarily predicated upon what we might term a “holistic textual analysis”—that is, upon the knowledge of competent viewers of the multiple episodes that constitute TNG and of Captain Picard. But as discussed above, textual meaning also derives from the combined efforts of the entire production team. The primary remaining traces of those combined efforts—the individual scenes in which Picard appears—highlight Patrick Stewart’s creative autonomy, but we should remember the contributions of others, especially the writers who supplied the character’s words. Diane Duane, together with Michael Reeves, coscripted “Where No One Has Gone Before,” (TNG 1:6), “written some weeks before Patrick Stewart had been cast as Picard.” Writing the script, said Duane, “taught both Michael and me a lot about the challenges inherent in writing for a series so new that no one knows what most of the primary characters even look like.”17 At that early point in the production process, the writers had only the show’s production bible and the producers’ advice to guide their construction of the character. As Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) observes, in this episode the writer’s input seems at variance with the actor’s: Picard seems to vacillate between extremes in this show, snapping at people and barking orders and then quickly changing his entire tone and attitude to one that’s more calming and warm. I’m not sure if that was a deliberate choice, so he would appear as a conflicted man, or if it was Patrick Stewart’s natural warmth and kindness coming through the gruff demeanor Picard was written to have. Either way, it’s confusing, and makes it difficult for the audience to really like and connect with him. . . . Luckily, Patrick’s outstanding abilities as an actor gave Picard strong direction and the writers would begin tailoring Picard to reflect more of who Patrick was, so he ultimately grew into the character audiences came to love.18

In those early TNG episodes, Picard is not really the Picard we came to love. It took several years and the combined agencies of all production

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personnel elaborating the six key elements of the character to create him. Now the frequent viewer may believe she knows Captain Jean-Luc Picard, an illusory but psychologically realistic “person,” as well as or better than her family, friends, or workmates.

staying in character The character Picard exists in the heads of competent viewers, produced from, to use Jeffrey Sconce’s formulation “ ‘parts’ that each week embody the whole.” But as Sconce also says, producers must find, “within such repetition, possibilities for novel and diverting variations.”19 Characters must occasionally depart from their established six components to introduce the differentiation the series format requires. A Picard with a full head of hair might indicate a flashback to a period before he captained the Enterprise, as in the episode “Violations” (5:12). A Picard leading a chorus of the Royal Navy anthem “Heart of Oak” in Ten Forward may be an alien replicant, as in the episode “Allegiance” (3:18). A Picard dressed in trench coat and fedora may be playing a holodeck program, as in the episode “The Big Goodbye” (1:12). A Picard dressed in civilian garb and on a non-Starfleet ship may be undercover, as in the episode “Gambit” (7:4 and 7:5). Divergence provides novelty, but writers must not so violate a character’s defining psychological traits as to make him act out of character. Most television dramas occasionally have recourse to altered mental states, and fantastic television dramas have additional recourse to parallel universes, alien possession, and the like in order to license “out of character” behavior. Such explanatory factors permit momentary deviation from established traits while preserving the underlying stability demanded by both the series and the serial formats. Despite his customary repression, Picard may occasionally exhibit unusual and intense emotion in extreme psychological distress reasonably motivated by the script. In “Sarek (3:23),” while mindmelding with Spock’s father, the Vulcan ambassador, Picard sobs in Beverly Crusher’s arms. In the episode “Family,” discussed by Ron Moore in chapter 2 as a deviation from the “Roddenberry box,” he returns home to recover from his Borg assimilation and has a fistfight with his bullying older brother that ends with him weeping in the mud, bewailing his failure to resist the ruthless invaders. But the episodes’ conclusions return Picard to command of both his emotions and his ship, as the repetitive nature of the series format demands. Television characters don’t “develop” in the manner of characters in one-off fictional forms such as novels and films. While television characters can accumulate a huge array of biographical

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details over the course of several seasons, they can never experience emotional epiphanies that would cause them to relinquish their primary narrative function. No matter how emotionally battered by events such as Borg assimilation, Picard must continue to captain the Enterprise. The exception that proves the rule is the two-part “Chain of Command,” (6:10 and 6:11), in which Picard is tortured by the sadistic Cardassian Gul Madred and does not return to his initial authoritative state at the episode’s end. Actor, writer, and other production personnel collude to divest Picard not only of his command function but of almost all that defines him. A hard metal chair in the middle of a vast, empty, and ill-lit space replaces his “big” chair on the Enterprise bridge, nakedness replaces his captain’s uniform, a hoarse whisper his resonant baritone, a defeated slump his ramrod-straight bearing, and red-rimmed eyes and silvery stubble his customary immaculate appearance. Stripped by the dramatic requirements of the production of everything but his innate psychological traits—intelligence, courage, and indomitable will—Picard must resist Madred’s attempt to break him by forcing him to agree that five lights shine into his eyes when in fact there are only four. At the episode’s climax, Madred tells Picard that the Enterprise has been destroyed and with it any chance of rescue. The Cardassian then offers the captain a Faustian bargain. Picard can maintain that there are four lights and endure continual torture or say that there are five lights and experience a captivity of relative comfort. As the weakened and befuddled prisoner stares at the lights, Madred’s superior enters and orders that Picard be returned to the Enterprise, which, of course, has both survived and triumphed. Escorted from the room by Cardassian guards, Picard turns back to Madred and defiantly declares, “There are four lights!” In the story’s coda, a still weak and disoriented Picard confides in Counselor Troi in his ready room. He admits that, had he not been rescued in the nick of time, he would have said “five lights,” willing as he was to do “anything, anything at all” to end the pain. Television series’ characters can undergo a degree of psychological trauma but must return at some point to relative stability in order to perform their central narrative functions. Picard’s admitting that he was on the verge of breaking under torture achieves a clever compromise, almost but not quite departing irreversibly from the psychological traits central to the character’s narrative function. Picard’s confession accords with general principles of psychological realism: no one, no matter how courageous, can hold out forever against torture. His confession also accords with principles of character psychology, adding depth and complexity by showing Picard in the unaccustomed role of vulnerable victim rather than heroic captain. But

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Picard’s actually breaking and saying “five lights” to Madred would have so compromised his central narrative functions of command and moral centrality as to require at least the equivalent of a “Family” episode, if not extensive leave and therapy, to restore him to the big chair on the bridge. As it was, TNG, more series than serial in form, was not bound by the requirements of strict continuity, and in the following episode, “Ship in a Bottle” (6:12), the captain seems entirely untroubled by memories of his recent captivity. Viewers could only assume that Picard had recovered in the narrative ellipses between episodes. Some fan-fiction writers20 have filled in the narrative ellipsis with post– “Chain of Command” stories about the captain’s posttraumatic stress. In many of these stories, Picard exhibits a psychological distress so great as to incapacitate him from command and make him totally dependent upon Beverly Crusher (and sometimes Deanna Troi as well). Not limited by the requirements of repetition and stability, fan-fiction writers happily seized upon an opportunity to explore the man rather than the captain. This example shows that there can be no general theory of fictional characters divorced from the fictional worlds to which they belong; characters should be conceived of in relation to their own specific fictional worlds. As Wallace Martin suggests, “Emphasis on action or plot—for example, in the detective novel—leaves little space or need for complexity of character. Everyday incidents become interesting if complex characters participate in them. . . . In the same way the division of characters into ‘flat’ and ‘round,’ depending on whether they are static or capable of change, might give way to a more flexible concept of the interaction of character and fictional world.”21 Martin here talks about generic variations within a specific fictional form: the novel. But as the contrast between the TNG writers’ and the fan-fiction authors’ exploration of Picard’s posttraumatic stress illustrates, characters must suit not only a fictional genre but a fictional form. As we said above, television characters cannot “develop” in the manner of novelistic or cinematic characters. Particular fictional forms require different kinds of characters at different stages in the forms’ historical development. The classic-network-era series format required characters who remained the same from episode to episode. To quote Marc Dolan, “Routine viewers of an episodic series watched in the secure knowledge that, whenever something drastic happened to a regular character like Lucy Ricardo or James T. Kirk in the middle of an episode, it would be reversed by the end of the episode and the characters would end up in the same general narrative situation that they began in.”22

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The serial format requires character development, but, as Jane Feuer points out, this preference has both marketing and ideological implications: Character development is . . . a quality prized by the upscale audience which tends to have a more literary standard of value . . . the idea of character depth and development does not necessarily make for “better” or even for more sophisticated programming. To value “character comedy” over other comic techniques is to take up an ideological position, to construct the genre in a particular way and to value it for a kind of depth that some would construe as ideologically conservative. According to certain Marxist analyses of art (in particular; Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the epic theater), flat characters are more politically progressive because they take us away from our identification with the characters and force us to think about how the play is constructed. According to this view, character complexity and development is merely a representation of bourgeois values.23

The character complexity and development of “quality” serial American television dramas such as The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) and Mad Men (HBO, 2007-present) may well be a representation of bourgeois values that, growing out of the traditional association between the middle class and the fictional forms of the novel and the play, are perceived to distinguish the serial from the series format. But despite critical kudos, ratings success, and talk of television becoming more like the cinema, the central protagonists of “quality” dramas such as Tony Soprano and Don Draper still in one key respect more closely resemble characters in an episodic series than in a oneoff novel or play. For literary and dramatic critics, development and complexity have often meant that the protagonist grows, achieves a higher degree of self-awareness, and makes life-transforming decisions. But the repetitive format of the television series dictates a relative state of stability for its characters. Characters failing to perform key narrative functions, such as leading the mob in the case of Tony Soprano, or coming up with great campaigns while being a serial seducer in the case of Don Draper, could seriously undermine the basic premise of a series. In keeping with the conventions of “serious” literature and drama, both Tony and Don grow and achieve greater self-awareness, but, in keeping with television series’ repetitive format, neither is permitted a life-transforming action or decision. Don can have a nightmare in which he strangles a former lover, but such an event “really” happening would of necessity remove him from the world of Madison Avenue. The commercial imperative of series television requires that the series doesn’t come to a conclusion too soon; there can be no Hamlet-like killing of Claudius, no Nora-like final exit from the doll’s

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house. Only when there is no series format to preserve can television characters in realistic drama have fates as malleable as those of their dramatic and cinematic counterparts. However, telefantasy, as we will shortly argue, resolves this problem through constructing alternate possible worlds in which characters can take on other identities.

allowing development: the flexi-narrative format Character complexity and development mean different things within the context of a television drama than they do in the context of a play or a novel. The two most famous captains of the Enterprise were Jean-Luc Picard and James T. Kirk—the former the hero of a flexi-narrative and the latter of an episodic narrative. The traumas of Borg assimilation or Cardassian torture cannot so alter Picard’s core psychological traits as to cause him to reevaluate his risky lifestyle and opt for a safer line of work as archaeologist or literary scholar. However, the flexi-narrative format does allow Picard in some respects to develop in the traditional literary and dramatic sense. In “Family” (TNG 4:2) Picard realizes that he, too, is ultimately a vulnerable human being, a life of stellar achievements not having prepared him to resist the Borg. He says to his brother Robert at the moment of his climactic breakdown that he wasn’t “good enough” or “strong enough,” a startling admission from the man who has always had to be good enough and strong enough to deal with any emergency. The episode also complicates the character by filling in his backstory, a common strategy in the writers’ search for divergence from the repetitive series format. We learn of the conflict between Picard, eager to join Starfleet and journey to the stars, and his traditional father and brother, devoted to their vineyards and winemaking, who expected him to join the family business. In keeping with the flexi-narrative format, this conflict resurfaces in a later episode, “Tapestry” (TNG 6:15), in which, courtesy of the galactic trickster Q, a perhaps-dead Picard confronts his indisputably dead and still disapproving father. In contrast, James Kirk also suffers traumatic experiences, but he doesn’t grow in any literary or dramatic sense: he is always returned to the stability of the series format. For example, in the episode “Dagger of the Mind” (TOS 1:9), Dr. Adams, the director of a penal colony, has been using a brainwashing device—the neural neutralizer—to control the colony’s inmates and his staff. When Kirk inquires about the device, the doctor asserts its harmlessness and offers to let Kirk try it himself. Adams, of course, uses the

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neural neutralizer for his own nefarious purposes, brainwashing Kirk into falling madly in love with crewwoman Helen Noel, thus permitting the sexual attraction and dalliances allocated to Kirk in virtually every episode—relationships, which, in keeping with the series format, are not recalled in later episodes. Kirk’s resistance to Adams’s suggestion causes the captain intense physical pain and mental anguish. In a twist of fate, the episode’s climax sees Adams falling victim to his own infernal device, the machine emptying his mind of all thoughts and causing him to die of loneliness. Having successfully resolved the week’s narrative dilemma, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy once again sit safely on the bridge of the Enterprise. A message from the penal colony reports that the neural neutralizer has been destroyed: mccoy: It’s hard to believe that a man could die of loneliness. kirk: (quietly and grimly) Not when you’ve sat in that room. (turns to Spock with half-smile and says more loudly) Take us out of orbit, Mr. Spock, warp factor one. spock: (heartily) Warp factor one.

TOS episode codas frequently accomplish the full restoration of narrative stability: in this instance, Kirk’s rapid shift from reflecting on his ordeal to his command function signals the lack of any posttraumatic stress. The series format denies Kirk the self-questioning of Picard in the coda to “Chain of Command,” let alone an entire episode in which to recover, as in “Family.” The series format’s search for divergence and new plot lines, however, permits Kirk to resolve traumas that occurred before he captained the Enterprise (as long as the resolution occurs in a single episode, of course). In “The Conscience of the King” (TOS 1:13), Anton Karidian, actor-manager of a group of traveling players, is actually Kodos the Executioner, who, when Kirk was a boy on Tarsus IV, ordered half the planet’s population to be killed in a drastic solution to a severe food shortage. Karidian’s/Kodos’s death closes this previous act in Kirk’s life. In “Shore Leave” (1:15), a simulacrum of Finnegan, an older cadet who tormented the overly serious and studious Kirk at Starfleet Academy, mysteriously appears on a planet on which the ship’s crew are enjoying some rest and relaxation. Kirk’s triumph in the ensuing fistfight removes any lingering feelings of inadequacy. In “The Obsession” (2:42), a deadly cloudlike creature that Kirk had first encountered eleven years earlier threatens the Enterprise. While a young ensign, Kirk had hesitated for a moment before firing on the creature and believes that his hesitation led to the death of his captain and half the ship’s crew. Spock establishes that the creature’s ability

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to shift instantly in space renders it invulnerable to phaser fire, thus freeing Kirk from his long-festering guilt. Characters and incidents from Kirk’s past also provide the plotlines for several other episodes. In “Court Martial” (1:20), Kirk is blamed for the death of Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney, an old friend. Finney has actually faked his death to seek revenge on Kirk, who he believes sabotaged his career by reporting a careless and potentially dangerous mistake when the two were posted together as junior officers. In “Patterns of Force (2:21),” a Nazi-like society turns out to have been established by Kirk’s Starfleet Academy history professor in a misguided attempt to bring order and stability. In “Turnabout Intruder” (3:79), former girlfriend Janice Lester, barred from Starfleet captaincy by her gender and consumed by jealousy of Kirk, uses an alien device to switch bodies with the captain. The introduction of characters and incidents from the past into the present series time tells us a great deal about Kirk. We learn that he spent part of his childhood on the colony Tarsus IV; that he studied history at Starfleet Academy, where, contrary to our expectations of the dashing captain, he was serious and studious; that he served as an ensign on the USS Farragut, where presumably he became friends with Ben Finney; and that he once had a relationship with Janice Lester. Character development in television drama is more a matter of accumulated depth than of the teleological trajectory toward character epiphany seen in realist literature and drama. The episodes discussed above provide new information about the Kirk character, adding to the sixth key element of character construction: the biography. The competent viewer extracts data from individual episodes and, as we have done above, constructs the character’s linear story. Had TOS run for longer, more ex-girlfriends, teachers, starships served on, and planets visited may have served as plot hooks. A character’s habitual behaviors are also almost infinitely expandable. TNG’s seven seasons showed us that Picard drank Earl Grey tea, fenced, rode horseback, liked Bach and Mozart, and so forth. Had there been a season eight or nine, we might well have learned new things about the character; perhaps at certain times he would have preferred Darjeeling to Earl Grey, or Handel to Bach and Mozart. (Indeed, in First Contact, an emotionally distressed Picard listens to Berlioz.) Scriptwriters resort more frequently to these two elements—biography and behavior—than to the other four character elements to introduce the novelty and divergence so necessary to the longrunning series or serial. And in telefantasy, writers can relocate a character to an alternate possible world in order to change key aspects of biography and behavior without violating character continuity.

