I watched it with my family when I was 3-4 years old. From that standpoint it was a family show.
Was TNG considered a "family tv show" at the time? And anyway, what does "family tv show" mean?
- Thread starter Skipper
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When I went to see the R-rated, ultraviolent Robocop 2 in the theater, at least two parents brought their toddlers to see it because they wrongly assumed a superhero movie had to be for small children, and apparently had no idea how movie ratings worked. They had to take their sobbing, terrified kids home early. There's a difference between what parents assume and what the creators intend.
I discovered Star Trek when I was 5 years old, but I recognize that it was not aimed at 5-year-olds. It was expressly intended by Gene Roddenberry as the first adult non-anthology science fiction series, a deliberate contrast to kid-oriented sci-fi like Lost in Space, and aspiring to the maturity of the most acclaimed adult dramas of the day; the series bible specifically cited Gunsmoke and Naked City as exemplars for how to write the show. TOS also aggressively pushed the envelope of skin and sexuality and was quite racy for its day, even if it was tame by 1970s or later standards. The reason people back then assumed it was a children's show was because the society was unthinkingly prejudiced against science fiction and perceived it as a childish genre -- the same way those moviegoers in the 1980s assumed a superhero movie couldn't possibly be aimed at adults. But that was the very prejudice Roddenberry was trying to overcome by making TOS. He would have been insulted to hear TOS described as a children's show. Even the animated series was promoted as the first Saturday morning cartoon aimed at adult viewers, and aside from toning down the sex and violence, its writing aspired to the same level of maturity as TOS.
Gene Roddenberry was insistent that TMP had to be suitable for families, since a decade of TOS prime time reruns had amassed an audience that included the young children of all those university students who used to watch TOS together, in first-run, in their dorm rooms. Despite the addition of Ilia's pheromones and a horrific transporter accident, the film received a "G" rating. (Although so had "Planet of the Apes".)
Walter Koenig had represented TOS in magazines like "15" and "Tiger Beat", aimed at teenagers. Will Wheaton was similarly promoted by the teen mags of the day. Despite adult fans supposedly disliking Wesley Crusher, Will Wheaton did apparently receive more fan mail each week than Stewart, Frakes and Spiner combined.
The addition of Wesley certainly seemed to be a way to address and support the "family viewing" prime time timeslot of syndicated first-run TNG.
And yet at the same time, he introduced Lt. Ilia as an ultra-sexual being whose pheromones drove men crazy, and insisted on giving her probe a nude shower scene. Given that, and given how much more graphically he described it all in the novel, I always got the sense that he would've made it R-rated if he'd had his druthers. (After all, the only other feature film he produced was Roger Vadim's dark sex comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row, which I believe was one of the first American feature films to have nude scenes after the R rating allowing them was introduced.) Are you sure he was the one who insisted on making it family-friendly? Or maybe that was pushed on him and he took credit for it anyway. We are talking about Roddenberry, after all.
I think a lot of kids would find it incredibly slow and boring, especially compared to the (at the time) recent Star Wars...
A family show doesn't need to be child oriented though. Something as simple as not showing a lot of sexual content and not swearing every other word could constitute as a family show. I feel like people conflate family show with kids show but those are two different things.
Yeah, but by 1960s standards, TOS's level of adult content was comparable to that. I mean, you could barely get away with showing a woman's navel back then, but TOS's costuming pushed the limits of how much of a woman's body you could show on camera. And TOS had to fight the censors to get away with saying "Let's get the hell out of here." It was a much stricter time, which is why people in later decades have seen TOS as more suitable for kids than it would have been perceived to be in its first run.
Similarly, TNG's first season definitely tried to be as sexy as it could get away with and pushed the limits of allowable violence with "Conspiracy." Later seasons mostly dialed it down, but season 1 was definitely trying to be adult.
Yeah I agree with you there. The first episode I remember watching was Qpid which was probably in the most family friendly season of TNG so that's my perspective. When I went back and finally watched Season 1, I was shocked on how "risque" it was, with episodes like Justice, Angel 1, and Conspiracy.
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Don't forget "The Naked Now", where the Enterprise hosts a giant flying orgy.
And yet, families did watch TOS reruns together, and many of that generation became TNG's fanbase. I wonder if the "boring vs action", "ST vs SW" split applies more to general audiences?
Skipper was talking about The Motion Picture specifically, not TOS. I know that a great many TOS fans found TMP boring, dubbing it "The Motionless Picture."
Stylistically, TMP (at least the first theatrically released version) was a strange beast. It wanted to combine the cerebral nature of some of the science fiction cinema of the early 70s with the spectacular nature of the blockbusters of the second half, such as Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
TMP's visual style owes a lot to Douglas Trumbull, whose prior works include 2001, Silent Running, and CE3K. So I wouldn't say that CE3K and TMP are fundamentally separate from those others, more just a maturation of their techniques. Of course, Star Wars' John Dykstra also did a lot of TMP's effects, so there's some of that too.
Honestly, I want to say that Star Wars is a bit of a stylistic hybrid itself. Everyone talks about how it introduced a grungy, run-down style to its technology that contrasted with the sterility of '70s sci-fi futures, but that's really only partially true. You've got run-down, lived-in stuff on Tatooine, the Falcon, and the Rebel base, but the Blockade Runner (retroactively named the Tantive IV) and the Imperial sets are as clean and sterile as anything in THX-1138, The Andromeda Strain, Superman: The Movie's Krypton, or TMP. So it's still using the '70s aesthetic of high-tech sterility, but contrasting it with the more run-down look of the civilians and rebels.
It's a very cringeworthy scene. I know people were hoping he would stay dead, but it was 11 episodes into the series. They weren't going to kill off that character. Thankfully by season 2 Wesley did become a better character and improved gradually as the series went on.
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More general question:
Would a series where most episodes are perfectly family friendly, but some contain material that may not be suitable for kids be considered family friendly?
Would a series where most episodes are perfectly family friendly, but some contain material that may not be suitable for kids be considered family friendly?
Yes, I know. I spent all of 1980 fending off such comments when I found Trek fandom.
But I am referring to memos from GR -- I am remembering now that these were letters sent to our Australian fan club (and to Diane Marchant, Australian Representative of the ST Welcommittee) by Gene and Majel themselves, during the making of TMP. He mentioned that he knew that Trek had became family viewing due to TOS reruns in early prime time, and was keeping that in mind during production of TMP.
In Australia, 39 episodes were rated the equivalent of PG in 1967. Only 40 were rated G. The episodes were never resubmitted to be re-rated here, causing a problem when a different network attempted to run the series again. Only the G episodes were shown during "family viewing" time slots.
Excellent question. I suppose it depends? If you are using a device or streaming service that implements parental controls, individual episodes will probably have a rating. So the remaining ones will definitely be "a family show".
Interesting, can you give a couple of examples of episodes each with one of the two ratings, please?
Which doesn't prove that it was his own idea, just that he took credit for it. It seems contradictory that someone prioritizing family-friendliness would introduce the Deltans in that selfsame story and try to sneak in as much of Ilia's sensuality as he could manage within the confines of a G rating. His novelization was far more overt about it, implying that's what he would have chosen to do in the movie given free rein -- which strongly suggests that he did not have free rein over the movie, and if he took credit for its G-rated tone in his letters, that was probably just his usual spin for the public.
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