Would 'Assignment Earth' really make it as a series?

Oh, there are plenty of cases of series being different from their unaired pilots, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse. My point is that even an aired pilot can be contradicted by the series that it spawns, since it was just a trial run. So we can't be sure that an Assignment: Earth series, if it had been picked up, would even have been in continuity with the Trek episode. Continuity was much less of a priority in TV at the time. Even if it hadn't overtly broken with the Trek episode from the start (say, by doing a new introductory episode or revamping some element of the concept or characters), I suspect it would have just avoided acknowledging the Trek connection and gone its own way, which would probably have led to some inconsistencies between the two series. Particularly if it had been on a different network from NBC.

If that had happened, I wonder how continuity-obsessed Trek fans would've dealt with it. Would we have tried to gloss over the inconsistencies and reconcile A:E as part of the Trek universe, or would we just have treated the series as an alternate continuity from the backdoor pilot?

 

Might have worked for a season or two. Either campy(IE: Austin Powers style) or played straight. I once postulated that Robert Patrick and Lisa Kudrow could have made a credible Seven and Roberta, now they'd be too old.

 

Picard would've had a much tougher time in the courtroom scene. No matter how he defended humanity, Q's riposte would be to show clips from the Gary Seven Series. "Is that the best you can do, Picard? Your dangerous, savage child-race wouldn't have lasted this long without a nanny!"

Actually it was the namesake of the S.S. Minnow, Newton N. Minow, who said that. (He must've ground his teeth hard, having been immortalized in a show that proved his whole point.)

Apropos of nothing, Minow is still alive today. Wonder if he still feels the same.

 

When Roddenberry made TNG, he tried to minimize its connections to TOS and saw it as a soft reboot of sorts, which is why he replaced the Eugenics Wars with a "Post-Atomic Horror" more than half a century later. So he probably wouldn't have tied it into an A:E series either, even if A:E hadn't explicitly ended up in a separate continuity from ST as I think it might have.

On the other hand, the Post-Atomic Horror was basically a reworking of the Genesis II/Planet Earth backstory, and the Trek timeline was vaguely enough defined at that point that Roddenberry may have implicitly intended TNG as a direct sequel to those. Though I doubt it, since they were from Warner Bros. and a Paramount show wouldn't have been able to reference them explicitly. It was probably more of his usual concept recycling, like how Picard, Riker, Troi, and Data were a reworking of Phase II's Kirk, Decker, Ilia, and Xon, and Data was also a reworking of Questor. So he basically put all his failed '70s sci-fi concepts in a blender to generate TNG.

 

LOL. I am gonna print that on a T-shirt!

 

Oh, I seriously doubt he would've done it that way. Even if the shows tied cleanly into each other, it would undercut his whole "evolved humanity" shtick.

Just pointing out what one (hypothetical) show would imply about another.

 

Not at all. Roddenberry's view, expressed both in Genesis II/Planet Earth and in "Encounter at Farpoint," was that humanity would have to suffer through an extreme, brink-of-extinction calamity before we were shocked into finally solving our problems and building a more ideal society, like an addict hitting rock bottom before admitting they have a problem and getting into recovery.

After all, that's basically what happened in Roddenberry's own generation. In the wake of World War II, the most cataclysmic war in human history, the United Nations was founded as an attempt to find a better alternative to solving international problems than constant warfare, and there was a general sentiment in the immediate wake of the war that humanity had learned its lesson and would never allow itself to make the same mistake again. But then the Cold War and the spectre of nuclear annihilation loomed, so the idea arose that it would take an even greater near-miss cataclysm, a survivable nuclear war, to shock us into coming to our senses and make it actually stick this time.

Only if they had been treated as sharing a continuity, which I'm not convinced would've been the case with TOS and A:E.

 

I don't think Roddenberry was all that opposed to nannies helping us along until we grew up. Heck, the whole premise of THE QUESTOR TAPES was that a long string of alien androids had been babysitting us for generations, with Questor intended to be the last in the line, now that humanity was finally on the verge of achieving maturity -- or destroying itself once and for all.