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alternate possible worlds and televisual character Some writers prefer telefantasy precisely because the genre permits greater latitude in character development. Ron Moore told us: I have more things that I can do. Writing is a big “what if” game. What if something happened to this character? And I have the ability to say, “What if someone time-travels from the future and tells you you’re going to die?” And you can’t do that on The West Wing. And I enjoy those kind of sort-of-bizarre thought-provoking situations. But at its heart, it’s all about what that person is going to do. How does a human being react in an extraordinary circumstance or on a world where fillin-the-blank is happening? It’s all about people and putting characters through their paces, and discovering little bits of humanity in them.24

As Moore’s comment indicates, the ready generation of alternate possible worlds opens up infinite possibilities for telefantasy writers.25 They can ring changes upon elements of the televisual character without resorting too often to altered states of mind, making characters behave inconsistently, or, worst of all, undermining the series’s basic premise. Discussion of two of Jean-Luc Picard’s alternate-possible-world experiences illustrates more fully the workings of this useful narrative device. Our first example, “The Big Goodbye” (TNG 1:12), creates an alternate possible world that alters environment, appearance, speech patterns, and interactions with other characters to contribute to the exploration and reinforcement of Picard’s established psychological traits. In this episode the Enterprise has been instructed to contact the insectlike Jarada, who insist on being properly addressed in Jaradan, their notoriously difficult language, before they will commence negotiations. Captain Picard, exhausted by his attempts to memorize the Jaradan greeting, decides to relax on the virtualreality holodeck. Accompanied by the android Data, Dr. Beverly Crusher, and literary historian Whalen, the captain runs his new program, playing the role of hardboiled detective Dixon Hill in a re-creation of 1940s San Francisco. But the Jarada’s long-range scan of the Enterprise causes a malfunction, incapacitating the holodeck’s safety mechanisms. Picard and the others are trapped on the holodeck, confronting gangster Cyrus Redblock (a reference to Sumner Redstone, CEO of what was at the time Viacom Paramount) and his henchman Felix Leach in a program where holographic fists now draw blood and holographic bullets wound. Chief engineer Geordi La Forge and scientific whiz kid Wesley correct the malfunction in the nick of time, and Picard races to the bridge to greet the alien

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race in perfect Jaradan, successfully establishing contact between them and the Federation. Availing themselves of telefantasy’s capacity to encompass myriad genres, as discussed in the previous chapter, the scriptwriter (Tracey Torme) consciously modeled the alternate possible world of “The Big Goodbye” upon the textual actual worlds of the film noir, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. Picard’s alter ego, Dixon Hill, has affinities with Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Raymond Marlowe, made explicit when Data searches for information on the fictional detective and discovers that Hill first appeared in a short story in a 1934 issue of Amazing Detective Stories and later in the 1936 novel The Long Dark Tunnel. The holodeck adventure’s parallels to the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon are obvious to intertextually competent viewers: the bad guys—the large and courtly Cyrus Redblock, modeled on Sidney Greenstreet’s Gutman, and the small and nervous Felix Leech, modeled on Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo—and the search for a missing item, modeled on the Falcon itself. At the conclusion, once more on the bridge, both Data and Picard find it hard to relinquish their holodeck alter egos. Data begins to recount their adventure in true hardboiled style: “It was raining in the City by the Bay.” Picard interrupts him, ordering a new course heading for the ship, but then puts his fedora back on his head and, speaking out of the side of his mouth in Bogart style, instructs Data: “And step on it.” This behavior, carried over from the alternate possible world, whimsically undermines the coda’s restoration of the narrative stability of the textual actual world, perhaps reminding the viewer that the detective alter ego still lurks somewhere within the ever-so-proper captain. “The Big Goodbye,” although only the twelfth episode of the first TNG season, shows the producers already seeking novelty and divergence, the alternate possible world showing off the new technology of the holodeck that will feature so centrally in many subsequent episodes, appealing to competent viewers’ knowledge of the referenced intertexts, and allowing the actors to play with the conventions of the hardboiled novel and film noir. Most important in terms of our current argument, the alternate possible world allowed the writer to augment a Picard still in the early stages of development but with key psychological traits already in place. For example, in the previous episodes his command function had established him as aloof from the rest of his crew; his contrast with dynamic first officer Will Riker, as cerebral and diplomatic; and his refusal to submit to Dr. Crusher’s viral-induced seductive come-ons in the episode “The Naked Now” (1:3), as slightly repressed and extremely duty conscious. In “The Big

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Goodbye,” Picard consciously chooses to inhabit an alter ego and alternate possible world quite different from the Enterprise. The writer’s choice of alter ego and actions within the alternate possible world seems to give clues to the usually repressed aspects of the character. The swapping of the welllit, well-regulated Enterprise for the dark, chaotic, and primitive environs of mid-twentieth-century San Francisco, of the formality of military uniform for the dashing romanticism of fedora and trench coat, of his formal speech patterns for the hard-boiled patter of the private detective, suggest that Picard longs to temporarily cast off the strictures and responsibilities of his command position, to transform from thinker and diplomat to man of action. No longer constrained by Federation regulations and morality, he can flirt with femmes fatales and solve problems with fists and guns rather than diplomacy. But it is the altered relationships to new and old characters that hint most strongly at the unsatisfied desires behind the Captain’s correct facade. A long-running part of Picard’s narrative arc is his relationship with Dr. Beverly Crusher, doomed by the writers to seven years of unresolved sexual tension with her old friend Jean-Luc. “The Big Goodbye” intimates that they came close to resolving that tension in the simulated San Francisco (and gives credence to Stewart’s assertion, reported in chapter 4, that The Next Generation’s first two seasons had constructed a romantic relationship between the two characters). Beverly, having decided to join the captain in his game, enters the holodeck attired in flattering 1940s garb, complete with seamed stockings and veiled hat. Clearly aroused by her appearance, Picard compliments her and invites her to come and see Dixon Hill’s office. As they walk away arm in arm, Data and Whalen catch up and ask to join them. The couple glance in frustration at each other, revealing to the viewer their thwarted intent (an example of the contribution of nonverbal performance to the construction of character). Picard’s alter ego liberates him from his self-imposed strictures. This liberation can take place only in the alternate possible world, so that despite the stark revelation of mutual desire on the holodeck, Beverly and Picard continue their frustrating sexual two-step right through the seventh and final season. The truly core elements of Picard’s character, his psychological traits/habitual behaviors and biography, remain unaltered. Other alternate-possible-world episodes, most notably “The Inner Light” (5:25) and “Tapestry” (6:15), do alter these core elements, the lessons Picard learns in those worlds affecting his behavior in the textual actual world. “The Inner Light” was mentioned by other interviewees as an exceptional episode—and an example of Patrick Stewart’s range as an actor, so we focus on this episode here.

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“the inner light” “The Inner Light” begins with the Enterprise encountering a mysterious probe that releases a nucleonic particle stream, penetrating the ship’s shields and causing Picard to lose consciousness. Although his body remains on the Enterprise, his consciousness has been relocated to an alien planet, Kataan. Kataan’s aging and expanding sun has inflicted a severe and longstanding drought; it will eventually go supernova, destroying the planet and, of course, all life upon it. Although Picard retains vivid recollections of his former life as captain of the Enterprise, those around him, including wife Eline and friend Batai, insist that he is Kamen, an iron weaver. Picard gradually adjusts to his new environment, growing to love Eline, fathering children, and seeking to combat the drought. When he is very old, his daughter, grandson, and son take him to see a missile launch. The missile, the others explain, carries a probe that will find someone in the distant future and relay to him memories of their doomed civilization. As Picard realizes that that someone is himself, the probe’s nucleonic particle stream ceases and he awakens aboard the Enterprise. Although he has been unconscious for a mere twenty-five minutes, he has experienced the equivalent of half a lifetime in the alternate possible world of Kataan. While the holodeck effected temporary and superficial changes in the Picard character in “The Big Goodbye,” the alien probe of “The Inner Light” imposes fundamental and seemingly long-lasting changes in all six character elements. The most fundamental alteration is in the character’s biography: he insists that he’s Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Enterprise, but everyone treats him as Kamen, the iron weaver. Almost everything else changes as a result. No longer the commanding officer at the top of a military hierarchy, he is a relatively insignificant member of the community. Instead of the captain’s uniform that embodies his unique status, he now wears civilian clothes that don’t distinguish him from the other villagers. Rather than resisting committed, close relationships, he has wife, children, and friends. Even his speech patterns are different. As he grows older, both physical traits and appearance alter, transforming him from a commanding and authoritative figure to a frail old man. At first, Picard, much like the competent viewer, tries to account for the alternate possible world within the logical system of the textual actual world. Upon first awakening in the unfamiliar environment, he says, “Computer, freeze program. Computer, end program.” But Kataan is not a holodeck program. Casting aside the blanket that covers him and glancing at the missing badge that signals his removal from the Enterprise, he asks

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Eline, “Am I a prisoner here?” But no, he is not the victim of alien abduction. Eline offers a counterhypothesis within the logic of the alternate possible world: Kamen has been ill, and “the fever has taken your memory.” Picard, continuing to believe that Kataan is an illusion, deploys his core psychological traits of intelligence and rationality to solve the puzzle of the alternate possible world and return to the Enterprise. But several subjective years on the planet begin to shift Picard’s priorities; his core psychological traits seem to have remained the same, but he deploys them to different ends, now seeking a solution to the planetary drought instead of seeking to return to his former life. After more subjective years have passed, his psychological traits have so altered that he decides to start a family with Eline. Picard has come to cherish the human connectedness so stalwartly rejected in the textual actual world. After yet more subjective years, when that family includes a daughter and a son, Picard no longer rejects the alternate possible world and perhaps values it over the textual actual world. Subsequent scenes show Picard as contented husband, father, and grandfather, his interactions with his grown children and response to Eline’s death revealing a tender, emotional side to the character not often seen in the textual actual world. In the final Kataan scene, Picard’s son and daughter take him to see the launch of the missile. As Picard realizes that the probe will encounter him aboard the Enterprise in the future, a once-again alive and young Eline appears and says: “The rest of us have been gone a thousand years. If you remember what we were and how we lived then we will have found life again. Now we live in you. Tell them of us, my darling.” We return to the Enterprise, where the probe has shut down, freeing the captain from the nucleonic particle stream. When Picard regains consciousness, he’s confused, caught between the textual actual world and the alternate possible world that he subjectively occupied for so long. The episode’s coda shows Picard in his quarters, examining an ancient (by twenty-fourthcentury standards) navigational instrument, a sextant, as if reacquainting himself with his life as Captain Picard. Riker enters carrying a small box which, he tells Picard, they discovered in the probe. Picard opens the box and finds the flute played by Picard/Kamen on Kataan. He cradles it to his chest and then walks into a medium shot and begins to play the melody associated with Kataan. The camera pulls back and the flute music continues over the customary final shot of the Enterprise flying away from the camera. Rather than restoring narrative equilibrium, or briefly invoking the alternate possible world for humorous purposes as in “The Big Goodbye,” the coda of “The Inner Light” indicates that Picard’s Kataan experiences

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may forever have affected his core psychological traits, leaving him longing for the romantic relationship and family denied him by his commitment to duty and Starfleet. Unlike the holodeck re-creation of 1940s San Francisco, the alternate possible world of Kataan has effected changes in the Picard character that carry over to subsequent episodes. In “Lessons” (6:19), Picard allows himself a relationship with a member of the Enterprise crew, Lieutenant Commander Nella Darren, whom he and the viewer first meet giving a piano recital. The couple’s attraction begins when Nella persuades Picard to play the Kataan flute for her, builds when they play piano/flute duets, and is consummated after Picard tells Nella the significance of the flute and of his Kataan family. But the relationship cannot last without fundamentally altering both the Picard character and the series premise. A crisis precipitates the couple’s parting as Nella is believed killed when serving on a dangerous mission. Although Nella does return to the Enterprise, Picard’s anguish at the thought of her death has persuaded him that he could not again imperil her safety. Their relationship threatening their professional obligations (as well as the series’ narrative stability), the couple reluctantly decide to part. But the alternate possible world of Kataan has clearly left the captain longing for the stable romantic relationship so often rejected in the past.

“an unstable element in a critical situation”: character across media Television characters crossing over to film may find themselves in the most alternate of all possible worlds. As noted above, character construction is medium specific; what works in fan fiction doesn’t necessarily work in a flexi-narrative television drama. A character tailor-made for television may have to be altered for the cinema. Star Trek provides a unique opportunity to contrast character construction in the two media. Many television shows have transferred to the bigger screen, but since this most often occurs several years or even decades after cancellation, there is usually no continuity of actors or other production personnel. By contrast, all four TNG films featured the same cast as the television show, and the first three films— Generations (1994), First Contact (1996), and Insurrection (1998)—were all scripted and directed by Star Trek veterans.26 Of these, First Contact is now generally regarded as the best. It also most directly builds its narrative on the Picard character’s biography, continuing the story of the captain and the Borg that began in the “The Best of Both Worlds” (3:26 and 4:1), considered by many fans to be among the best TNG episodes. For these

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reasons, we have chosen First Contact to explore how character construction is medium dependent. Star Trek cinema’s greater need and capacity for visual spectacle than Star Trek television has a significant impact on character construction. Some academics see intensive spectacle, axiomatic for any would-be blockbuster science fiction film, as the central characteristic of an otherwise hard-to-define genre. Says Annette Kuhn, in her introduction to the collection Alien Zone II: “If science-fiction cinema possesses any distinctive generic traits, these . . . have to do in large measure with cinematographic technologies and with the ways in which these figure in the construction of diegetic and spectatorial spaces: while science-fiction films may certainly tell stories, narrative content and structure per se are rarely their most significant features.”27 Her contributors agree. Barry Keith Grant asserts that “[p]opular science-fiction movies like The Terminator (1984) and Predator (1987), offering almost continuous spectacular action, seem to have succumbed almost entirely to the siren call of the sensuous spectacle.”28 Jonathan Frakes, whose experience of directing TNG episodes had prepared him to helm First Contact, recognized that spectacle is the sine qua non of the science fiction blockbuster. Speaking of the opening shot, he said: “I think we have the longest pullback in movie history. The shot starts inside Picard’s pupil, then pulls back through the black of his eye, the iris, the white, then hundreds of thousands of miles out into space and right into this incredible Borg hive. It’s breathtaking. You’re not going to see that on TV.”29 There were many reasons why you weren’t going to see that on TV, not least because of the relative sizes of the television and cinema audiences. As we have detailed in chapter 1, TNG’s consistently respectable ratings proved that a television drama could flourish in first-run off-network syndication. But the patronage of Star Trek’s regular viewers alone would not translate into box-office success. The producers had to lure other viewers to the cinema by giving them the spectacle that they had come to expect from the science fiction genre. As Ron Moore said about the first TNG film, Generations, “It has to appeal to a different audience. . . . We wanted to do something that was broader and had more action and adventure.”30 Cinema’s longer production schedules and larger budgets also encourage the inclusion of more spectacular elements. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, those making television shows work under the constraints of tight budgets and schedules. Those making films have more generous budgets and schedules. The pattern budget for TNG was around $1.2 million per episode, whereas First Contact had a budget of around $40 million. Network television

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programs usually shoot about eight to ten pages of script per day compared with a film’s two to three pages. All involved in the transition of the TNG crew from the small screen to the large anticipated the greater scope resulting from the more generous shooting schedules and budgets. Ron Moore, cowriter with Brannon Braga of Generations, said that he and Braga watched all the previous films before beginning their script: “[We] wanted to get a feel for how Star Trek transferred to the big screen and what the action sequences were like. We [had] got very, very used to writing tightly controlled space battles on the series where there were only two exterior shots when a phaser hits and you shake the camera a lot.”31 Star Trek’s transference to the cinema also meant that producers could take advantage of a bigger screen and better resolution. Screen size still to some extent determines the aesthetics of television, the smaller, flatter, and less detailed image both militating against long-shot spectacle and encouraging close and medium-close shots of characters, which in turn encourage certain kinds of genres and narratives.32 The representation of character, too, is affected. All those transporting TNG’s crew from the small screen to the large recognized that the qualities of a good television character aren’t necessarily those of a good film character—or at least those of a good spectacle-intensive science fiction film character. The first thing to do when turning a cerebral hero into an action hero is to make him more spectacularly active. In “The Best of Both Worlds,” Picard resists the Borg with eloquent language and will power. When first captured, before his transformation into Locutus, Picard speaks with the Borg collective: borg: You speak for your people. picard: I have nothing to say to you. And I will resist you with the last ounce of my strength. borg: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. You will adapt to service us. picard: Impossible. My culture is based on freedom and selfdetermination. borg: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply. picard: We would rather die. borg: Death is irrelevant.

Picard’s resistance is not futile, but it takes a rather passive form. The Enterprise crew succeeds in rescuing Picard from the Borg cube, and Data

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attempts to use the captain’s mental link with the collective to order the Borg to break off their attack. Unfortunately, the Borg’s primary systems cannot be accessed, but Picard mutters, “Sleep, Data, sleep,” suggesting that the android order the Borg to regenerate. Data does so, the Borg sleep, and the cube explodes. The Federation wins the day, not with a fleet of mighty starships but because of one man’s will power, Picard having fought through his Borg programming to make the crucial connection with Data. The writers relied upon what the television drama does best: character and dialogue. In First Contact, Picard gets up close and personal with the villains, resisting the Borg not with inspiring speeches about freedom and selfdetermination or subtle suggestions about programming but rather with big phaser rifles, holographic machine guns, and newly developed musculature. From the moment Picard suspects that the Borg have invaded the Enterprise, he takes charge of the situation, striding through the corridors at the head of his security forces, brandishing a phaser rifle and shooting at any Borg that moves. In the film’s climactic sequence in the engineering section, Picard, stripped down to his undershirt, climbs a dangling cable to escape the deadly plasma that engulfs the Borg queen and her drones— action heroism at its most quintessential. The producers relied upon what big-screen science fiction does best: spectacle and action. The producers also took advantage of the one-off nature of the cinematic narrative. First Contact scriptwriter Braga explained: “Because it’s a movie you can take big risks with the characters and do more event kind of plotting techniques, because you’re not obligated to do an episode the following week.”33 The television series had to treat Picard’s Borg- and Cardassianinflicted traumas with, respectively, an episode and a coda, both of which implied ongoing therapy with Counselor Troi. A Star Trek feature film can push Picard to the limit precisely because he doesn’t have to resume his central narrative function the next week. In First Contact, he can violate Starfleet orders, order his crew to their deaths, and behave like a revengedriven Ahab chasing his white whale—all without the writers having to account for the repercussions of the character’s actions. The Picard character’s embodiment, dialogue, gestures, and habitual behaviors remain fairly constant between TNG and First Contact. In the film, Picard looks, sounds, moves, and to some extent behaves like Picard: he listens to classical music (Berlioz), quotes a classical author (Herman Melville), demonstrates detailed knowledge of Federation history, and runs the Dixon Hill holodeck program. But his transformation to action man entails a concomitant transformation in two of the six key elements of the televisual character: his psychological traits and his interactions with

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others. The Berman wanted to stop Jean-Luc’s brooding and introspecting, but the First Contact Picard broods and introspects to a degree that the televisual Picard may well have considered self-indulgent. The film opens with a nightmare sequence of Picard’s Borg assimilation, immediately offering the audience an access to the captain’s interiority rarely granted in the television series. The traditional opening captain’s log does so, too, in reporting that the Borg are again threatening Earth: “The moment I have dreaded for nearly six years has finally arrived.” This declaration, perhaps the most personal ever recorded by the usually ever-so-controlled captain, signals that this is indeed one of the most important events in the protagonist’s life. Picard’s subsequent actions confirm his turbulent psychological state. After learning that Starfleet wants him nowhere near the Borg, he behaves like a sulky adolescent, retreating to his ready room and listening to music so loud that it shakes his teacup and rattles the isolinear chips. The very choice of music—the romantic and passionate Berlioz opera Les Troyens instead of the baroque Bach or classical Mozart favored by the televisual Picard—speaks to the captain’s inner turmoil. Previously noted for self-control, he howls with rage as he machine-guns Borg drones, and then prepares to smash their faces to pulp. Previously noted for compassion, without a shudder he digs through the Borgified body of a crewmate in search of a Borg coprocessor. Previously noted for putting personal concerns second to the high humanist ideals of the Federation, he swears that he will make the Borg pay for what they did to him. It is the altered nature of the captain’s interactions with others, however, that most distinguishes the small-screen from the big-screen Picard. On television he confides only in the doctor and the counselor, but in the film he voices his emotions not only to the entire senior staff but to the entire crew. First Contact radically alters Picard’s relationship with his subordinates. Rather than seeking input to command decisions, Picard ignores all suggestions and orders the crew to fight to the death. He accuses one of his most trusted and courageous crewmates of cowardice. To his command to “stay and fight” Worf objects: “With all due respect I believe that you are allowing your personal experience with the Borg to influence your judgment.” Picard responds: “You’re afraid. You want to destroy the ship and run away. You coward.” Worf: “If you were any other man I would kill you where you stand.” Picard: “Get off my bridge.” But the film does not entirely alter Picard’s relationship with his subordinates; the narrative climax, in which Picard destroys the Borg queen and her minions, is precipitated by the captain’s staying aboard the Enterprise to rescue Data, with whom, as TNG has established, he has a particularly strong bond. However,

