Anyone receive "These Are The Voyages..." Season 2 yet?

I was away last week. Got home to find it waiting for me. I ended up splurging and bought Season 1 again to get the corrections. Now I need to find some time to dig into Season 2.

 

And that material is readily available at all times now!

 

I just received mine.

 

Haven't had the time/money to order it yet - surprised its not on Amazon yet!

 

Yeah and he does it again in A Private Little War, crediting the music in the final seconds to Gerald Fried, who he thinks composed it for the episode. It was, in fact, another library cue by Courage called "Captain Playoff No. 3 (Sad and Alone)." Honestly, I didn't even need the CDs to tell me it was Courage. The piece begins with a re-orchestration of the unaired version of the main theme for Where No Man Has Gone Before, which he heavily incorporated into The Naked Time. It wasn't the "Star Trek Theme" and seems a little too obscure for another composer to adapt (although it certainly would have been possible).

D'OH!

 

I got notice yesterday that mine is waiting to be picked up at the post office. I actually drove to the post office yesterday to pick it up, but I didn't realize the time and they were closed six minutes before I got there.

Oh well, I'll pick it up today. I'm eager to start reading it.

 

I am surprised you have to go to the post office to pick it up. Mine was in the community box for me to pick up with my mail.

 

I often do have stuff left in the community box. They leave a key in your regular mailbox for you to open the larger bin, but they didn't do that this time. Or maybe he thought the package was too big to fit (it was oversized for the size of book it is). Anyway I picked it up before lunch and I'll start reading it this afternoon.

 

And this is the easily verifiable stuff! What about all of the material he had access to that we can't see? Are we to trust him with that? I can't do it, which is why I'm not reading these books.

Neil

 

^^^Bingo.

 

Wow, you're not buying 'em either? Cool.

Hard to believe that he didn't recognize that end cue on PRIVATE, it is awfully damned distinctive and memorable from early season 1 (though just as effective here, just another example of how skillfully TOS scores are 'tracked.')

 

I finally got mine this afternoon. So far I've read the beginning up to the beginning of the coverage on "Catspaw."

He's laying out the case in more detail of what he started saying in Volume 1, that NBC's beef was with Roddenberry and not Star Trek itself. But NBC displayed their escalating displeasure by taking it out on the show. Cutting the budget was one thing, but slotting the show into Friday evening time slot made something a lie of anything the network said publicly in support of the series. They couldn't well come out and say publicly what (or who) was really pissing them off so they simply made it more difficult for the show to succeed.

Oddly it appears the first letter campaign initiated by Harlan Ellison (at Roddenberry's asking for help) while successful also got the story started that TOS' ratings were soft, which apparently in first season they definitely weren't. And this is the story that became folklore and stuck with the show for decades.

But that Friday evening time slot for the second season was a clear move to make the show suffer.

 

First of all, the budget was cut by Desilu, not NBC. According to the Solow/Justman book, in the third season, NBC increased their financial commitment to the series, but it didn't matter, because Paramount shrunk their portion of the funds to the bare minimum.

Second of all, if NBC had a problem with Roddenberry, but liked the series, why didn't they show him the door? It wouldn't have been the first time -- nor the last -- that a network axed a series creator/executive producer who they didn't like.

Cushman's argument about the ratings in volume one, to paraphrase another classic from the '60s, was not half-baked, it was completely baked. The season one ratings were soft. The Broadcasting Magazine article previously linked to clearly showed them in the middle of the pack -- not good, but not bad, either.

Cushman's narrow-minded approach on ratings by time slot in volume one is illustrative of his research methods -- he doesn't consider the big picture, and he's decided on his argument before gathering and considering all the evidence.

 

I don't remember TOS ever being in the weekly top 25 Nielsens. The more I read about Cushman's claim that it was very popular show, just from what's being reported here, makes me wonder how much he's inflating everything else.

 

From the chapter excerpt, it looks like "Amok Time" could have been absolutely terrible, a huge embarrassment, had it not been for the tremendous amount of shepherding given to the original Sturgeon script. We're lucky the producers were in such top form.

 

Same with "The Doomsday Machine." Gene Coon deserves a great deal of credit for many of the plot points that resulted in the final episode becoming a classic.

 

Unfortunately we had only ever gotten Spinrad's take on DOOMSDAY, which, between what he told Gerrold and what he has since said about what Coon did to his Milton Berle script, is largely unfavorable.

The question of why NBC didn't force GR out is of REAL interest to me. They must have realized Coon was running the show and probably liked a lot of what he was doing, so it would have made sense for them to back him if there was a showdown.

That assumes Coon would actually have been willing to have such a showdown (he might have thought it unprofessional or at the very least unethical to go this route, so leaving & going to the Larson show was an easy way out.)

We've read that Coon had ideas for more comedy and more returning characters (Koloth at the very least), so some of his direction for the show was not followed up on (though I think JM Lucas did a very good job for the rest of 2nd season, bringing us back to the eternal 'why didn't they stick with him for season 3?' question, which has utterly usurped the 'ginger or maryann?' query that haunted my younger decades.)

Even with duds like OMEGA GLORY (and who do we have to blame for that?), I seriously enjoy 2nd season, and rewatch it more than any other batch of Trek in any incarnation, because even the dud shows still have character moments of interest. I don't attribute much at all of that to GR, though I suppose when you guys read this book you may get more info suggesting his level of involvement that could counter my view.

 

At this point I'd be skeptical about any conclusions Cushman draws, outside of him reprinting whole memos verbatim. He's pretty well demonstrated that he doesn't do his homework properly.

 

I believe he mentioned in the book that it was around 37 and he compares it to other shows that were a success that were rated lower than 37. I can't remember exactly which ones but it seems "That Girl" and "My Three Sons" were a couple of them. He does say that during the second season that TOS never was in the number 1 position but was mostly in 2nd or 3rd place for the time slot. Apparently "Gomer Pyle USMC" was the number 1 show the entire season (for that time slot).

 

He does disingenuously include a ratings chart from early season one in volume one which has the series doing okay, but this doesn't account for the show's performance over the entire season, which saw its ratings decline along with its overall position (which was about 50th IIRC).