 

And as I mentioned, Questor was pretty much Roddenberry's third stab at Assignment: Earth, since Gary Seven and Questor had pretty much the same mission, and were both similarly cool, ultracompetent superhuman characters.

 

Exactly. Adam-12 was not going to work within its genre if its heroes--two uniformed officers in what was once called a "radio car"--never faced criminals who needed to be stopped / apprehended, instead, their calls always had them encounter incidents requiring them to act as firefighters. In other words, as a creation, Gary Seven was hard wired to a sci-fi origin involving aliens, whether his introduction was a part of Star Trek or not. The essence of and interest in Seven--that which made him distinctive as a potential series focus was his alien origin, otherwise he would have been--as noted earlier--an earth-bound human fighting threats with advanced weapons, which on its face was no different than Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series. If a Gary Seven show was more U.N.C.L.E. than all his backdoor pilot suggested / promised, it would have been seen as a late entry into an already dying "TV espionage" sub-genre, with no identity of its own.

"Assignment: Earth" gave viewers the expectation of alien involvement in Seven's life, even if his debut story was focused on an earthly struggle. I see the needs of a Seven series similar to the way the early Pertwee era of Doctor Who (season seven) was handled: the strange and/or alien so often came to him at a point where he was earth bound, which lent itself to the sci-fi demands of the concept. Roddenberry, et al., likely had a desire to reduce expenses (IOW, no more Star Trek-level production costs), but a series could have a fair amount of alien activity set in the 20th century--beyond that seen on The Invaders--without breaking the bank. I maintain that Roddenberry--or perhaps Paramount--would not shower the series with the budget needed, and it would end up like any espionage-fantasy of the period (again, by 1968, they were dying off), leading to its quick cancellation.

Indeed, which was so often the case for the Adventures of Superman TV series.

That would have been an interesting wrinkle, so it would not necessarily be an example of retconning the "Assignment: Earth" dialogue, or his need to ask Roberta to join his cause.

 

It probably would've gotten pretty old especially when there were series such Time Tunnel around. I wish they could've started the project in the future than some bland faux historical tale. There has to be something in the future which needs to be fix. Try it there and have Roberta a fish out of water completely dumbfounded about seeing the future and time traveling beyond.

 

I had a dream last night that they were using Airwolf to look for a lost cat.

I blame you. lol

 

"String, I've got something on thermal!"
"Dom, give me turbos!"

 

"Hurry up! Go and use ultra-futuristic technologies (which introduced to the market would potentially save millions of people) to investigate a rigged beauty pageant!

These are the real priorities!"

 

Why couldn't some missions be in the future, and on other planets?

 

Ha, that’s pretty much exactly how it went.

Then they landed in someone’s yard and blew over a tree.

 

Just speculation, but budgetary limitations may have limited how much they could do stories like that, as far as constructing sets and whatnot.

Regarding the question of what could be done with such a series that Section 31 or Starfleet Intelligence couldn't, those concepts were yet to be introduced to the Trek universe at the time of TOS, and an Assignment: Earth series would have taken place in the present-day, late 1960s, not in the future timeframe. Even in later Trek productions, S31 and Starfleet Intelligence are not in the habit of traveling back in time.

Kor

 

That's a good elevator pitch. Alternately, when I described the whole Gary Seven concept to my wife when we were watching S2 of Star Trek: Picard, I described the would-be Assignment: Earth concept as "Doctor Who meets Mission: Impossible."

I would say that almost as much time has passed since Patrick and Kudrow would have been the right ages as had passed at that time since "Assignment: Earth" had aired.

 

As I've been saying, I really think the Doctor Who comparisons are mistaken. I get why people make that assumption based on the aired episode, but the 1967 prospectus document makes it clear that the intended series would not have featured alien threats or time travel, at least not frequently. One can draw comparisons between Gary Seven and the Third Doctor as characters, but the nature of the threats Gary would've faced wouldn't have been anything like DW plots as a rule. If we're making British TV analogies, it would've been far closer to The Avengers, or maybe Sapphire and Steel.

 

It's an elevator pitch, not a treatise. The DW elements in "Doctor Who meets Mission: Impossible" would be the presence of an older, fantastically-wise man with a young female assistant. That's the extent of the comparison in that particular elevator pitch.