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had First Contact been a TNG episode, the writers might have had to seek ways of restoring the status quo ante between the captain and his crew (as opposed to, say, having him court-martialed or confined to a Starfleet mental-health facility). To this point in the chapter, we have primarily considered the construction of the individual televisual character, albeit also considering the ways in which interactions with other characters contribute to this construction. In the next and final section of the chapter, we consider how interactions among characters can engender a uniquely televisual engagement with the public sphere.

character and television’s cultural forum Television drama’s storytelling mode lends itself to the presentation of multiple perspectives on social and cultural issues. By contrast with most films’ single protagonists, many television dramas feature ensemble casts composed of characters who, to provide maximum dramatic potential, tend to be quite distinct from each other. A diverse and varied crew has been a Star Trek hallmark since TOS, with demographic oppositions of male and female, youth and maturity, human and nonhuman, and white and nonwhite. Emotional oppositions also structure the crew’s makeup: Spock’s cool logic versus McCoy’s warm compassion; Picard’s reserve versus Riker’s easy charm; Data’s rationality versus Worf’s hotheadedness; Odo’s integrity versus Quark’s lack of scruples. Such contrasts are not unique to the television medium; novelistic, theatrical, and cinematic characters can also be structured around binary oppositions. But the construction of these characters and their binary oppositions across a series of episodes rather than in a one-off text is a defining characteristic of television and brings with it, we argue, enhanced opportunities for heteroglossia. When an episode tackles a controversial social issue, the diverse range of characters, whose personalities and opinions have been established in multiple previous episodes, can voice a diverse range of views. The ambiguities that can result from this polysemy make it difficult to identify the “truth” within the textual actual world or, by extension, in the real world upon which it comments. As Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “Though the text should be regarded as the highest authority in establishing the facts of the fictional world, this authority does not derive from a monolithic power but is distributed—in accordance with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism—among a plurality of narrative voices. Since these voices may contradict each other, fictional truths cannot automatically be derived from textual statements.”34

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A television program with an ensemble cast resembles in many respects the novel from which Bakhtin derived his concepts of heteroglossia and the dialogism to which it gives rise. According to Bakhtin, [t]he novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types . . . and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. . . . The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships.35

This heteroglossia permits television drama to debate rather than reproduce a culture’s dominant assumptions. As Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch say in their essay “Television as a Cultural Forum,” The conflicts we see in television drama, embedded in familiar and nonthreatening frames, are conflicts ongoing in American social experience and cultural history. In a few cases we might see strong perspectives that argue for the absolute correctness of one point of view or another. But for the most part the rhetoric of television drama is the rhetoric of discussion. . . . We see statements about the issues and it should be clear that ideological positions can be balanced within the forum by others from a different perspective.36

Yet scholars writing about the social and cultural meanings of Star Trek have frequently seen the programs as complicit with patriarchy, American imperialism, and other practices benefiting the society’s most powerful elements.37 For the most part, these scholars have operated on the basis of what we might term “the reflection paradigm,” assuming that a program originating from a particular society will automatically reflect that society’s dominant assumptions. The reflection paradigm assumes a direct connection between the society and the text, but fails to take into account the ways in which the specific characteristics of a televisual text, such as the relationships among the characters in an ensemble cast, can refract rather than directly reflect dominant assumptions.

debating ideological positions The rest of this chapter illustrates the ways in which television drama’s ensemble casts can debate rather than reproduce dominant social assumptions,

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using as case studies two Star Trek episodes from different historical periods that both concern particularly sensitive social issues: “A Private Little War” (TOS 2:48, first broadcast February 2, 1968), dealing with the Vietnam War; and “The High Ground” (TNG 3:12, January 29, 1990), tackling terrorism. “A Private Little War” is one of TOS’s most direct engagements with contemporary political debates, with the central Federation/Klingon confrontation a very thinly disguised Vietnam War metaphor.38 In the episode, Kirk returns to a primitive planet that he first visited thirteen years earlier as a young lieutenant. He discovers an ongoing conflict between the planet’s inhabitants—the villagers and the hill people, the former armed with flintlocks given to them by the Klingons. The Klingons have disturbed a Garden of Eden, which, Kirk argues, would without their intrusion have developed into a remarkably civilized culture. Kirk articulates the contemporary dominant rationale for the US presence in Vietnam: Americans were not embroiling themselves in a civil war but fighting Communist outsiders to restore stability. Kirk decides to reestablish the balance of power by giving the hill people their own flintlocks, his strategy clearly linked to the Cold War policy of brinksmanship and mutual assured destruction. McCoy vehemently contests this decision. The emotional and compassionate doctor opposes the pragmatic captain as they debate Federation intervention on the planet (and, metaphorically, American intervention in Vietnam): kirk: We must equalize both sides again. mccoy: You’re condemning the whole planet to a war that may never end. kirk: Do you remember the twentieth-century brush wars on the Asian continent? Two great powers involved, not unlike the Klingons and ourselves. Neither side felt they could pull out. mccoy: I remember it well. It went on year after bloody year. kirk: But what would you have suggested? That one side arm its friends with an overpowering weapon? Mankind would never have lived to travel space if they had. No, the only solution is what happened back then. Balance of power. The trickiest, dirtiest game of them all, but the only one that preserves both sides.

But the captain is seen to have lingering reservations when at episode’s end he orders Scotty to make a hundred flintlocks—“serpents for the Garden of Eden.” Strictly speaking, the episode is an example of dialogism rather than heteroglossia. “A Private Little War” offers a limited degree of polysemy,

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undoubtedly constrained by a contemporary political climate in which the antiwar movement had yet to make a significant impact upon politicians or the public. The inclusion of the cool and rational Spock, exiled to sick bay at the episode’s beginning by a shot from one of the villager’s muskets, might have resulted in a more vigorous and multifaceted debate of the society’s dominant assumption concerning American involvement in Vietnam, but this did not happen. The two-sided debate between the militaristic Kirk and the softhearted McCoy resonated with the contemporary binary opposition between hardheaded hawks and bleeding-heart liberals. “A Private Little War” gestures toward television drama’s capacity for debate but does not fully embrace it. “The High Ground,” on the other hand, is truly heteroglossic in its exploration of the morality of terrorism. Addressing an issue not then as high on the political agenda as it became post-9/11, the writers were perhaps less constrained than their TOS counterparts. In the episode, the Enterprise delivers medical supplies to Rutia 4, a planet torn by conflict between the Rutians and the Ansata. The Ansata are carrying out continuous attacks on the Rutian populace to persuade the government to give them control of the western continent that they see as rightfully theirs. Seeking to involve the Federation in the conflict, the “terrorists” and their leader, Finn, first kidnap Dr. Crusher and then Captain Picard and finally attempt to blow up the Enterprise. At the episode’s end, Commander Riker and the head of the Rutian security services, Alexana Devos, rescue the Starfleet personnel. Finn, still hoping for Federation intervention, threatens to kill Picard and Alexana shoots him dead. Kent A. Ono, in a typical ideological critique, argues that TNG in general, and “The High Ground” in particular, unproblematically support American interests, with nationalism, “military authority as mechanisms for achieving the ultimate good,” and Federation (for which read “American”) logic reigning supreme.39 But Ono analyzes the episode in isolation from the TNG storyworld, most particularly the characters’ relationships and backstories. For Ono, Picard acts throughout the episode, and indeed throughout all of TNG, as the bearer of Federation (and American) patriarchy and imperialism, the imposer of monoglossia. Picard is “at the helm of patriarchy, . . . at the center of television’s voice of authority.”40 This reading ignores the heteroglossic potential of the ensemble cast as well as the ways in which viewer familiarity with the characters might inflect interpretations. In “The High Ground,” Picard is not the hero; there isn’t one, which is rather the point. His resentment at the Ansata’s kidnapping of Dr. Crusher and their threats to his ship clearly affect his judgment, and his

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exchanges with crewmates, inflected by the competent viewer’s knowledge of the characters’ construction (psychological traits, interactions with others, and biography), undermine his interpretive authority. Exchanges between other characters, most notably Crusher/Finn and Riker/Alexana, add to a heteroglossic chorus in which some voices challenge and others support the hegemonic rejection of violent terrorist tactics as irrational and unjustifiable. The following dialogue between Picard and the android Data sets up the episode’s central problematic: is violence ever a suitable means to a political end? data: I have been reviewing the history of armed rebellion and it appears that terrorism is an effective way to promote political change. picard: Yes it can be, but I have never subscribed to the theory that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. data: Yet there are numerous examples when it was successful: the independence of the Mexican state from Spain, the Irish unification of 2024, and the Kensey rebellion. picard: Yes, I am aware of them. data: Then would it be accurate to say that terrorism is acceptable when all options for peaceful settlement have been foreclosed? picard: Data, these are questions that mankind has been struggling with throughout history. Your confusion is only human.

Ono asserts that Picard simply discounts Data’s difficult questions: “Picard, through characteristic frustration with Data’s obsession with rationality, dismisses Data’s potentially narrative-threatening logic and reminds him of his honorary ‘human’ status. Picard adjudicates rationality.”41 Even a viewer unfamiliar with the TNG storyworld might question Ono’s interpretation of this exchange. Stating that “these are questions that mankind has been struggling with throughout history” hardly constitutes dismissal. But a viewer familiar with TNG would interpret the exchange through knowledge of the characters’ previous relationship. Ono is correct to say that Picard had previously expressed “frustration with Data’s obsession with rationality,” although such frustration was often played to comic effect. But implying that reminding Data of his honorary human status constitutes a veiled threat overlooks major elements of the characters’ backstory. It was Picard who, in the classic second-season episode “Measure of a Man” (TNG 2:9), took Starfleet to court to establish Data’s honorary humanity, or at least his legal recognition as a free and self-determining

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sentient being. While Picard occasionally finds Data frustrating, it is the captain to whom the android looks as his tutor in the humanities and humanity. Thus Picard’s reminding Data of his honorary human status is not a warning against, but rather an affirmation of, Data’s “narrativethreatening logic.” Ono also asserts that Picard uses his patriarchal authority to dismiss Dr. Crusher’s opposing views. When Picard is captured and imprisoned with Crusher, she apologizes for refusing his order to abandon a victim of an Ansata attack and beam back to the ship, her disobedience leading directly to her capture: crusher: I’m sorry. If only I’d gone back to the ship. picard: I should have beamed you up. crusher: You wouldn’t dare. picard: Oh yes, I would and should. crusher: Without my permission? picard: If you don’t follow orders. crusher: If you’d give reasonable orders I’d obey. picard: Doctor, I’ll be the judge of what is reasonable.

Taken in isolation, Picard’s last line, could, as Ono argues, be seen as an imposition of male rationality on female irrationality. But the line takes on a different meaning in the context of the previous construction of the two characters: their psychological traits/habitual behaviors (Crusher has a fiery temper; Picard has difficulty dealing with emotion); biographies (Crusher, the widow of Picard’s deceased best friend, knew him prior to her posting to the Enterprise); and interactions with others (sexual tension underlay the Picard/Crusher relationship from season one). To a viewer familiar with the characters, the “no, you wouldn’t; yes, I would!” dispute may read as an argument between very close old friends or even a lovers’ spat. In this light, Picard’s use of Crusher’s official title and his “I’ll be the judge” seem more a frustrated man’s desperate claim than a captain’s affirmation of the chain of command—an interpretation given credence by Patrick Stewart’s nonverbal performance. After proclaiming that he’ll judge what’s reasonable, Picard glances around the chamber that holds them captive, clearly realizing the silliness of the argument in their current predicament. Crusher’s dialogues with the Ansata leader add another voice to the episode’s diverse chorus of opposing viewpoints, with Finn making a strong case against the Federation’s—and, by implication, the United States’— claims to the moral high ground:

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finn: I’ve read your history books. This is a war for independence, and I’m no different than your own George Washington. crusher: Washington was a military general, not a terrorist. finn: The difference between generals and terrorists, Doctor, is only the difference between winners and losers. You win, you’re called a general; you lose . . . crusher: You are killing innocent people. Can’t you see the immorality of what you’re doing, or have you killed so much you’ve become blind to it? finn: How much innocent blood has been spilled for the cause of freedom in the history of your Federation, Doctor? How many good and noble societies have bombed civilians in war, have wiped out whole cities, and now that you enjoy the comfort that has come from their battles, their killings, you frown on my immorality? I’m willing to die for my freedom, Doctor. And in the finest tradition of your own great civilization, I’m willing to kill for it.

If, as Ono asserts, the Federation is the metaphoric equivalent of the United States, Finn’s exchange with Crusher metaphorically criticizes rather than upholds American authority. Long-term familiarity with Crusher might tend to make viewers side with her and the Federation against Finn, but the script works to make the Ansata leader at worst an ambiguous and at best a sympathetic character. Picard and Alexana characterize him simply as a violent terrorist, but his conversations with Crusher reveal his positive aspects and his motivations. Finn first appears after Crusher’s capture, offering her a plate of food. She remains silent and refuses the plate. Finn leaves, claiming, “Doesn’t matter to me. You want to be hungry, be hungry.” In their next scene, he again offers her food. Crusher maintains her silence, and Finn remarks: “This isn’t the best way to meet new people is it?” He unshackles her. “What’s the point of not eating? Do I look like it’s bothering me? Okay, it’s bothering me.” He hands her the plate and says, “Come on.” This time she accepts. When she apprehensively tells him that she has a son whom her death would orphan, he assures her that she’ll see him again. “I see no reason to kill you,” he tells her—a statement that directly contradicts Picard’s and Alexana’s view of him as irrational. The writers never let us forget that Finn is perfectly capable of killing Crusher, Picard, and the entire Enterprise crew for his cause, because to do otherwise would sacrifice dramatic tension. But to further enhance dramatic tension, the writers construct a charming and attractive character

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who shows concern for both Crusher and the dying colleagues whom he’s brought her to tend. They also supply him with both rational and emotional motivation for his violent actions. He wants to blow up the Enterprise because “we’ve been shouting for seventy years and no one’s paid attention. Destroy a Federation flagship and someone will listen.” Most tellingly, he reveals that he had a thirteen-year-old son who died in detention. Dead or threatened children link Crusher and Finn with Alexana, the Rutian security chief, whose concern for Rutia’s murdered innocents motivates her repressive tactics. Her conversations with Riker counterpoint Finn’s conversations with Crusher; her articulations of the hegemonic view of terrorism counterbalance Finn’s contestation of that hegemony, while the gradual revelation of her personal feelings humanizes her, although not, we would argue, as fully as the Ansata leader is humanized. Alexana first appears as an inflexible ideologue. In a meeting with Picard and Riker soon after Crusher’s kidnapping, she tells them: “These are not people we’re dealing with here; they’re animals, fanatics who kill without remorse or conscience, who think nothing of murdering innocent people.” When Picard wonders why they captured Crusher rather than killing her, Alexana responds, “Don’t ask me to explain them. I can’t.” In her next scene, she tells Riker that before becoming security chief she’d considered herself a moderate. He asks what changed her mind. She says: “The event that really opened my eyes took place only a few days after my arrival. A terrorist bomb destroyed a shuttle bus. Sixty schoolchildren. . . . That day I vowed that I would put an end to terrorism in this city and I will.” In a later scene, Riker and Alexana watch the security forces rounding up Ansata suspects. Alexana tells Riker that her assassinated predecessor had operated even more repressively: “Suspects would be brought into police headquarters and would vanish. I put a stop to that.” The inflexible ideologue, it turns out, has some regard for human rights. Her penultimate scene reveals that, in her own way, she is just as much a victim as Finn. She tells Riker: “I want to go home, back to my own country, to leave behind the roundups, the interrogations, the bodies lying in the streets, to be able to walk without the bodyguards. That’s what I want.” The episode ends on an unresolved chord, albeit one that resonates with Star Trek’s guiding humanism, rather than, as Ono implies, imposing monoglossia on the heteroglossic chorus. At episode’s end, after Alexana shoots Finn dead, a young boy, with whom Beverly has previously bonded, aims a phaser at Alexana. Beverly says to him, “No more killing.” After a tense moment, he lowers his weapon. Alexana reads his actions from her hegemonic perspective: “Already another one to take his place. It never

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ends.” Riker responds: “He could have killed you. He didn’t. Maybe the end begins with one boy putting down his gun.” Ono asserts that “[b]y the end of the episode, the ideal viewer forgets Finn’s death and the colonialist system responsible for it.”42 We would argue that the viewer, at least the viewer familiar with the TNG storyworld, has perhaps, like Data, been moved to ponder the morality and effectiveness of terrorism. Speculation about viewers aside, it is demonstrably the case that one former colonial power thought that an episode centering on disputed territory, featuring a charismatic freedom fighter called Finn, and referencing the “Irish unification of 2024” would remind viewers of the injustices of a colonialist system. In 2007 it was reported that “The High Ground” was to be shown at the Belfast Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. Writing on the BBC News website, Johnny Caldwell noted: “Due to what no doubt many people will still consider to be sensitive content, the episode has never been shown on terrestrial TV in the UK or in the Republic of Ireland and initial airings on Sky One were edited.” Sean Kelly, director of the festival, was quoted as saying that “many people will see the funny side of an occasion on which the powers that be decided to censor an episode of a popular science-fiction series because of what was happening politically at the time.”43 “The High Ground,” together with “A Private Little War,” shows that television drama, rather than unproblematically reflecting dominant assumptions, can debate and sometimes challenge them. But a critic wishing to understand and illuminate these debates and challenges must be as familiar with the program’s storyworld as the most loyal of viewers. We contest Ono’s interpretation of “The High Ground” because it illustrates a fairly common methodological failure in television studies: the isolation of a single episode of an ongoing series from the storyworld and character relationships established in previous episodes. By contrast with the ideological criticism of film, which has to account only for a single text, ideological criticism of a television program must account for the tens or even hundreds of episodes that constitute a series. It must also take into account the relationships among those puzzling, pseudosentient beings—the characters that inhabit the expanded storyworld of an ongoing television drama. Drawing on narrative theory grounded in knowledge of the production process, this chapter and the previous one have attempted to illuminate the construction of those characters and that storyworld.

