The "internet of the '70s" consisted of fanzines, professional publications (like
Starlog), phone calls, snail mail and groups of like-minded folks getting together.
It's very easy to be flippant and dismissive to ascribe TOS' longevity and success to one or two meaningless things. But, as was stated above, all the reruns would mean nothing if no one was watching. They kept rerunning the show
because it pulled in viewers which is what television is all about. Granted different people were finding different things of appeal in the show and that speaks to a great strength of the show, that it could appeal to so many on different levels. This is not a small thing given most programming appeals on one or very few levels and therefore has a limited audience.
Although
Lost In Space and other Irwin Allen sci-fi's of that era have cult followings none of them resonated among the greater audiences and to nearly the same extent of
Star Trek. And that can be said about a lot of series from that period.
Star Trek was the right show at the right time and it clicked with the audience even in the beginning and even if the numbers weren't there initially. If it hadn't then it would have died in syndication as many other series did. I, for one, will be quite interested to read the followup volumes of Marc Cushman's TOS books to see what is to be said about TOS' original ratings and the reasons NBC canned the show (assuming ratings mightn't be the real or whole story). Because when you look at it
Star Trek had everything going for it plus things the competition didn't have: intelligence and a generally adult level approach to the subject matter.
Would
Star Trek succeed today? How can that really be answered because the perception of popular science fiction on television today has been greatly influenced by TOS and its spin-offs? Could
Star Trek's concept work today? Maybe, but admittedly not done exactly like TOS but a similar approach might work. The sci-fi offered up today is generally of a narrow vision and often with a good dose of cynicism running through it similar to a lot of other television. In some respects a show evoking TOS' approach to the subject matter could be nearly as different from the mainstream as TOS was in the '60s.
JJtrek is not a true barometer of whether a show similar to TOS would work, because JJtrek is shallow and lacking in nuance and the general level of intelligence brought to TOS. You need only read of the thought that went into developing the series and the individual scripts and episodes. JJtrek rides on the coattails of what TOS did while parodying it at the same time.
Stargate: SG-1 and
Stargate: Atlantis are closer to TOS in more contemporary terms and those shows definitely had a following.
The television audience is also very fragmented today given the plethora of channels available, the narrow casting of programs and the diversity of media people have access to. Success on television is measured quite differntly today than even ten to twenty years ago. You're fighting for a smaller slice of the pie, a slice that would have been dismissed out of hand back in the day when much larger numbers (percentage wise) ruled.
It's easy to proclaim
"Star Trek wouldn't work today," but that is a meaningless assertion because something like
Star Trek really hasn't been tried recently. And it's really no differnt than the resistence (by some) to TOS' concept when the show was first pitched. Could a new
Star Trek be as succesful as TOS and TNG? Who can say and possibly not by the standards used previously. But on the right network and done just the right way it possibly could succeed by today's standards.
Could a new
Star Trek become iconic? That I doubt because so much has changed in the television landscape and audiences are bombarded with new things all the time and audiences in general seem to have less of an attention span and shorter memory. It all conspires (figuratively) to argue against the liklihood of a new
Star Trek ever becoming iconic.