Conclusion “It’s Not a Television Show”

Despite this book’s continued insistence that Star Trek must be considered as a television show, Star Trek has not been a television show, or at least a television show producing original weekly episodes, since Enterprise’s crash landing in 2005. But as we argue in the book’s introduction, Star Trek provides an excellent case study for illuminating the American television industry’s past—its modes of production and narrative conventions during the classic network and multichannel eras. In the present, CBS monetizes the Star Trek library and intellectual property in conformity with the characteristic practices of the postnetwork era. And there may well be a future; media commentators and fans (sometimes an overlapping category) continue to hope for a new television series, rumors of which abound on the Internet. This conclusion summarizes the previous chapters’ insights into Star Trek television’s past, updates the story by examining Star Trek television’s present, and speculates about Star Trek television’s future and legacy.

the past Star Trek’s permeation of popular culture, its longevity, its profitability, and Gene Roddenberry’s cultivation of his producer brand have all encouraged an almost mythic perception of TOS and its creator in popular and even in some academic circles. Star Trek has often been viewed as an extraordinary phenomenon, but rarely as a commonplace television product. Roddenberry certainly deserves credit for the initial concept of an adult program featuring a starship and its crew exploring the galaxy. To get this concept into production, however, Roddenberry had to conform to the standard industrial practices of the era and, we suspect, might not have managed to do so without the crucial intervention of Herbert Solow or, at least, of someone 185

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like Solow, a well-placed industry insider. From its development through to its cancellation, TOS was in many ways a typical product of its era. Despite Roddenberry’s frequent fulminations regarding NBC, the network managed the program in conformity with the standard practices of the era. But in the 1970s, the Star Trek story turned from the commonplace to the extraordinary. TOS’s surprising success in off-network syndication led first to the feature-film series and then to TNG and its successors—programs that played an important role in challenging the three-network oligopoly and establishing some of the business practices of the multichannel era. And of course, TOS’s syndication success also jump-started the powerful and profitable franchise that both Paramount and CBS continue to exploit. Star Trek television has been both commonplace and extraordinary, typical and atypical. Assessing Star Trek’s place in television history requires accounting for the balance between typicality and atypicality that we have explored throughout the book. The mythification of Roddenberry has obscured not only Solow’s contribution but that of the many others who helped make TOS into the program that performed so well in syndication that it became an enduring cultural landmark. We were lucky enough to meet and talk to one of the most central of them in 2002—the late Robert Justman. Distinctive television shows arise from the combined efforts of talented individuals working within institutions, not from the institutions themselves. But, as the introduction notes, both television and creative-industry studies have tended not to account for individual agency, fearing that doing so might romanticize the “individual genius.” We have tried not to romanticize anyone, but have given credit to the talented individuals who made the post-TOS series, both those above and below the line that separates the “artists” from the “craft workers.” We particularly championed the contributions of the latter, whom television studies and creative-industry studies have mostly overlooked, but we also found that some above-the-line workers—the writers— were perceived by all as central to the production process. We argued that all the workers had some degree of creative autonomy, but also detailed how the tension between art and commerce, manifested in particular in time and budget pressures, both constrained and enabled this autonomy and how these constraints and enablers played out at different levels of the production hierarchy. The Star Trek production process in many ways typified the process of making American television dramas during the multichannel era, and many of the practices described persist into the postnetwork era. For this reason, our insights may prove helpful to scholars investigating both historical and contemporary programs. But, as always

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with Star Trek, the production process was also atypical. This atypicality demonstrated itself most markedly in the eighteen years of continuous production that forged the Star Trek “family” and enabled what Rick Berman termed their creative shorthand. We concluded our case study of Star Trek in the classic network and multichannel eras through textual analysis of some examples of the final product of the collaborative production process in the Star Trek television series. While, as we said in the introduction, such analysis has been a staple of Star Trek studies, we hope that ours has been more rigorous. As opposed to what we termed the literary and ideological approaches, our analysis is underpinned by narrative theory and informed by knowledge of the industry’s production process and narrative conventions. The analysis reveals yet more typicality and atypicality. The series format followed by TOS conformed to the dominant narrative conventions of the classic network era, and the post-TOS programs’ flexi-narrative format conformed to those of the multichannel era. But Star Trek’s extended seriality, its linking together of five different series produced over almost four decades, built a vast and complex storyworld equaled by no other American television program. We also looked at the characters inhabiting the storyworld, proposing a theory of the televisual character that we think works for most television dramas. We used this theory to distinguish between characters in the series format of the classic network era and characters in the flexi-narrative format of the multichannel era. In augmenting a televisual narrative theory still in its relative infancy, our exploration of the Star Trek storyworld may be helpful to television scholars in exploring other televisual storyworlds.

the present Star Trek provides a useful case study to illustrate the television industry’s multiplication of revenue streams through different distribution windows from the classic network era to the postnetwork era. From its original broadcast in the 1960s through to syndication in the 1970s, home video and cable and satellite in the 1980s, DVDs in the 1990s, and video streaming in the twenty-first century, Star Trek typifies television distribution practices across historical periods. But once again Star Trek is also atypical. By the early twenty-first century, the extent of this distribution and the profits gained from it most probably outstrip those of any other television show. And we suspect that Star Trek currently earns more revenue than any other television show no longer in production, although confirming this would require access to proprietary corporate data.

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At the end of 2005, CBS acquired the rights to Star Trek in a complicated corporate restructuring of Paramount-Viacom that resulted in the network that had initially rejected Star Trek becoming its caretaker—an ironic twist of fortune. CBS currently monetizes its intellectual property in ways that map onto practices established in the classic network, multichannel, and postnetwork eras. One of the most important revenue streams in the classic network era, off-network syndication, gave birth to the Star Trek franchise. According to showbiz bible Variety, Star Trek syndication “helped redefine the economics of the TV biz.”1 Today, as the Star Trek series repeat and repeat on channels in the United States and around the world, CBS profits from the library of more than seven hundred episodes that Paramount so carefully built for eventual syndication. CBS continues the long tradition of selling Star Trek merchandise begun by Gene Roddenberry himself. Lincoln Enterprises, a mail-order company set up by Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, began by marketing the Vulcan IDIC (“Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”) symbol worn by Spock in the episode “Is There No Truth in Beauty?” (TOS 3:5), subsequently adding scripts, film clips, and other merchandise.2 CBS still operates a mail-order service through the online store located on the official Star Trek website. The store offers DVDs, books, apparel, collectibles, toys, and games along with other items such as the oh-so-tempting Classic Spock Wig with Ears.3 As had Paramount since TOS, CBS also licenses manufacturers to produce Star Trek merchandise. It has teamed up with the major toy manufacturer Hasbro for a Star Trek toy line featuring legendary characters from the franchise.4 In the classic network era, revenues accumulated from the only three distribution windows then available: the networks’ original and repeat broadcasts, off-network syndication, and overseas sales. The proliferation of platforms since that time has offered producers ever more opportunities to extract revenue from their back catalogues and intellectual properties. In the multichannel era of audience fragmentation and channel proliferation, the major studios and networks began creating their own networks and subsidiary channels, both at home and abroad. A late entrant to the overseas market, CBS in 2009 entered into a joint venture with Chellomedia to launch an international suite of branded channels. These were intended to appeal to over-thirty-five-year-olds “who have affection for the library shows.”5 One of these branded channels, CBS Action, has aired TOS and TNG in the United Kingdom. The home-video market emerged during the multichannel era, although it did not then constitute a major revenue stream. Having proven remarkably successful in syndication, TOS was one of the first television shows to be distributed to that market; in 1986, sixty

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TOS episodes were made available on videocassette.6 The advent of the DVD made the home market more profitable, and CBS now repurposes and reversions the library for that platform. Star Trek’s extended seriality has engendered a series of mix-and-match DVD box sets. “Fan collective” DVD sets (sets comprising episodes that were chosen by fan votes) include the Borg, the omnipotent and annoying entity Q, the Klingons, and the Mirror Universe, the last featuring pictures of textual-actual-world Spock and alternate-possible-world Spock on the cover. Fan votes determined these thematic groupings, as CBS pursued the strategy of interacting with the fan base begun by Roddenberry in the classic network era but taken up more generally by the television industry in the multichannel era and of everincreasing importance in the postnetwork era.7 Technological developments drive other repurposing strategies. In 2006, on the occasion of Star Trek’s fortieth anniversary, CBS released digitally remastered versions of all seventy-nine TOS episodes, converting them to high definition and “replacing . . . visual effects with state-of-the-art CGI.” Variety noted that the low penetration of HD sets meant that not many people would immediately see the episodes at their best but that “when the HD future does arrive, ‘Star Trek’ will be ready to cash in again.”8 To commemorate TNG’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the series was re-versioned for the Blu-ray format. The Star Trek website announced that a “sampler of several popular episodes,” including fan favorite “The Inner Light,” discussed in chapter 6, would be followed by a season-one set later in 2012 and subsequent seasons after that. Eventually, the episodes would be “released for runs on television and digital platforms in the US and across the world.”9 They are running on the Syfy channel in the United Kingdom as we write this conclusion. The re-versioning of the TNG episodes for the home-video market and their subsequent television runs conforms to multichannel-era practices, but their distribution on digital platforms is in accordance with a defining characteristic of the postnetwork era: television shows watched on devices other than television sets. In 2011, Netflix and CBS agreed to stream all the Star Trek television series, including the animated one from the 1970s; a little later CBS entered into the same agreement with Amazon Prime.10 In 2012, CBS CEO Les Moonves indicated that the Netflix deal would be renewed, saying, “It’s good to have the Star Trek franchise, I think that’s something that works exceedingly well.”11 As is also characteristic of the postnetwork era, CBS monetizes the Star Trek intellectual property as well as the back catalogue, producing new content for digital platforms, including the iPad. The “official” Star Trek PADD app reproduces the Enterprise’s touch-screen computer interface, “leveraging 21st century technology to

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provide a glimpse into the 24th century;” fans can access the Star Trek database on the official website and communicate with each other through Facebook and Twitter, social networking being an increasingly important component of the postnetwork-era business model.12 CBS also licensed the development of a Star Trek massively multiplayer online game that exploits and develops the extended seriality and world building discussed in chapter 5. Players can visit iconic locations, warp out to unexplored star systems, and make contact with new alien species.13

the future? Although our book ends with Enterprise’s cancellation in 2005, Star Trek’s cultural and financial importance guarantees that CBS will monetize and protect its intellectual property well into the future. In 2012 a long-lost TOS script by Norman Spinrad reappeared. The science fiction author had penned the classic episode “The Doomsday Machine” (2:6) and subsequently wrote another script, “He Walked among Us.” Unhappy with Gene Coon’s rewrite, the author insisted that Gene Roddenberry not make the episode. The script was rediscovered in a university archive, Spinrad made it available on the Internet, and the fans who make the web series Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II (which has featured appearances by TOS actors and new scripts penned by TOS writers such as D. C. Fontana) planned to produce it. But at that point CBS stepped in. Said the New York Times: “For Star Trek fans it was like finding a lost Shakespeare play—only to have it snatched away by the playwright’s heirs.” CBS demanded that Spinrad remove the script from the Internet and that the fans not film the episode. Since CBS had previously raised no objections to Star Trek New Voyages or to other fan-produced Star Trek films and episodes, the network’s blocking the filming of the Spinrad script shocked Star Trek fandom.14 Following up on the Times story, Forbes magazine consulted copyright attorney Harold Feld. Feld said that while Spinrad undoubtedly has rights to his script, CBS does also. The fact that CBS doesn’t always enforce its rights does not mean that they cannot or will not enforce them. According to Feld, “[r]ightholders have their rights. The fact that CBS has not gone after everybody in the world in a way they could have, doesn’t mean they’ve waived their right to intellectual property around the Star Trek franchise.” So it seems that intellectual property holders can— and do—assert their rights at any time.15 CBS is now considering “opportunities to offer licensed copies of the work.”16 Did CBS assert its rights merely for the sake of the relatively small profits to be gained from selling the old script, or was this assertion of copyright

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paving the way for the much larger profits that might be derived from rebooting Star Trek television? Hypothesizing such a significant development from a relatively insignificant news story might be wishful thinking on the part of our inner fan, but if so, we are not alone. In a testament to Star Trek’s continued prominence in popular culture, media commentators regularly speculate about a new Star Trek series. The folks at Forbes magazine who followed up on the New York Times Spinrad-script story are clearly Trekkies, delighted at any prospect of a new series and happy to offer CBS suggestions. Forbes’s Alex Knapp has written about how to reboot Star Trek for modern television, and the magazine’s Erin Kain has written about making Star Trek for this generation.17 In 2011, Jonathan Frakes (TNG’s Will Riker), industry insider and director, offered a more sober assessment of the prospects for a new series: I had a Star Trek [project] that I developed for TV, and we were told in no uncertain terms that they said no to [a] Bryan Singer [-produced] television Star Trek [and] they said no to a William Shatner [-produced] television Star Trek. . . . They feel at CBS Paramount that they don’t want to make the same mistake that’s been made before, which was watering down the brand by having a TV show and a movie [out at the same time].18

A year later, a story on the Entertainment Weekly website confirmed that present CBS was not yet ready to contemplate a new series. Hannibal (NBC, 2013) showrunner Bryan Fuller said that he had discussed a television reboot with film director Bryan Singer. Said Fuller: “I don’t think anything is going to happen in any official capacity until after the next movie comes out. And I’m sure it would be wisely under J. J. Abrams’ purview of what happens. He’s the guardian of Trek right now.”19 More recently, Frakes’s former crewmate Michael Dorn (Worf on TNG and DS9) spoke about the possibility of a new series centered around his old character: Last year there was interest and I talked to a couple producers and we actually had a pitch meeting with Paramount and CBS. Business things got in the way in terms of the J. J. Abrams movie coming out and CBS/ Paramount and their relationship with J. J. Abrams. I don’t think they wanted to step on his toes by putting a new series on, but it’s not dead yet. I’ve finished the script and hopefully someone will take a look at this and say “we can do this.”20

It seems as if many in the industry would be happy to make a new series, including Star Trek alumni. But were CBS to reboot Star Trek television, the new series would enter a television marketplace crowded with telefantasies.

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Star Trek is in some sense a victim of its own success. As discussed in chapter 1, TOS’s triumph in off-network syndication demonstrated that telefantasy could succeed with adults, particularly those young adults who did not often watch television, and TNG’s consistently high ratings in first-run syndication spawned a lot of competition. Since the early 1990s, telefantasies have proliferated on the networks, on Syfy and other cable channels, and in firstrun syndication—among them The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Stargate franchise. Lost and Battlestar Galactica (with showrunner Ron Moore) were the critical and commercial successes of the early twenty-first century, but telefantasies keep appearing, including J. J. Abrams’s Fringe and the rebooted Beauty and the Beast. As those speculating about a reboot have pointed out, a new Star Trek series would have to compete in this crowded marketplace by appealing to an audience more accustomed to Buffy’s postmodern irony or to Battlestar’s grubby realism than to Star Trek’s often old-fashioned earnestness. The rise of the telefantasy is one of Star Trek’s legacies. Another is the rise of the telefantasy showrunner brand. As discussed in chapter 1, Roddenberry was an unusual classic network producer in promulgating his own brand. Although this did not immediately benefit him, it provided a template for others to follow. Without Roddenberry, there may have been no Joss Whedon, J. J. Abrams, Chris Carter, or whoever else may soon follow in their footsteps. Telefantasy fandom is another of Star Trek’s legacies, the roots of which were also discussed in chapter 1. Even in the absence of a current series, Star Trek fandom continues, and, as we said above, fans are now a crucial aspect of television’s business model. Finally, Star Trek’s cultural impact endures, reaching even to the highest places in the land. In February 2012, Nichelle Nichols, TOS’s legendary Uhura, visited the White House to meet Barack Obama, a self-confessed Trekkie, dubbed “Spock” by the media in recognition of his intelligence and cool reserve. Nichols, one of the many Star Trek alumni active on Twitter, subsequently tweeted a photo of her and Obama in the Oval Office.21 Smiling broadly, the two stand close together, right hands raised in the split-fingered Vulcan greeting. The photo delighted us and, we are certain, millions of other fans. We revealed our fannish inclinations in the introduction but, in the interests of scholarly objectivity, have suppressed them throughout the book. We feel entitled to express them now in our last sentence. Whatever happens in the future, we would bet all our gold-pressed latinum, several bottles of Saurian brandy, and a few dilithium crystals that Star Trek will live long and prosper.

appendix

List of Interviewees Quoted

Unless otherwise noted, all of these people worked on all of the television series from Star Trek: The Next Generation to Star Trek: Enterprise. Thomas (Tom) Arp, construction coordinator and union local coordinator Rick Berman, executive producer Robert Blackman, costume designer Brannon Braga, executive producer and scriptwriter Dan Curry, visual-effects producer Jonathan Frakes, actor and director Merri Howard, supervising producer Robert Justman, associate producer, TOS, TNG Winrich Kolbe, director Peter Lauritson, supervising producer, postproduction Kerry McCluggage, chairman, Paramount Pictures Television Group James (Jim) Mees, set director/dresser Ronald D. (Ron) Moore, writer and co–executive producer, DS9 Wendy Neuss, producer, postproduction sound specialist, TNG, DS9, and Voyager Michael Okuda, art supervisor and technical consultant Michael Piller, executive producer and writer, TNG, DS9, and Voyager William Shatner, leading actor, TOS Marina Sirtis, actor, TNG, Voyager Sir Patrick Stewart, leading actor, TNG Michael Westmore, supervising designer, makeup Herman Zimmerman, chief production designer

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We spoke to some other members of the Star Trek family whom we have not been able to quote because of the direction the book eventually took, but our thanks are due to them, too: Michael Mellon, head of research, shared thoughts on his special area of expertise, audiences. (As stated in the introduction, the book is not concerned with audiences or fans.) Similarly, Marty Hornstein, line producer on the film Star Trek: Nemesis, gave valuable insight into his role, but we have, in the end, confined ourselves to discussion of Star Trek as television. Also, publicist Mike Klastoran gave us some valuable insights into the promotion of the film Star Trek: Nemesis, on which he was working at the time, but we have not addressed issues of marketing and promotion except in passing. Eric Stilwell, who worked with Michael Piller at his production company, Piller Squared, was also very helpful to us, and we wish to record our thanks to him.

Notes

introduction: “it’s a television show” 1. Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 431. 2. There was a short-lived animated series of twenty-two episodes that aired in 1973 and 1974, but given the significant differences between producing animation and live-action drama, it is omitted from the book. We should note that we adopt the common fan convention, also employed by some academics, of abbreviating the names of the first three series: TOS for the original Star Trek series, TNG for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and DS9 for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. 3. CBSNews.com, “ ‘Beam Me Up, Scotty’: 45 Years of Star Trek,” http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/08/scitech/main20103413.shtml. 4. The list of people we interviewed, and their status at the time, is given in Appendix 1. We conducted all our interviews with Star Trek production personnel in 2002, and we have been in touch with many of them since, to check their views on the interviews. In addition to the fact that Star Trek itself has undergone some changes of fortune since that time, of which we needed to take account, our lives, too, have moved on. Academic readers who have changed jobs or taken on administrative responsibilities, or both, may appreciate other reasons why it has taken us so long to get this book into print. We hope that, like a fine single malt, it has matured with age. 5. William Shatner, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 6. For discussions of television’s changing status, see Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds., Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Amanda Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 28–31. 7. Horace Newcomb, “Toward Synthetic Media Industry Research,” in Media Industries: History, Theory and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 268.

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8. Jonathan Bignell, “Programmes and Canons,” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 1 (2006): 31. 9. The only show that could claim to rival Star Trek in this regard is the BBC’s Doctor Who, which initially ran from 1963 to 1989, was relaunched in 2005, and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2013. 10. For discussions of periodization, see Mark C. Rogers, Michael Epstein, and Jimmie L. Reeves, “The Sopranos as HBO Brand Equity: The Art of Commerce in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in This Thing of Ours: Investigating “The Sopranos,” ed. David Lavery (London: Wallflower Press, London, 2002) 42–57; Trisha Dunleavy, Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2–6; Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (London: Routledge, 2012), 6–9; and Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 7–19. For further considerations of television during particular historical periods, see Elihu Katz, “The End of Television,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625 (September 2009): 6–18; and Amanda Lotz, “What Is US Television Now?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625 (September 2009): 49–59. 11. Since 1970 the United States has also had a nationwide, publicly funded network, PBS (Public Broadcasting System), which likewise operates through local affiliated stations, but PBS has far fewer resources and smaller audiences than, for example, the mass-channel, license-fee-funded BBC in the United Kingdom, and depends partly on membership fees and sponsorship. Nevertheless, it has broadcast such iconic American series as Sesame Street (1969–present, produced by Sesame Workshop, formerly Children’s Television Workshop) and is an outlet for popular imported television “classics” from the United Kingdom, such as Downton Abbey. 12. Michael Curtin, “Matrix Media,” in Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, ed. Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay (London: Routledge, 2009), 12. 13. Ibid., 11. 14. For an overview of the networks’ audience share from the 1980s to the 2010s, see Bill Gorman, “Where Did the Primetime Broadcast Audience Go,” TV by the Numbers, April 12, 2010, http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it. com/2010/04/12/where-did-the-primetime-broadcast-tv-audience-go/47976/. 15. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, 7. 16. Michael Curtin (“Matrix Media”) argues that the 2007–8 season was a significant turning point for the industry as the full impact of the new digital technologies manifested itself. We recommend Lost (ABC, 2004–10) to those seeking a television program that exemplifies the nascent postnetwork era. See Roberta Pearson, “Lost in Transition: From Post-Network to PostTelevision,” in Quality: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 239–56; Roberta Pearson, ed., Reading “Lost”: Perspectives on a Hit Television Show (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); and Roberta Pearson, “ Lost’s Legacy,” in “Lost” in Media,

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ed. Benjamin Beil, Herbert Schwaab, and Daniela Wentz (Münster: LIT-Verlag, in press). 17. Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5, no. 1 (2007): 44. 18. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, “Introduction: Does the World Really Need One More Field of Study?” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell), 3. 19. Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), 28. 20. For a comprehensive guide to “just about everything written about Star Trek” prior to 1991, see Susan R. Gibberman, Star Trek: An Annotated Guide to Resources on the Development, the Phenomenon, the People, the Television Series, the Films, the Novels and the Recordings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991), xi. See also Lincoln Geraghty, “Reading on the Frontier: A Star Trek Bibliography,” Extrapolation 43, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 288–315; and Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Cold War, Pop Culture and the Image of US Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 74–103. Sarantakes’s lengthy first footnote (74–76) lists works on Star Trek and race, gender, philosophical, and psychological issues and myth. 21. Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, “Star Trek,” Oxford Bibliographies, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286 /obo-9780199791286–0138.xml. 22. Ibid. 23. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). 24. Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, Star Trek, Oxford Bibliographies Online, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199791286/obo-9780199791286–0138.xml?rskey = TWAUAG&result = 84&q = 25. Indeed, as we were writing this introduction yet another fan study appeared as part of Intellect Books’ “Fan Phenomenon” series; see Bruce E. Drushel, ed., Fan Phenomenon: Star Trek (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2013). We have not ourselves written about the fans, except in passing, but we have written about Star Trek audiences. See Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies, “Class Acts?: Public and Private Values and the Cultural Habits of TheatreGoers,” in Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, ed. Sonia Livingstone (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2005), 139– 62; Messenger Davies and Pearson, “To Boldly Bestride the Narrow World: Shakespeare, Star Trek and the British Television Market,” in European Culture and the Media, ed. Ib Bondejberg and Peter Golding (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2004), 65–90; and Davies and Pearson, “Stardom and Distinction: Patrick Stewart as an Agent of Cultural Mobility—A Study of Theatre and Film Audiences in New York City,” in Contemporary Hollywood Stardom, ed. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker (London: Edward Arnold, 2003): 167–86.

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26. We have refrained from giving specific examples, since it seems invidious to single out particular authors for criticism when we lack the space to fully engage with their work. 27. John Corner, “Finding Data, Reading Patterns, Telling Stories: Issues in the Historiography of Television,” Media, Culture & Society 25, no. 2 (March 2003): 276. 28. Ina Rae Hark, Star Trek (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 5. 29. Catherine Johnson, Telefantasy (London: BFI, 2005); Ina Rae Hark, “Franchise Fatigue? The Marginalization of the Television Series after The Next Generation,” in The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 44–69; Eileen R. Meehan, Why TV Is Not Our Fault: Television Programming, Viewers, and Who’s Really in Control (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 30. In addition to Johnson’s, Hark’s, and Meehan’s contributions, three more items that focus on representations of the social and the political and that attempt to connect the production context to particular aspects of Star Trek’s engagement with the public sphere might be of interest to the reader. Sarantakes’s “Cold War Pop Culture,” uses evidence from the Roddenberry papers and production personnel’s memoirs to argue against the assumption that the program invariably supported US foreign policy, including the Vietnam War. Micheal C. Pounds’s Race in Space: The Representation of Ethnicity in “Star Trek” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999) explores how TOS and TNG reflected social reforms and changes in attitudes to race in the United States between the 1960s and the ’80s/’90s, basing his argument in part upon the differences in the American television industry during those two periods. Daniel Leonard Bernardi’s “Star Trek” and History: Race-ing toward a White Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), takes a multifaceted approach to the topic, considering how factors such as network decision making, genre, intertextuality, and the fans structure the meaning of race. We also refer the reader to Paul Rixon’s discussion of Star Trek’s UK distribution: “Star Trek: Popular Discourses: The Role of Broadcasters and Critics,” in The Influence of “Star Trek” on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 153–72. 31. We don’t have room here to rehearse the “acafan” debate, although it certainly has relevance to our methodological concerns. For more on this, including a contribution by Pearson, see the “Acafandom and Beyond” exchange that took place over the summer of 2011 on Henry Jenkins’s blog, Confessions of an Acafan, http://henryjenkins.org/archives.html. 32. We had contact details for some interviewees; for others we used the imdb.com database to contact agents, and through them their clients. In a few cases, we could not find agent contact details, or there was no response from agents or their clients, despite at least three attempts via email, telephone, fax, and surface mail, to contact them. In such cases we have used material judiciously in the knowledge that we have made all possible attempts to check it with our interviewees.

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33. John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 2. 34. Ibid., 2, 3. 35. Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise,” in Production Studies: Critical Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 104–5. 36. Julie D’acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of “Cagney & Lacey” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jostein Gripsrud, Dynasty Years: Hollywood Television and Critical Media Studies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1. 37. For more general discussions of television production, see Horace Newcomb and Amanda Lotz, “The Production of Media Fiction,” in Handbook of Media and Communication Research, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 62–77; Jane M. Shattuc, “Television Production: Who Makes American TV?” in A Companion to Television, ed. Janet Wasko (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 142–54; and Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). For a discussion of soap-opera production, see Elana Levine, “Toward a Paradigm for Media Production Research: Behind the Scenes at General Hospital,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 18, no. 1 (2001): 68–82.

1. star trek and american television history 1. Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 2002), 194. 2. Ibid., 229. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 194. 5. Ibid., 230. 6. Paul Klein, “Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch,” TV Guide, July 24, 1971, 6–9; Raymond Williams, Television and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974). 7. Paul Klein, “The Men Who Run TV Know Us Better Than You Think,” in The Mass Media Book, ed. Rod Holmgren and William Norton (New York: Prentice Hall, 1972), 327. 8. Ibid., 327–28. 9. Ibid., 329. 10. Muriel G. Cantor, The Hollywood TV Producer: His Work and His Audience (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 169. 11. Ibid., 172. 12. Ibid., 173. 13. Ibid.

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14. Ibid., 174. 15. Robert Justman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Justman in this chapter are taken from this interview. 16. On the independents’ relationship to talent agencies, see Mark Alvey, “The Independents: Rethinking the Television Studio System,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 139–60. 17. Michele Hilmes, introduction to “Part Three: NBC and the Classic Network System, 1960–1985,” in NBC: America’s Network, ed. Michele Hilmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 172. 18. Alvey, “The Independents,” 145–46. 19. Ibid., 154. 20. See Tise Vahimagi, The Untouchables (London: BFI, 1998). The Star Trek: Voyager episode “Memorial” (6:14) includes a clip from The Untouchables, perhaps in acknowledgement of shared parentage, or at least of overlapping intellectual property. 21. See Herbert F. Solow and Yvonne Fern, interview by Peter Anthony Holder, http://peteranthonyholder.com/cjad26.htm. 22. “Star Trek”: The True Story, directed by Phil Stebbing; aired January 5, 2013, on the Discovery Channel in the United States; aired May 9, 2013, on Channel 5 in the United Kingdom; video recording in possession of the authors. 23. Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside “Star Trek”: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 18. 24. Quoted in Hadassah R. L. Broscova, “Herbert Solow: Discusses His Desilu & MGM Legacy,” http://www.dartmouth.org/classes/53/archives /solow.php. 25. Solow and Fern, interview by Holder. 26. Quoted in Broscova, “Herbert Solow.” 27. Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 11, 116. 28. Ibid., 122. 29. Ibid. 30. Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek” (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 23. 31. William Shatner, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Shatner in this chapter are taken from this interview. 32. Catherine Johnson, Telefantasy (London: BFI, 2005), 91. 33. Ibid., 74, 75–80. 34. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 21. 35. Quoted in Broscova, “Herbert Solow.” 36. “Star Trek”: The True Story. 37. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 26 (emphasis in original). 38. Ibid., 25.

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39. Johnson, Telefantasy, 80. 40. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 23. 41. Years later Roddenberry would also refer Patrick Stewart to Hornblower (Patrick Stewart, interview with the authors, London, March 1999). 42. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 22. 43. Ibid., 28. Star Trek nonetheless turned out to be “one of the most expensive series in television history at that time” (Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” xix) because of the higher number of optical effects, the relatively infrequent use of cheap location shooting, and the need for props and makeup consistent with its twenty-third-century setting. These expenses became a pressing problem in the third season, when Paramount, already topping up the broadcast license fees, feared it wouldn’t recoup its losses because projected foreign sales were minuscule and there weren’t, according to then-current practices, enough episodes for syndication. 44. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 98. 45. Michael Okuda, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 46. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 19. 47. Star Trek: The True Story. 48. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 41. 49. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 124. 50. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 60. 51. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 128. 52. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 60–61. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 59. 55. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 126. 56. Cantor, The Hollywood TV Producer, 127. 57. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 142. 58. Museum of Broadcast Communications, “Standards and Practices,” http://www.museum.tv/eotv/standardsand.htm. 59. National Association of Broadcasters, The Television Code, 5th ed. (March 1959), http://www.tv-signoffs.com/1959_NAB_Television_Code.pdf. 60. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 200. 61. National Association of Broadcasters, The Television Code, 2; Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 328. 62. National Association of Broadcasters, The Television Code, 2; Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 298. 63. National Association of Broadcasters, The Television Code, 4; Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 298. 64. National Association of Broadcasters, The Television Code, 1. 65. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 200. 66. Ibid., 326. 67. Ibid., 297. 68. Quoted in Broscova, “Herbert Solow.” 69. Solow and Fern, interview by Holder.

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70. Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek,” 21. 71. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 413. 72. Ibid., 417. 73. Kerry McCluggage, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from McCluggage in this chapter are taken from this interview. 74. Press release issued by Paramount/UPN, February 2, 2005. 75. Calculated using http://www.westegg.com/inflation. 76. New York Times, August 24, 1966, 14. 77. Advertisement, New York Times, April 22, 1968, 24. 78. Mark Alvey, “ ‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies’: Quality Demographics and 1960s US Television,” Screen 45, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 40–62. Alvey says that NBC knew that its “leadership in colour programming . . . gave it an undeniable edge in attracting more desirable demographics.” A 1965 research bulletin “cited a Brand Ratings Index study that correlated colour set ownership with heavier spending patterns on household products, convenience food, travel and ‘status symbols,’ as well as more ‘venturesome’ buying habits (such as trying modern products)” (50). For more on Star Trek and color, see Johnson, Telefantasy, 85–86. She notes that RCA, having learned from Nielsen research that Star Trek was the highest-rated color series on air, used the show in a promotional campaign for its color sets. 79. See, for example, Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (London: Routledge 2011). 80. See Roberta Pearson, “Lost in Transition: From Post-Network to PostTelevision,” in Quality: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCaber and Kim Akass (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007): 239–56. 81. Roberta Pearson, “Hyphenate: The Writer-Producer in American Television,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 11–26. 82. Cantor, The Hollywood Producer, vii. 83. Of course, other classic network era producers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Desilu’s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had prominent public profiles, but their prominence derived from other fields of production—in Hitchcock’s case, film directing and in Ball’s, television acting. And the public profiles of significant classic-network-era producers such as Stephen J. Cannell, Aaron Spelling, Norman Lear, and Quinn Martin bear investigating. 84. For more on the associations between NASA and Star Trek, see Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997). 85. Rod Serling, “Roasting Rod Serling,” by Mike Wallace, http://www .rodserling.com/mwallace.htm. 86. John J. O’Connor, “Next Stop, the Sight and Mind of Rod Serling,” New York Times, November 29, 1995, C13. 87. “On Television,” New York Times, February 12, 1957, 55.

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88. “Star Trek’s Crew Travels in Future,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1966, SFB10; Hal Humphrey, “A Flight Plan for Star Trek,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1966, A2. Humphrey refers to Roddenberry as “the sober individual on this week’s cover,” indicating the producer’s willingness to shine the spotlight on himself from the outset. 89. “Smithsonian Seeks TV Pilot,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1967, C19. 90. Don Page, “Enterprising Star Trek Taps TV’s Potential,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1968, G10. 91. Roddenberry to Schlosser, February, 1, 1968, box 29, folder 7, UCLA-SC, cited in Micheal C. Pounds, Race in Space: The Representation of Ethnicity in “Star Trek” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999). 92. Burt Prelutsky, New York Times, October 15, 1967, 141. 93. Ibid. 94. Hal Humphrey, “Star Trek’s Upward Flight,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1967, a39C. 95. Page, “Enterprising Star Trek.” 96. Johnson, Telefantasy, 73. 97. Cecil Smith, “Roddenberry Sires Son of Star Trek,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1973, H1. 98. M. L. Stein, “At Last, All Systems Are ‘Go’ for Star Trek,” New York Times, January 21, 1979, D13. 99. Desson Howe, “Pioneer in the Final Frontier,” Washington Post, August 19, 1985, D1. 100. David Schonauer, “ ‘Star Trek’ Sails Boldly On,” New York Times, March 27, 1988, H37. 101. David Alexander, “Star Trek” Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (London: Boxtree, 1994), 503. 102. Michelle Logan, “Star Trek: Paramount’s $1 Billion Enterprise,” California Business, November 1, 1992, 20. 103. “Topics of the Times: A Stargazer’s Playground,” New York Times, October 29, 1991, A2. 104. Rick Berman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Berman in this chapter are taken from this interview. 105. Quoted in Robert Wilonsky, “The Trouble with Trek,” Salon.com, October 29, 1999, http://www.salon.com. 106. Ant3311 ([email protected]), “What Is Going Wrong with the Star Trek Series?” alt.startrek.creative, July 30, 1996. 107. http://www.stfanassoc.com/id286.htm. 108. http://www.petitiononline.com/savetrek/. 109. Quoted in Wilonsky, “The Trouble with Trek.” Matt Hills, in Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), notes that “it is the auteur which acts as a point of coherence and continuity in relation to the world of the media cult” (132). 110. Sue Short, Cult Telefantasy Series: A Critical Analysis of “The Prisoner,” “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Lost,” “Heroes,” “Dr. Who” and “Star Trek” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 182.

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111. Ina Rae Hark, “Star Trek” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 148. 112. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 296. 113. Alvey, “ ‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies,’ ” 44. 114. Elana Levine, Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 26. 115. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 201. 116. Alvey, “ ‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies,’ ” 58. 117. Elana Levine, “US Networks in the 1970s and 1980s,” in The Television History Book, ed. Michele Hilmes, assoc. ed. Jason Jacobs (London: BFI, 2003), 89–94. 118. Alvey, “ ‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies,’ ” 45. 119. Ibid., 47. 120. Ibid., 48. 121. Ibid., 49. 122. Ibid., 51. 123. Quoted in Walter Spencer, “TV’s Vast Gray Belt,” Television, August 1967, 74, quoted in Alvey, “ ‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies,’ ” 51. 124. Quoted in Richard K. Doan, “Why Shows Are Canceled,” TV Guide, June 15, 1968, reprinted in Television, ed. Barry G. Cole (New York: Free Press, 1970), 124, quoted in Alvey, “ ‘Too Many Kids and Old Ladies,’ ” 51. 125. NBC Television Network, “Advance Information on 1966–67 Programming,” reproduced in Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek.” 126. Hal Humphrey, “TV Networks Get Mail from Home,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1967, D23. 127. Laurence Laurent, “ ‘Star Trek’ Is Rescued,” Washington Post, February 20, 1968, D11. 128. Aleene Macminn, “Survives Rating Dip: NBC’s Star Trek Renewed,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1968, E23. 129. Humphrey, “Star Trek’s Upward Flight.” 130. Don Page, “Adventure, Shatner Seek One Another,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1968, E27. 131. Prelutsky, New York Times. 132. Digby Diehl, “Girls All Want to Touch the Ears,” New York Times, August 25, 1968, D17. 133. Mary Celeste Kearney, “The Changing Face of Teen Television; or, Why We all Love Buffy,” in Undead TV: Essays on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” ed. Elana Levine and Lisa Parks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 18. 134. See, for example, the interview with Star Trek überfan Bjo Trimble, credited with organizing the letter-writing campaign: http://www.trekplace. com/bjotrimble.html. 135. Don Page, “Rumors Galore: Have You Heard about Star Trek?” Los Angeles Times, January, 5, 1968, c14. 136. Jerry Ruhlow, “Cosmic Issue—TV Series,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1968, 3.

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137. “All Systems Are ‘Go’ for Star Trek,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1968, A31D. 138. Don Page, “Enterprising Star Trek,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1968, G10. Roddenberry’s letter to Schlosser (see above), arguing for renewal despite low ratings, referred to the fanzines as well as to the show’s favorable demographics. 139. Solow and Yvonne Fern, interview by Holder. 140. Les Brown, “TV’s Old Math for New Myth: Wooing of Youth Proves a Fizzle,” Variety, December 31, 1969, 21; quoted in Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 202. 141. Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube, 202–3. 142. For an excellent history of syndication, see Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005). 143. Kompare, Rerun Nation, 76. 144. Solow and Justman, Inside “Star Trek,” 418. 145. Fred Ferretti, “Independents Fight for Growing TV Audience Here,” New York Times, August 4, 1969. 70. 146. Don Page, “Gentry Special Due,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1970, C21. 147. Doug Shuit, “Star Trek: Still Luring a Galaxy of Aficionados,” Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1972, A1. 148. Ben Bova, “Why Hollywood Finds Profits Out of This World—SF Now Very Popular,” New York Times, November 13, 1977, D1. 149. Paul Grimes, “Fantasy Boom: The Profits Are Real,” New York Times, May 30, 1976, 213. 150. Ronald L. Soble, “ ‘Star Trek’ Still Grounded,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1977, F1. 151. “Best, Worst, Oddballs,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1979, W7. 152. Joe Saltzman, “Syndication—Pot of Gold at End of the TV Rainbow,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1979, W6. 153. Lewis Beale, “ ‘Star Trek’ at 20: A Universal, Enigmatic Success,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1986, A3. 154. Soble, “ ‘Star Trek’ Still Grounded.” 155. Logan, “Star Trek: Paramount’s $1 Billion Enterprise.” 156. Jim Benson, “Comp Fight Not Preempted; NATPE Sesh Shows Some Affils Still Upset over Issue of Cuts,” Daily Variety, January 27, 1993, 43. 157. See Kompare, Rerun Nation, chap. 3. 158. Ibid., 133. 159. Aljean Harmetz, “New ‘Star Trek’ Plan Reflects Symbiosis of TV and Movies,” New York Times, November 2, 1968, H31. 160. Thomas Tyrer, “Paramount Placing Trust in ‘Voyager’ to Launch Network,” Electronic Media, May 16, 1994, 53. 161. Harmetz, “New ‘Star Trek’ Plan.” 162. Quoted in Logan, “Star Trek: Paramount’s $1 Billion Enterprise.”

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163. For more on Paramount’s exploitation of the Star Trek back catalogue, see Eileen R. Meehan, Why TV Is Not Our Fault: Television Programming, Viewers, and Who’s Really in Control (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), chap. 4. 164. Logan, “Star Trek: Paramount’s $1 Billion Enterprise.” 165. John Kessler, “Star Trek Boldly Going . . . Going . . . Gone,” Denver Post, May 25, 1994, F-01. 166. Logan, “Star Trek: Paramount’s $1 Billion Enterprise.” 167. Joe Mandese, “Fox, Big 3 Unite Against Paramount,” Advertising Age, April 5, 1993, 32. 168. Benson, “Comp Fight Not Preempted.” 169. Tyrer, “Paramount Placing Trust in ‘Voyager.’ ” 170. Trey Paul, “Stellar Finale: Last ‘Next Generation’ Episode Becomes a Major Television Event,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 21, 1994, C1. 171. Kompare, Rerun Nation, 141. 172. “ ‘Star Trek’ Will Return,” New York Times, June 18, 1977, 12. 173. “New Star Trek Debut Postponed,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1977, F20. 174. Peter Mikelbank, “The Boss Speaks: ‘Star Trek’ Lives!” Washington Post, August 29, 1977, B1. 175. “William Shatner to Return in New Star Trek Version,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1977, E14. 176. “New Star Trek Debut Postponed,” F20. 177. Brian Lowry (special from the Los Angeles Times), “Assessing WB, UPN at Age 5,” Bergen County (NJ) Record, January 2, 2000, Y1. 178. William LaRue, “Stations Compete for New Trek,” Syracuse (NY) Post-Standard, May 30, 1994, B4. 179. For an insider’s account of UPN and the WB, see Susanne Daniels and Cynthia Littleton, Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN (New York: Harper, 2007). For a discussion of the relative failure of the post-TOS series, see Ina Rae Hark, “Franchise Fatigue? The Marginalization of the Television Series after The Next Generation,” in The Influence of “Star Trek” on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). 180. Susan Christopherson, “Beyond the Self-Expressive Creative Worker: An Industry Perspective on Entertainment Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 74. 181. Ibid., 74–75.

2. art, commerce, and creative autonomy 1. Susan Christopherson, “Beyond the Self-Expressive Creative Worker: An Industry Perspective on Entertainment Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 74. 2. Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 83–85.

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3. Mark Deuze, Media Work (London: Polity, 2007), 147. 4. Ibid., 93. 5. John Thornton Caldwell, “Cultures of Production: Studying Industry’s Deep Texts, Reflexive Rituals, and Managed Self-Disclosures,” in Media Industries: History, Theory and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 200. 6. David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (London: Routledge 2011), 55. 7. Mark Banks, “Craft Labour and Creative Industries,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16, no. 3 (2010): 305–6 (emphasis in original). 8. Ibid., 305. John Thornton Caldwell’s Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) is an important exception within the television-studies literature, including as it does extensive discussion of these below-the-line workers. 9. But for those interested in the debate, see, for example, Nicholas Garnham, “From Cultural to Creative Industries: An Analysis of the Implications of the ‘Creative Industries’ Approach to Arts and Media Policy Making in the United Kingdom,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11, no. 1 (2005): 15–29; and Susan Galloway and Stewart Dunlop, “A Critique of Definitions of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Public Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 13, no. 1 (2007): 17–31. For a good overall introduction to cultural/creative industries, see David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2013). 10. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, Creative Labour, 101. 11. Thanks to Paul McDonald, from whose insights we take these points. 12. Mark Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 6–7 (emphasis in original). 13. Michael Piller, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Piller in this chapter are taken from this interview. 14. Kerry McCluggage, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January, 2002. Further quotations from McCluggage in this chapter are taken from this interview. 15. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, Creative Labour, 96. 16. Rick Berman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Berman in this chapter are taken from this interview. 17. Brannon Braga, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Braga in this chapter are taken from this interview. 18. Braga told us that he didn’t know why the studio and network demanded those extra episodes. Kerry McCluggage gave us the reason: “When you do twenty-six a year, you get seventy-eight and it’s then strippable after three [seasons]. But we usually don’t start syndication till the fourth season. We feel it makes for a better strip to have that many episodes, twenty-six times seven. It means they don’t repeat as often in that cycle.”

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19. Peter Lauritson, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January, 2002. Further quotations from Lauritson in this chapter are taken from this interview. 20. Banks, The Politics of Cultural Work, 6 (emphasis in original). 21. Ibid., 29. 22. Jim McGuigan, “Creative Labour, Cultural Work and Individualization,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16, no. 3 (2010): 326. 23. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, Creative Labour, 77. 24. Ibid., 9. 25. David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, “Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry,” Theory Culture and Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 102 (emphasis in original). 26. Robert Blackman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Blackman in this chapter are taken from this interview. 27. Gender was undoubtedly another important factor affecting creative autonomy, but not one that we have hard evidence to address. With the exception of the actors, the majority of the Star Trek production staff were male, except for the wardrobe staff whom we’ve mentioned. Race may also have been a significant factor; while the Star Trek crews are famously multicultural, the production staff was not. During our sojourn on the Paramount lot, the most visible people of color were the security staff. Again, however, we have no hard evidence to address the relationship between race and creative autonomy. For a discussion of gender issues in the production process that focuses specifically on costume designers, see Miranda J. Banks, “Gender Below-the-Line: Defining Feminist Production Studies,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 87–99. 28. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Tina Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005), 119. 29. Mark Banks, “Craft Labour and Creative Industries,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16, no. 3 (2010): 312 (emphasis in original). 30. Dan Curry, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Curry in this chapter are taken from this interview. 31. Michael Westmore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Unless otherwise stated, further quotations from Westmore in this chapter are taken from this interview. 32. Michael Okuda, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Okuda in this chapter are taken from this interview. 33. Herman Zimmerman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Zimmerman in this chapter are taken from the interview 34. Writers Guild of America, West, “Writing for Episodic TV: From Freelancer to Showrunner,” http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=156. 35. See Producers Guild of America, “Code of Credits—Long-Form Television— Credit Guidelines,” http://www.producersguild.org/?page = coc_lft_2.

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36. Ibid. 37. See, for example, Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, “Star Trek The Next Generation”: The Continuing Mission (New York: Pocket Books, 1997). 38. Writers Guild of America, West, “Writing for Episodic TV.” 39. Matt Jefferies’s name has been immortalized in the “Jefferies tubes”— the channels that link different parts of the Federation starships. Other production staff have also been honored within Star Trek‘s diegetic world. The alien Bolians, for instance, were named after director Cliff Bole, who directed the first TNG episode in which they appeared. 40. Jim Mees, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Mees in this chapter are taken from this interview. 41. McGuigan, “Creative Labour,” 328. 42. Hesmondhalgh and Baker, “Creative Work and Emotional Labour,” 100. 43. Caldwell, Production Culture, 114. 44. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 113–14. 45. Denise D. Bielby and William T. Bielby, “Hollywood Dreams, Harsh Realities: Writing for Film and Television,” Contexts 1, no. 21 (2002): 22. 46. Deuze, Media Work, 174. 47. There were other shows of the multichannel era that had long runs, such as Law and Order and ER. It would be interesting to explore the creative autonomy of the workers employed on those programs, but that is outside this book’s scope. 48. Winrich Kolbe, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 49. Tom Arp, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 50. William Shatner, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 51. Braga told us that the actual budget was over $2 million per episode, so McCluggage’s made-up figures were not far off. 52. Merri Howard, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 53. Ron Moore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Moore in this chapter are from this interview. 54. Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside “Star Trek”: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 253. 55. See, for example, http://www.blankmaninc.com/top-10-star-trek-thenext-generation-episodes/2; http://whatculture.com/tv/star-trek-top-25-nextgeneration-episodes.php/13; http://www.imdb.com/list/yigzEBZ-bEs/. 56. Noah Wyle, who had played Dr. John Carter for twelve years, returned for the last season of ER after having been absent for the preceding two. 57. Berman did not want to name the studio executives who rejected his idea. 58. Ina Rae Hark, “Franchise Fatigue? The Marginalization of the Television Series after The Next Generation,” in The Influence of “Star Trek” on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 57.

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59. The Maquis were those living on Federation colonies within space that had been conceded to the Cardassians. They were named in honor of the Second World War French resistance.

3. the craft-workshop mode of production 1. Rick Berman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Berman in this chapter are from this interview. 2. Mark Deuze, Media Work (London: Polity 2007), 85. 3. Ibid., 91. 4. Ibid., 92. 5. We are indebted for this concept of the atelier to a comment by Peter Walsh, then chairman of the Massachusetts Art Commission, on a paper given by Máire Messenger Davies called “Television: A Creative Industry?” at the Media in Transition Conference no. 4, “The Work of Stories,” at MIT, Cambridge, MA, May 6–8, 2005. A version of this paper was later published as Máire Messenger Davies, “Quality and Creativity in TV: The Work of Television Storytellers,” in Quality Television: American Contemporary Television and Beyond, ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 171–84. 6. Mark Banks, “Craft Labour and Creative Industries,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16, no. 3 (2010), 310. 7. Ibid., 307. 8. Ibid, 309. 9. Herman Zimmerman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Zimmerman in this chapter are from this interview. 10. Michael Piller, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Piller in this chapter are from this interview. 11. Wendy Neuss, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Neuss in this chapter are from this interview. 12. Dan Curry, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Curry in this chapter are from this interview. 13. Robert Blackman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Blackman in this chapter are from this interview. 14. Tom Arp, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Arp in this chapter are from this interview 15. Jim Mees, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Mees in this chapter are from this interview. 16. Michael Westmore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations in this chapter are from this interview. 17. Michael Okuda interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations in this chapter are from this interview. 18. Writers Guild of America, West, “Writing for Episodic TV: From Freelancer to Showrunner,” http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=156.

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19. Quotations in this paragraph are from the Westmore and Blackman interviews mentioned above, and from our interview with Winrich Kolbe, which took place in Los Angeles in January 2002. 20. “The Making of Yesterday’s Enterprise,” an unpublished manuscript by Eric Stilwell, which he kindly shared with us, gives a detailed insight into the stages that a script idea—especially an unsolicited one—has to go through in order to be produced. 21. “Act” is the generally used television-industry term for the narrative unit between advertisement breaks. The structure of all American network drama would have been (and still is) determined by the number of such breaks. 22. We have to remember, of course, that in 2002 everyone was talking with hindsight (and this is even more the case for us writing in 2013), particularly about the early and middle seasons of TNG when the series became a mainstream ratings (and hence commercial) success, not just a cult enthusiasm for a niche, fan audience, as TOS had been in the early days of syndication. Such mainstream success was still possible in the multichannel era of TNG; less so at the time when Enterprise was trying to establish itself in the transition to the postnetwork era 23. Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, “Star Trek: The Next Generation”: The Continuing Mission (New York: Pocket Books, 1997), 158. 24. Ina Rae Hark, “Franchise Fatigue? The Marginalization of the Television Series after The Next Generation,” in The Influence of “Star Trek” on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 43. 25. Ron Moore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 26. Deuze, Media Work; Banks, “Craft Labour and Creative Industries.” 27. Merri Howard, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 28. Peter Lauritson, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 29. This is not to deny that there could be tensions and resentments, some of which have found their way into published accounts of the program over the years, but we did not hear about these from our interviewees. 30. Banks, “Craft Labour and Creative Industries,” 306.

4. actors: the public face of star trek 1. Los Angeles Times, “Hollywood Star Walk: Star Trek,” http://projects. latimes.com/hollywood/star-walk/category/star-trek/page/1/. 2. Yvonne Fern, Inside the Mind of Gene Roddenberry, the Creator of “Star Trek” (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 49. 3. Mark Deuze, Media Work (London: Polity, 2007), 93. 4. Robert Blackman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles January 2002. Further quotations from Blackman in this chapter are taken from this interview. 5. Patrick Stewart, interview with the authors, London, March 1999 (hereafter Stewart, interview 1).

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6. James Mees, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 7. Michael Okuda, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 8. On network shows, the director’s role has remained fairly constant from the classic network era to the postnetwork era, but with cable programs with shorter seasons, more leisurely shooting schedules, and two or three people directing the majority of episodes, a director’s input could potentially be much greater. 9. William Shatner, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Unless otherwise stated, further quotations from Shatner in the chapter are taken from this interview. 10. Winrich Kolbe, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Kolbe in this chapter are taken from this interview. 11. Stewart, interview 1. 12. Jonathan Frakes, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Frakes in this chapter are taken from this interview. 13. Marina Sirtis, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Sirtis in this chapter are taken from this interview. 14. Leonard Nimoy writing in Variety, June 1968, quoted in James van Hise, The Unauthorized History of “Trek” (London: Voyager, 1997), 49. 15. Brannon Braga, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Braga in this chapter are taken from this interview. 16. Stewart, interview 1. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Herman Zimmerman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 20. “No One Ever Upsets the Star,” TV Guide, October 15, 1966, quoted in van Hise, The Unauthorized History of “Trek,” 2. 21. Patrick Stewart, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002 (hereafter Stewart, interview 2). 22. Quoted in Adam Shrager, The Finest Crew in the Fleet: The “Next Generation” Cast on Screen and Off (Chichester, UK: Summersdale, 1998), 30–32. 23. Stewart, interview 1. 24. Stewart, interview 2. 25. Stewart, interview 1. 26. Leonard Nimoy, I Am Spock (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 119. 27. Leonard Nimoy to Gene Roddenberry and Doug Cramer, memo, October 15, 1968, quoted in Nimoy, I Am Spock, 125–26. 28. William Shatner, “Star Trek” Memories: The Inside Story of the Classic TV Series (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 271–72. 29. Nimoy, I Am Spock,121. 30. Pilot episodes are normally accorded more shooting time and a higher budget than series episodes.

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31. “Interview: Max Grodenchik,” Star Trek Monthly 7 (November 1999): 56. 32. Robert Beltrane, “Chakotay Chats,” interview by Nick Joy, Starburst no. 371998 (n.d.): 58. 33. Stewart, interview 1. 34. Michael Westmore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 35. There is simply not space in this chapter to fully consider the meanings of such vexed words as “realist” and “theatrical.” We use them fairly imprecisely here in their generally understood meanings. 36. William Shatner with Chris Kreski, Get a Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 166, 167. 37. Robert Justman, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January, 2002. Further quotations from Justman in this chapter are taken from this interview. 38. Wendy Neuss, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 39. “Patrick Stewart: How Shakespeare’s Plays Were Mere Preparation for the Enterprise,” Times Online, March 2, 2009, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article5834388.ece. 40. Quoted in David Bassom, “Tom Foolery: Robert Duncan McNeil,” Star Trek: The Official Monthly Magazine, March 1998, 47. 41. Quoted in Deborah Fisher, “Gowron: A Warrior’s Portfolio,” Star Trek Communicator, no. 122 (April/May 1999): 27. 42. Quoted in Ian Spelling, “Following the Herd,” Star Trek: The Official Monthly Magazine, no. 67 (July 2000): 69. 43. The “Imzadi” genre of fan fiction, devoted to the Riker/Troi relationship, confirms both Frakes’s statement and the research. 44. Quoted in Shrager, The Finest Crew, 30–32. 45. Stewart, interview 1. 46. Ibid.

5. world building 1. Tom Arp, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2001. 2. Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 95. 3. Matt Hills, “Cult TV, Quality and the Role of the Episode/Programme Guide,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 190–91. 4. Sconce, “What If,” 95. 5. Or at least got there first in terms of American television; Doctor Who began world building in 1963 and is the only television show that can rival Star Trek in this regard. 6. Quoted in Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek” (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 74.

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7. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Radio, rev. ed. (London: Routledge: 1992), 155. 8. Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. Since the book has not yet appeared in print, we quote from the chapters that Mittell posted online at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook .org/mcpress/complextelevision/introduction/. 9. Marc Dolan, “The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks,” in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks,” ed. David Lavery, Christy Desmet, Marc Dolan, and Diana Hume George (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 33. 10. Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values & Cultural Change (London: Macmillan, 1997), 82. 11. Mittell, Complex TV. 12. Ibid. 13. Angela Ndalianis, “Television and the Neo-Baroque,” in The Contemporary Television Series, ed. Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 88. 14. Ron Moore, interview, Star Trek Monthly 7 (November 1999), 46. 15. Kerry McCluggage, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 16. Roger Hagedorn, “Doubtless To Be Continued: A Brief History of Serial Narrative,” in To Be Continued . . . Soap Operas around the World, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1995), 39. 17. Chris Gregory, “Star Trek”: Parallel Narratives (London: Macmillan, 2000), 89. 18. Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” Velvet Light Trap, no. 58 (Fall 2006): 35. 19. Ibid., 36. 20. The ironic concept of the audience knowing more than the crew about how the technology of a starship works is cleverly and amusingly exploited in an affectionate homage to Star Trek, the 1999 DreamWorks film Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot, which some have argued is the best Star Trek film ever made. For further discussion of Galaxy Quest’s relationship with Star Trek’s storyworld, as well as the actual world, see Máire Messenger Davies, “What Planet Are We On? Television Drama’s Relationship with Social Reality,” in Using Visual Evidence, ed. Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2009), 153–69. 21. Ron Moore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. Further quotations from Moore in this chapter are taken from this interview. See chapter 6 for discussions of both of these episodes, the first of which crosses over TOS and TNG and the second, TOS and DS9. 22. Arising from Roddenberry’s adamant insistence on nonreligious rationalism, “Apollo” simply has exceptional scientific powers. In exposing the illusion, Kirk makes an “atheist” speech that is unlikely to have been written now: “You’re no god to us, mister . . . we’ve [humanity] come a long way in 5000

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years . . . We’ve outgrown you. You asked for something [worship] we can no longer give you.” (TOS 2:31). 23. Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), xii. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. “Telepix review: Star Trek,” Daily Variety 133, no. 3 (September 8, 1966): 9. 26. John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” (London: Routledge, 1995). 27. Catherine Johnson, Telefantasy (London: BFI, 2005), 2. 28. John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 261. 29. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Possible-Worlds Theory,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (London: Routledge, 2005), 446. 30. See particularly Marie-Laure Ryan, “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction,” Poetics Today 12, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 553–76. 31. Ibid., 554. 32. For another discussion of this particular Enterprise credit sequence, see Lincoln Geraghty, “Eight Days That Changed American Television,” in The Influence of “Star Trek” on Television, Film and Culture, ed. Lincoln Geraghty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 18–19. 33. Sconce, “What If,” 101. 34. Ibid., 102.

6. character building 1. Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of “Star Trek” (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 26. 2. David Alexander, “Interview of Gene Roddenberry: Writer, Producer, Philosopher, Humanist,” The Humanist, March/April 1991, http://bit.ly /1jiQmEH. 3. And which goes back almost to the beginnings of the cinema. See Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 4. Michael Piller, “Piller Reflects on ‘Voyager,’ ” Trek Today (2002), http:// www.trektoday.com/news/170202_02.shtml. 5. But see Roberta Pearson, “Chain of Events: Lost’s Unique Construction of the Televisual Character,” in Reading “Lost,” ed. Roberta Pearson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 139–58; and ibid., “Anatomising Gilbert Grissom: The Structure and Function of the Televisual Character,” in Focus on “CSI,” ed. Michael Allen (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 39–56.

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6. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory,” Postmodern Culture 5, no. 1 (1994): 5, http://www.humanities .uci.edu/mposter/syllabi/readings/ryan.html. 7. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 118, 119. 8. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 115. 9. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), 33. We should also mention Murray Smith’s Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). But Smith is interested in developing a cognitive-based theory of spectators’ emotional responses to characters that depends upon speculation as to viewers’ interpretations, whereas we are interested in developing a theory of character grounded in narrative theory. We have not found his approach particularly helpful in doing this. 10. Jason Jacobs makes a similar point, illustrated through an analysis of ER. See his “Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2001), 427–47. 11. http://www.startrek.com/database_article/picard-jean-luc. 12. Chris Gregory, “Star Trek”: Parallel Narratives (London: MacMillan Press,2000), 89. 13. Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45. 14. H. Porter Abbot, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 124. 15. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), 13–14, 15. 16. For example, Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993–99), The Wire (HBO, 2002–8); ER (NBC, 1994–2009), and House (Fox, 2004–12). 17. Diane Duane, “Star Trek: The Next Generation: ‘Where No One Has Gone Before,’ ” Out of Ambit, October 28, 2006, http://www.dianeduane.com /outofambit/2006/10/28/star-trek-the-next-generation-where-no-one-hasgone-before/. 18. Wil Wheaton, “Star Trek: The Next Generation: ‘Where No One Has Gone Before,’ ” HuffPost TV, October 27, 2006, http://www.aoltv. com/2006/10/27/star-trek-the-next-generation-where-no-one-has-gonebefore/. 19. Jeffrey Sconce, “What If? Charting Television’s New Textual Boundaries,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 101. 20. Fan fiction is “broadly defined” by Wikipedia as “stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction). 21. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 117, 118

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22. Marc Dolan, “The Peaks and Valleys of Serial Creativity: What Happened to/on Twin Peaks,” in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to “Twin Peaks,” ed. David Lavery, Christy Desmet, Marc Dolan, and Diana Hume George (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 33. 23. Jane Feuer, “Genre Study and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1992), 154. 24. Ron Moore, interview with the authors, Los Angeles, January 2002. 25. For other discussions of television character and alternate possible worlds, see Gaby Allrath and Marion Gymnich, ed. Narrative Strategies in Television Series (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). See also an earlier discussion in Roberta Pearson, “Kings of Infinite Space: Cult Television Characters,” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, November 2003, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cfm/research/scope.aspx. 26. For Nemesis, the last TNG film, the producers brought in a new director, Stuart Baird, and a new scriptwriter, John Logan. 27. Annette Kuhn, “Introduction to Part One,” in Alien Zone II, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 11. 28. Barry Keith Grant, “Reason and the Visible in the Science-Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone II, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 28. 29. Quoted in Roberta E. Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies, “ ‘You’re Not Going to See That on TV’: Star Trek: The Next Generation in Film and Television,” in Quality Popular Television, ed. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), 103. 30. Ron Moore, quoted in Edward Gross, The Making of the “Trek” Films (London: Boxtree, 1995), 137. 31. Quoted in Gross, The Making of the “Trek” Films, 137. 32. The common assumption among television scholars has been that the televisual image is relatively impoverished compared with the cinematic one. Says John Corner: “Screen size persists as an important distinction between cinematic and televisual image projection. . . . Even allowing for the new range of large screen systems, most television is watched on screens which are many times smaller than those of the local cinemas and this has important consequences for the aesthetics of the television image” (John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999], 26). The next generation of television scholars is beginning to contest this assumption or at least to assert that television mise-en-scène should be accorded equal importance with the television narrative. See, for example, Catherine Johnson, Telefantasy (London: BFI, 2005), especially pp. 10–12; and Jan Johnson-Smith, American Science Fiction TV: “Star Trek,” “Stargate” and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). 33. Quoted in Gross, The Making of the “Trek” Films, 139. 34. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Possible Worlds in Recent Literary Theory,” Style 25, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 533. 35. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 273.

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36. Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum,” in Television: The Critical View, 6th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 566. 37. See, for example, Taylor Harrison, Sarah Projansky, Kent A. Ono, and Elyce Rae Helford, Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on “Star Trek” (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 38. For more on TOS’s Cold War context, see Rick Worland, “From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier: Star Trek from Kennedy to Gorbachev,” Film and History 24, nos. 1–2 (1994). See also Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, “Cold War Pop Culture and the Image of US Foreign Policy: The Perspective of the Original Star Trek Series,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 74–103. 39. Kent A. Ono, “Domesticating Terrorism: A Neocolonial Economy of Différance,” in Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on “Star Trek,” ed. Taylor Harrison, Sarah Projansky, Kent A. Ono, and Elyce Rae Helford (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 159. 40. Ibid., 170. 41. Ibid., 166. 42. Ibid., 174. 43. Johnny Caldwell, “Star Trek Predicts a United Ireland,” BBC News, April 14, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6553307.stm.

conclusion: “it’s not a television show” 1. David S. Cohen, “Enterprising ‘Trek’ Stays in Orbit,” Variety, September 17, 2006, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117950175.html?categoryid = 1019&cs = 1&query = star+trek+original+series. 2. http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Lincoln_Enterprises. 3. http://store.startrek.com/. 4. http://www.toyark.com/news/toy-fair-59/hasbro-teams-up-with-cbsfor-star-trek-toy-line-5335/. 5. Chris Curtis, “CBS Channels to Launch in UK,” Broadcast, October 2, 2009, 6. Our thanks to Sam Ward for this information. 6. Aljean Harmetz, “New ‘Star Trek’ Plan Reflects Symbiosis of TV and Movies,” New York Times, November 2, 1986, H31. See also Jim Bessman, “Vid Companies Set Sights on TV,” Billboard, September 23, 1989, 53. 7. See Roberta Pearson, “Fandom in the Digital Era,” Popular Communication 8 (2010): 1–12. 8. Cohen, “Enterprising ‘Trek’ Stays in Orbit.” 9. “The Next Generation Blu-rays Launch in 2012,” Startrek.com, September 28, 2011, http://www.startrek.com/article/the-next-generationblu-rays-launch-in-2012. 10. Max Eddy, “Every Episode from Every Star Trek Series Coming to Netflix,” April 9, 2011, www.geekosystem.com/star-trek-netflix/; Anthony Pascale, “Moonves Commits to Extend CBS/Neflix Streaming Deal + Says ‘Good to Have Star Trek,’ ”August 6, 2012, http://trekmovie.com/2012/08/06

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/moonves-commits-to-extend-cbsnetflix-streaming-deal-says-good-to-havestar-trek. 11. Pascale, “Moonves Commits.” 12. “CBS Interactive Launches the Official ‘Star Trek PADD APP’ for iPad,” press release, July 11, 2011, http://www.cbscorporation.com/news-article. php?id=800. 13. “About Star Trek Online,” http://startrekonline.com/about_star_trek_ online. 14. Thomas Vinciguerra, “A ‘Trek’ Script Is Grounded in Cyberspace,” New York Times, March 28, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/arts/television /cbs-blocks-use-of-unused-star-trek-script-by-spinrad.html?scp = 1&sq = norman%20spinrad&st = cse. For information on the fan films, see Robert Kozinets, “Star Trek Fan Films: Prosuming’s Final Frontier?” Brandthrosophy: A Marketing, Social Media, and Research Blog, June 8, 2007, http://kozinets.net/ archives/12. 15. Carol Pinchefsky, “CBS Blocks Production of ‘Star Trek’ Fan Film,” Forbes, March 29, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/03/29/cbs-blocks-production-of-star-trek-fan-film/. 16. Vinciguerra, “A ‘Trek’ Script Is Grounded.” 17. Alex Knapp, “How to Re-boot Star Trek for Modern TV,” Forbes, October 27, 2011, forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/27/how-to-reboot-startrek-for-modern-tv/; Erik Kain, “Making Star Trek for this Generation,” Forbes, October 26, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/10/26/makingstar-trek-for-this-generation/. 18. Morgan Jeffery, “Star Trek TV Revival Turned Down by CBS,” Digital Spy, April 8, 2011, http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/ustv/news/a313611/star-trektv-revival-turned-down-by-cbs.html. 19. James Hibberd, “ ‘Hannibal’ on NBC: How Bryan Fuller Will Reinvent Dr. Lecter,” Entertainment Weekly, April 19, 2012, http://insidetv.ew .com/2012/04/19/bryan-fuller-hannibal/. 20. Quoted in Bryan Young, “Wil Wheaton and Michael Dorn Talk Star Trek,” HuffPost TV, August 20, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bryanyoung/wil-wheaton-and-michael-d_b_3784659.html. 21. http://twitpic.com/95b6ki.

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References

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films Executive Decision, directed by Stuart Baird (Warner Bros., 1996) Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot (DreamWorks, 1999) King of Kings, directed by Nicholas Ray (MGM, 1961) The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston (Warner Bros., 1941) Star Trek, directed by J. J. Abrams (Paramount Pictures, 2009) Star Trek: First Contact, directed by Jonathan Frakes (Paramount Pictures, 1996) Star Trek: Insurrection, directed by Jonathan Frakes (Paramount Pictures, 1998) Star Trek: Into Darkness, directed by J. J. Abrams (Paramount Pictures, 2013) Star Trek: The Motion Picture, directed by Robert Wise (Paramount Pictures, 1979) Star Trek: Nemesis, directed by Stuart Baird (Paramount Pictures, 2002) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, directed by Nicholas Meyer (Paramount Pictures, 1991) US Marshalls, directed by Stuart Baird (Warner Bros., 1998)

television programs All in the Family (CBS, 1971–79) Battlestar Galactica (SyFy Channel, 2003–9) Beauty and the Beast (The CW, 2012–present) The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007–present) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB and UPN, 1997–2003) A Christmas Carol (TNT, 1999) The Comedian (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1957) Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis Productions, 1966–71) The Dating Game (ABC, 1965–73) Dead Zone (UPN and USA Network, 2002–7) Downton Abbey (ITV [UK] and PBS [USA], 2010–present) Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–89 and 2005–present) E.R. (NBC, 1994–2009) Fringe (Fox, 2008–13)

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Hannibal (NBC, 2013–present) Have Gun Will Travel (CBS Television, 1957–63) Highway Patrol (ZIV Television Programs, 1955–59) Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87) Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC 1993–99) House (Fox Network, 2004–12) I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–57) The Lieutenant (ABC, 1963–64) Lost (ABC, 2004–10) The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–77) M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–83) The Newlywed Game (ABC, 1966–74) Patterns (Kraft Television Theatre, ABC, 1955), Requiem for a Heavyweight (Playhouse 90, CBS, 1956) Sesame Street (Children’s Television Workshop/Sesame Workshop for PBS, 1969–present) The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present) The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) Star Trek: the original series (NBC, 1966–69) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Paramount Television for syndication, 1993–99) Star Trek: Enterprise (UPN, 2001–5) Star Trek: The Next Generation (Paramount Television for syndication, 1987–94) Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995–2001) Stargate SG-1 (Showtime, SyFy Channel, 1997–2007) The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64) The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63) West Point (ZIV Television Programs, 1956–58) The Wire (HBO, 2002–8) The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002)

Index

ABC (American Broadcasting Company), 2, 6, 18, 41–42, 43 Abrams, J.J., 38, 81, 191, 192 action-adventure genre, 23, 25 actors, 105, 106–7, 120–21, 122–23; and characters, 155, 156; and nonverbal performance, 123–25 advertising, 2, 4, 28, 31–32, 47–48; and affliates, 6, 18; and characters, 26; and; demographics, 42; and syndication, 49 “Allegiance” episode, 159 “All Good Things” episode, 156 “All Our Yesterdays” episode, 116, 117 Amazon Prime, 189 “Amok Time” episode, 131 “Angel One” episode, 124 apprenticeship system, 91–92 Archer, Captain Jonathan (character), 77, 79, 109, 133 Arnaz, Desi, 20, 202n83 Arp, Tom, 3, 56, 70, 72, 92, 126; and team working, 90, 101 art, 55–56, 59, 60, 75, 87, 135, 186 artists, 104, 186 Auberjonois, Rene, 122, 142 audiences, 6, 17, 25, 27, 47; male, 48, 50, 118; and narrative, 129–30; niche, 28, 41–46, 57; viewing habits, 18–19, 23 Avengers, The, 43

Baird, Stuart, 111 Bajorans, 145 Bakula, Scott, 79, 109 Ball, Lucille, 20, 202n83 Barclay, Lieutenant Reginald (character), 131, 136 Barrett Roddenberry, Majel, 25–26, 38, 188 barter syndication, 49–50 Bashir, Julian (character), 136, 142, 143 Battlestar Galactica, 37, 81–82, 192 Beauty and the Beast, 192 Belfast Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, 184 Beltrane, Robert, 119, 120 Berman, Rick, 12, 38–40, 53, 54, 66, 81, 107; and actors, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119; and apprenticeships, 91; and budgets, 74, 102; and control, 92–93, 105; and creative autonomy, 56, 60, 62, 78–79; and design, 65; and Roddenberry, 83, 85; and setting, 79–80; and team working, 89, 90, 187; and writers, 95, 98 “Best of Both Worlds” episode, 97, 131, 171, 173–74 Big Bang Theory, The, 1 “Big Goodbye, The” episode, 159, 166–68, 169, 170 Billingsley, John, 122 “Birthright” episode, 136

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Blackman, Robert, 63, 64–65, 93, 94, 103, 106; and actors, 108, 114–15, 155, 156; and team working, 89–90, 91 Blalock, Jolene, 109 Blu-ray, 189 Bochco, Steven, 32, 130 “Bonding, The” episode, 84 Borg (character), 85, 131, 159, 160, 163, 173–74, 175 bottle shows, 74–75 Braga, Brannon, 39, 40, 66, 91, 94, 106; and actors, 112, 119; and characters, 78; and creative autonomy, 60, 61, 79; and films, 173, 174; and preproduction, 100; and setting, 80; and time pressures, 71; and writers, 95, 97–98 branding, 32–33 “Bread and Circuses” episode, 141 Broadcast Standards and Practices, 26–28, 59 Brooks, Avery, 122 budgets, 23–24, 25, 30, 90, 102, 103, 186; and creativity, 60–61; and films, 172–73; and narrative, 130; and pattern, 72–75, 111–12; and scripts, 101; and writers, 98–99 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 9, 44, 192 Bujold, Geneviève, 118 Burton, LeVar, 106, 109, 111 cable television, 6, 187, 192 “Cage, The” episode, 25, 26, 130 Caltech, 35, 44 Cardassians, 91, 145, 160 “Caretaker, The” episode, 110, 118 Carson, David, 111 Carter, Chris, 32, 192 casting, 25–26 catchphrases, 1 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 2, 5–6, 18, 21, 41, 50; and franchise, 186; and intellectual property, 185, 188, 189, 190–91 censorship, 27–28, 34, 36–37 “Chain of Command” episode, 157, 160–61, 164

characters, 23, 74, 77–78, 79, 149–51, 187; and actors, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 125; and biography, 157– 58; and conflict, 83, 85; and construction, 151–54, 158–59; and costume, 108; and development, 161–63, 165; and diversity, 176–77; and interaction, 156–57; and media crossover, 171–72, 173–76; and narrative, 131, 134, 135–36, 148; and social issues, 177–78; and storyworld, 127–28; and traits, 154–56, 159–61, 167, 171 Chayefsky, Paddy, 33 Chellomedia, 188 classic network era, 5–6, 7, 11, 21, 32, 53, 187; and audiences, 23, 41, 42; and distribution, 17–18; and narrative, 129; and producers, 33; and revenue, 188 Cochrane, Zefram (character), 78, 127–28, 129, 131, 145–46 Cold War, 34, 35, 178 colonialism, 9, 184 commerce, 55–56, 59, 60, 75, 87, 135, 186 “Conscience of the King, The” episode, 164 “Conundrum” episode, 157 copyright, 190–91 costume, 24, 27, 63, 64–65, 101, 106–7; and actors, 108–9, 114–15, 118, 121, 155, 156 Coto, Manny, 98 “Court Martial” episode, 165 craft workers, 57–58, 63–64, 65–66, 86, 104–5, 186; and actors, 107–8, 110; and preproduction, 101 craft-workshop environment, 87–88, 91, 93, 94, 107–8 Cramer, Doug, 116 creative autonomy, 77, 78, 96–97, 103, 186; and actors, 107, 111, 112, 114; and production, 59, 60, 61–63, 67–68, 87 creative industries, 58–59, 64, 68–69, 186

Index credit sequences, 146–47 Crusher, Dr. Beverly (character), 124, 131, 157, 161, 168, 181–82, 183 Crusher, Wesley (character), 157, 158 CSI, 76, 77 cult television, 32, 126 Curry, Dan, 63–64, 102, 105, 106–7, 119; and budgets, 73, 74; and preproduction, 100, 101; and scripts, 94; and team working, 89 Cuse, Carlton, 32 “Dagger of the Mind” episode, 163–64 Dallas, 130 Darren, Nella (character), 171 Data (character), 109, 115, 157, 166, 167, 174, 180–81 Davies, Russell T., 82 “Day of the Dove” episode, 134 “Deathwish” episode, 136 demographics, 32, 41–42, 45–46 Desilu Productions, 1, 2, 8, 17, 53, 55; and budgets, 23–24, 46; and Solow, 20–21, 22, 29 Devos, Alexana (character), 179, 180, 182, 183–84 digital technology, 6, 189–90 Diller, Barry, 52 directors, 99, 101, 103, 110–11, 120–21, 212n8 distribution, 4, 17–18, 55, 57, 187 Doctor Who, 9, 82, 196n9, 213n5 Doohan, James, 106, 135 “Doomsday Machine, The” episode, 190 Dorn, Michael, 191 Dorton, Louise, 12, 92, 100 Dr. Kildare, 23 DS9. See Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Duane, Diane, 158 Dukat, Gul (character) 74 DVDs, 130, 187, 189 employment conditions, 68–70, 88 “Enemy Within, The” episode, 141 Enterprise. See Star Trek: Enterprise Entertainment Weekly (website), 191

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episode numbers, 61, 62, 207n18 ER, 70, 76, 77, 120, 121 Facebook, 190 family atmosphere, 86, 89, 90, 187 “Family” episode, 85, 159, 161, 163, 164 fandom, 1, 9, 38, 39–40, 45, 192; and DVDs, 189; and web series, 190 “Far Beyond the Stars” episode, 134, 141–44 Federal Communications Commission, 36, 46 Feld, Harold, 190 Felton, Norman, 20 Fields, Peter Allan, 96 filming, 101–2 films, 2, 171–73, 186 Finn, Kyril (character), 179, 180, 181, 182–83 First Contact. See Star Trek: First Contact first-run syndication, 49, 50, 51, 59 “Flashback” episode, 134, 142 flexi-narrative, 129, 131, 163, 187 Forbes (magazine), 190, 191 Forester, C.S., 23 Fox Network, 2, 6, 49, 52 Frakes, Jonathan, 14, 93, 109, 136, 191; and character, 117–18, 123–24; and directing, 111, 172. See also Riker, Will “Frame of Mind” episode, 134 franchise, 1, 4, 46, 81, 186, 188 Freiberger, Fred, 116–17 Fringe, 192 Fuller, Bryan, 191 “Gambit” episode, 159 Ganino, Trent Christopher, 96 Gendel, Morgan, 96 gender, 9, 12, 118, 208n27 Generations. See Star Trek: Generations genre, 23, 25, 136–37, 138, 140–41, 167 Goldberg, Whoopi, 106, 115 Goldman, Steve, 48, 50

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Grodénchik, Max, 119 Guinan (character), 106 Gulf + Western, 2, 30 Gunsmoke, 23 hairstyles, 118, 156, 159 Hasbro, 188 Herd, Richard, 123 Heroes, 48 Hero, The, 31 heteroglossia, 176, 177, 179, 180 hierarchies, 58, 62–63, 66–67, 68, 92, 105; and actors, 114–19 “High Ground, The” episode, 178, 179–84 Hill Street Blues, 41, 130 Homeland, 129 Howard, Merri, 12, 66, 90, 94, 107; and budgets, 72; and preproduction, 99, 101–3 Hunter, Jeffrey, 25, 121–22 Hurley, Morris, 117

standards, 26, 27–28; and cancellation, 30; and scheduling, 28 Kaiser Broadcasting, 47 Katz, Oscar, 21 Kelley, David E., 32 Kelley, DeForest, 106 Kim, Harry (character), 136 Kirk, Captain James T. (character), 31, 106, 116, 163–65, 178, 179; and world building, 133, 134, 135, 140, 145 Klein, Paul, 18, 42 Klingons, 75, 123, 131, 134, 145, 178 Kolbe, Winrich, 3, 70, 93, 94, 101, 103; and actors, 110–11, 118, 120, 121 KTLA, 47–48

I Love Lucy, 20, 47 “I, Mudd” episode, 130 “In a Mirror, Darkly” episode, 133, 144–46, 147 independent networks, 20, 46, 49, 52 individual agency, 7–8, 12, 55, 56, 62, 186 “Inner Light, The” episode, 96, 134, 168, 169–71, 189 innovation, 20, 22, 37 Insurrection. See Star Trek: Insurrection International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), 92 Internet, 185, 190 interviews, 12–15 “Is There No Truth in Beauty?” episode, 188

La Forge, Geordi (character), 106, 127, 136 Lansing, Sherry, 40 Larsen, Glen A., 82 Lauritson, Peter, 61–62, 66, 67–68, 90, 94, 107; and production, 99, 102, 103–4 Law and Order, 70, 76, 77 least objectionable programming, 18, 19, 23, 33, 42, 129 “Lessons” episode, 171 Lester, Janice (character), 165 “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” episode, 141 Lincoln Enterprises, 188 locations, 24 long-form television, 70, 71, 75–76, 86, 148; and actors, 112, 113, 116 Los Angeles Times, 35, 36, 43, 44, 106; and Paramount, 51–52; and syndication, 47 Lost, 48, 129, 130, 192 Lost in Space, 21, 35

Janeway, Captain (character), 79–80, 118 Jefferies, Matt, 68, 209n39 “Journey to Babel” episode, 131 Justman, Robert, 19, 21, 25, 68, 91, 186; and actors, 121, 122; and broadcasting

Mad Men, 162 Madred, Gul (character), 160, 161 makeup, 64, 106, 121 Making of “Star Trek”, The (Roddenberry/Whitfield), 23, 36

Index managers, 58–59, 60, 87 McCluggage, Kerry, 13, 30, 48, 50, 52–53, 67; and budgets, 72, 73; and creativity, 59–60, 61, 62, 79, 80; and narrative, 132; and Roddenberry, 83; and storyworld, 76, 77–78 McCoy, Dr. (character), 106, 134, 136, 145, 178, 179 McNeil, Robert Duncan, 123 “Measure of a Man” episode, 115, 180–81 Mees, Jim, 68, 80, 92, 90, 100–101, 106, 109 “Menagerie, The” episode, 130 merchandise, 188 Messerschmidt, Jean, 26 MGM, 20 Minow, Newton, 36 “Mirror, Mirror” episode, 145 Moffat, Stephen, 82 Moonves, Les, 189 Moore, Ron, 81, 84–85, 98–99, 131–32, 135, 166; and budgets, 73, 74, 75; and films, 172, 173 morality, 26, 127, 149, 157, 168 Mudd, Harcourt Fenton (character), 130, 131 “Mudd’s Women” episode, 130 Mulgrew, Kate, 118, 122 multichannel era, 6–7, 11, 17, 32–33, 56–57, 188; and audiences, 41; and narrative, 130, 132; and production, 186, 187 multiculturalism, 48. See also race relations Murdoch, Rupert, 52 music, 147 “Naked Now, The” episode, 167 narrative conventions, 4, 6–7, 10, 130, 134, 138–39. See also flexinarrative; serial narrative NASA, 33, 35 Nashville Network, 50 nationalism, 9, 179 NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 2, 6, 8, 17, 22, 55; and

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advertising, 31–32; and audiences, 18, 53; and budgets, 23–24; and demographics, 42–43; and pilot episode, 25, 26; and protests, 44, 45; and Roddenberry, 29–30, 36, 186; and scheduling, 28; and TOS, 21, 23 Nemesis. See Star Trek: Nemesis Netflix, 189 network affliates, 18, 46, 53 Neuss, Wendy, 12, 89, 99, 104, 122 New York Times, 31, 32, 34, 190, 191; and audiences, 43–44; and Paramount, 51; and Roddenberry, 35, 37, 38 Nichols, Nichelle, 25, 106, 192 Nimoy, Leonard, 43–44, 51, 106, 112, 116, 117. See also Spock Nip/Tuck, 139 Noel, Helen (character), 164 nonverbal performance, 123–25, 181 Obama, Barack, 192 O’Brien, Chief (character), 136 “Obsession, The” episode, 164 Odo (character), 142, 176 Okuda, Michael, 24, 64, 68, 90, 100, 106, 109–10 oligopoly, 5–6, 15, 17, 18, 46, 51, 186; and employment, 69 “Omega Glory” episode, 44 O’Reilly, Robert, 123 overseas market, 48, 188 Paramount Pictures, 2, 30 Paramount Television, 2, 5, 8, 30–31, 51–52, 55, 59; and Berman, 40, 78–79; and franchise, 186; and intellectual property, 188; and multiculturalism, 48; and TNG, 49–50. See also United Paramount Network Paramount-Viacom, 2, 30, 50, 188 Paris, Tom (character), 123, 131 patterned behavior, 86–87, 90 “Patterns of Force” episode, 141, 165 PBS (Public Broadcasting System), 196n11

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“Pegasus, The” episode, 133, 153 Picard, Captain Jean-Luc (character), 75, 85, 106, 122, 124, 131; and character, 153, 154, 155–61, 163, 165, 166–71, 173–74, 179–81; and world building, 133, 134, 136, 141 Picardo, Robert, 119, 122 “Piece of the Action, A” episode, 140– 41 Pike, Captain Christopher (character), 25, 122 Piller, Michael, 59, 66, 67, 68, 91–92, 94, 106; and character, 149; and Roddenberry, 83–84, 85; and team working, 88; and writers, 95–97, 98 postnetwork era, 6, 7, 32, 33, 130, 187, 189–90 postproduction, 86, 102, 103–4 Predator, 172 preproduction, 86, 98–103 Pressman, Admiral (character), 133, 151, 153 prime-time programs, 18, 19, 20, 48 “Private Little War, A” episode, 178– 79, 184 producers, 19, 57, 66, 86, 101, 202n83; and brand, 32–33, 38; and character, 154, 159; and narrative, 136 Producers Guild of America (PGA), 66–67 production, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 55, 186–87; and classic network era, 17–18; and craft workers, 57–58; and team working, 87–89. See also preproduction; postproduction profanity, 27 professionalization, 64–66 programming, 18–19, 41–42 prosthetics, 72 Q (character), 131, 136, 157 race relations, 9, 10, 141–44, 208n27 Rand Corporation, 35 Rand, Janice (character), 134–35 ratings, 2, 30, 40, 41, 42, 50; and Enterprise, 53, 133; and TNG, 172

Redstone, Sumner, 40 Reeves, Michael, 158 Reiss, Randy, 48 “Relics” episode, 135, 142 religion, 9, 37 revenues, 187–88, 201n43 Riker, Tom (character), 136 Riker, Will (character), 97, 117–18, 127, 133, 156–57, 183–84; and Troi, 123–24, 141, 151–53 Roddenberry, Gene, 17, 19–21, 53, 106, 185–86, 188; and actors, 114, 116, 117, 122, 125; and artistry, 29, 30, 55; and audiences, 43, 45; and broadcasting standards, 27; and characters, 149, 155; and fans, 40, 189; and legacy, 80, 81–85, 192; and pilot episode, 25–26; and producer brand, 33, 34–38, 39; and science fiction, 137, 142; and Star Trek: Phase II, 51; and storyworld, 127; and TOS pitch, 22, 23 Rose, Reginald, 33 Russell, Benny (character), 142–44 Sarek (character), 136 “Sarek” episode, 159 satellite television, 187 scheduling, 28, 33, 47 scholarship, 8–12 science fiction, 20, 34, 37, 63–64, 65, 172; and actors, 119–21; and Roddenberry, 22–23, 33, 35, 137–38, 142; and world building, 140, 141 Scotty (character), 106, 135, 145 “Second Chances” episode, 141 serial narrative, 126, 128–36, 144–45, 147–48, 162–63 Serling, Rod, 33–34, 35, 36, 37, 38 set design, 65, 68, 72, 100, 106–7; and actors, 109–10, 114 setting, 23, 24, 79–80 sexual identity, 9, 37 Shakespeare, William, 122, 123, 156 Shatner, William, 3, 13, 22, 31, 51, 106; and audiences, 43; and directors, 110; and hierarchy, 114, 116–17; and

Index Roddenberry, 23, 24; and science fiction, 121, 122; and time pressures, 71, 112–13. See also Kirk, Captain James T. “Ship in a Bottle” episode, 161 “Shore Leave” episode, 164 showrunners, 32, 37, 57, 66, 82, 95; and actors, 115; and branding, 33, 38, 192. See also Berman, Rick Simpsons, The, 1 Singer, Bryan, 191 Sirtis, Marina, 12, 109, 110, 111, 118– 19; and nonverbal performance, 123–25; and science fiction, 120. See also Troi, Deanna Sisko, Captain Benjamin (character), 74, 135, 141–42, 143–44 sitcoms, 41 Smithsonian Institution, 35 social issues, 35–36, 37, 141–42, 176, 177–78 social media, 190 Solow, Herbert F., 1–2, 30, 53, 55, 185– 86; and broadcasting standards, 27; and pilot episode, 24–25, 26; and ratings, 41; and Roddenberry, 20–23, 29, 45; and scheduling, 28 Sopranos, The, 139, 162 Sorkin, Aaron, 32 space travel, 33, 35, 37 speech patterns, 156 Spiner, Brent, 109, 111 Spinrad, Norman, 190, 191 Spock (character), 22–23, 26, 80, 106, 136, 140, 188; and audiences, 43–44; and Nimoy, 116, 117 sponsors, 34, 35 Stanley, Jerome, 22, 24 Stargate, 192 Star Trek (2009 film), 81 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 2, 12–13, 50, 85, 95, 131; and narrative, 132, 134, 135, 136, 145; and setting, 76, 77 Star Trek: Enterprise, 2, 3, 12, 13, 40, 52, 53; and cancellation, 17, 70, 81, 185; and costume, 64–65; and

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creativity, 59, 61–62; and narrative, 132–33, 144–45; and setting, 76, 77–78, 79–81; and storyworld, 127, 128; and writers, 94–95, 97–98 Star Trek: First Contact, 111, 118, 127, 128, 145; and characters, 131, 171– 72, 174–76 Star Trek: Generations, 111, 171, 172, 173 Star Trek: Insurrection, 40, 65, 76, 111, 118, 171 Star Trek: Nemesis, 12, 14, 40, 111, 115–16 Star Trek: Phase II, 51, 52 Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 2, 37, 52 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 2, 6, 13, 46, 59, 186; and audiences, 48; and Blu-ray format, 189; and budgets, 74–75; and costume, 108; and narrative, 131, 133, 135–36; and ratings, 172; and Roddenberry, 37–38, 39; and setting, 76; and syndication, 49–50; and visual effects, 67–68; and writers, 67, 95, 96 Star Trek (the original series), 2, 3, 5–6, 41, 53–54, 188–89; and audiences, 19, 42–44, 45–46; and budgets, 23–24; and cancellation, 30–31; and creation, 20–21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 185–86; and narrative, 134, 135, 164; and storyworld, 128, 130– 31; and syndication, 49, 51 Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, 134 Star Trek: Voyager, 2, 12–13, 46, 50, 52, 53, 85; and characters, 131; and creativity, 59; and narrative, 134, 136; and setting, 76, 77 Star Trek website, 2, 153, 188, 189, 190 Stewart, Patrick, 3, 12, 13, 14, 106, 110; and character, 155–56, 158; and costume, 108–9; and directors, 111; and hierarchy, 114–15, 116, 119; and nonverbal performance, 124, 125; and science fiction, 120, 122; and time pressures, 112, 113; and writers, 115– 16. See also Picard, Captain Jean-Luc

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Stillwell, Eric, 91–92, 96 storytelling, 4, 11, 32, 55 storyworld continuity, 75–78, 80–82, 84, 127–28, 131–32, 134–35, 187 subscription television, 6 Sulu, Captain (character), 106, 134 sweeps period, 61–62, 134 Syfy channel, 189, 192 syndication, 2, 29, 46–48, 186, 187, 192; and narrative, 129; and revenue, 24, 53, 188. See also first-run syndication Takei, George, 106 Talosians, 25 “Tapestry” episode, 157, 163, 168 Tarzan, 28, 31 team working, 86, 88–90, 98, 99–100, 101, 187 technology, 32, 68, 110, 120. See also digital technology telefantasy, 138, 140, 148, 166, 167, 191–92 television, 3–4, 5–7, 10, 16, 128–29; and social issues, 176, 177. See also cult television; telefantasy Terminator, The, 172 terrorism, 10, 178, 179 Theiss, William, 108 “These Are the Voyages” episode, 133–34, 151–53 “Tholian Webb, The” episode, 145 Thrower, Fred, 47 “Timeless” episode, 136 time pressures, 71–72, 75, 90, 102–3, 111–13, 186 “Time Squared” episode, 141 Tinker, Grant, 21, 22, 24 TNG. See Star Trek: The Next Generation Tormé, Tracy, 39, 40, 167 Torres, B’Elanna (character), 131 TOS. See Star Trek (the original series) T’Pol (character), 77, 109 trade unions, 92 “Trials and Tribble-ations” episode, 135, 142

Trip (character), 77–78 Troi, Deanna (character), 115, 118–19, 123–24, 133, 136, 151–53, 157 “Trouble with Tribbles, The” episode, 135 “Turnabout Intruder” episode, 30, 165 Tuvok, Lieutenant (character), 134 Twilight Zone, The, 33, 34 Twitter, 190, 192 UHF stations, 46–47 Uhura (character), 80, 106, 145, 192 “Unification” episode, 136 United Paramount Network (UPN), 2, 6, 8, 17, 31, 51, 52–53; and creativity, 59–60, 61; and franchise, 46 Untouchables, The, 20, 50, 140 Variety (magazine), 188, 189 VHF stations, 47 video, 6, 187, 188–89 Vietnam War, 36, 178, 179 “Violations” episode, 159 Visitor, Nana, 122 visual effects, 67–68, 73, 94, 102, 107; and actors, 120–21; and preproduction, 100, 101 Voyager. See Star Trek: Voyager Vulcans, 80, 131, 145–46 “Waltz” episode, 74, 75 Washington Post, 37, 43 WB Television Network, 6, 52 Weiner, Matthew, 32 Werner, Mort, 26 Westmore, Michael, 64, 72, 90, 94, 106, 119; and actors, 121; and Berman, 93; and budgets, 73–74; and preproduction, 100, 101 Whedon, Joss, 192 “Where No Man Has Gone Before” episode, 26, 158 Whitfield, Stephen, 25, 26, 36 Whitney, Grace Lee, 26 “Whom Gods Destroy” episode, 116

Index Wire, The, 130 WNEW, 47 Worf (character), 136, 141, 144, 157, 175, 191 world building, 126–27, 136–37, 139– 40, 141, 144–45, 146–47, 148; and narrative, 128, 131 World Science Fiction Convention, 39, 137 WPIX, 47 writers, 59, 66, 67, 86, 94–99, 104–5, 186; and actors, 106, 107, 114, 119; and character, 141, 154, 158–59, 166, 168; and employment, 69–70; and narrative, 132; and Roddenberry, 83–84; and scripts, 100, 101, 112; and world building, 126

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Writers Guild of America (WGA), 66, 67, 91, 92 X-Files, The, 9, 37, 130, 192 Xindi (character), 133 “Yesterday’s Enterprise” episode, 74–75, 81, 91, 96 Zimmerman, Herman, 64, 65, 80, 92, 93, 106; and actors, 114; and craft workers, 105; and creative autonomy, 56; and employment, 70; and production, 87–88, 100; and Roddenberry, 82; and scripts, 94; and team working, 90–91; and time pressures, 71