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

You mean a new actor replacing Gary Lansing and taking on the globalists plan of world domination?

 

I'd bet that what she didn't liked was Roddenberry's hands up her miniskirts.

 

Definitely coincidental, since the era of Doctor Who that resembled A:E came along years after Roddenberry first conceived A:E. The first pilot script for A:E is dated November 1966, around the start of the Patrick Troughton era of DW, still in the point where the series was half alien planets and half historical tales in Earth's past, with present-day stories being very infrequent.

If anything, the 1966 pilot script reads like an unfunny sitcom in the vein of My Favorite Martian, complete with a detective antagonist trying to prove that Seven is up to something and always getting stymied by Seven's high-tech tricks. The villains, Harth and Isis, are basically Korob and Sylvia from "Catspaw," aliens whose version of science is indistinguishable from Earth witchcraft and demonic imagery. Both groups are from the future, with Harth and Isis trying to sabotage Earth's progress before it becomes a benevolent galactic power in their time -- an idea that presages the Temporal Cold War in Enterprise.

The revised series prospectus that was developed by Roddenberry and Art Wallace in December 1967 suggests that the intended series would've been in the vein of James Bond or Mission: Impossible, a show about a hero using high-tech gadgets to cope with assorted present-day crises. It suggested antagonists such as the Mafia, the Kremlin, a greedy politician, or a Senate committee about to make a grave error. Though it also suggested the possibility of stories along the lines of stopping a dangerous experiment from going awry, or more character-oriented stories like saving a gifted young scientist from ruining his life before he can make a vital contribution to the world. Instead of having alien villains, the prospectus stresses that the antagonists should be human, and indeed asserts that Quinn Martin's The Invaders made a mistake by featuring alien villains instead of pitting man against himself.

In contrast to the 1966 version, there's no indication in the '67 series prospectus that time travel would be an element; indeed, even the Trek episode stressed that Gary Seven was from the 1960s and only the Enterprise had engaged in time travel. At most, it hints that Seven would have foreknowledge of certain things that he and Roberta had to head off.

In short, with little to no use of aliens or time travel, the planned series would not have resembled Doctor Who to anywhere near the extent people tend to assume it would have. It would've been in the spy-fi vein that Pertwee-era DW emulated, but without the Quatermass-inspired emphasis on alien invaders, monsters, and the like. Typically, the only science fiction elements we would've been likely to see were the methods Gary Seven used to solve the problems, or perhaps some borderline sci-fi of some dangerous new invention or experiment getting out of hand. If anything, I'm thinking more MacGyver than Doctor Who.

Indeed, I think it's quite possible that if A:E had gone to series, they might've revamped the premise to remove any connection to Star Trek, or at least would've ignored the Trek link going forward and done their own thing. After all, Trek always struggled in the ratings, and A:E was probably Roddenberry's attempt to give himself a fallback series if Trek got cancelled. So he might've preferred to let it stand on its own. That may have been why he went for a more conventional present-day setting, which might have been more accessible to the general audience, and would certainly have been less expensive.


It's worth noting that Roddenberry made a third try at this premise with The Questor Tapes, replacing Gary and Roberta with Questor and Jerry Robinson. Questor's mission was basically the same as Gary's, to use his alien super-science to clandestinely help keep humanity on the right track through its turbulent adolescence.

 

It could absolutely have worked as a series. I'm not sure why so many people think it wouldn't...have you seen some of the crappy shows that have run for multiple years?!

 

Paramount+ should do a one off special that's like a lost episode of an "original series" and just throw it on there.

 

Network execs aren't always right, but they aren't always wrong either.

I've not seen this episode in a very long time, mostly because it was rubbing me the wrong way far more than the cat involved ever could. But from what I do remember:

TOS's ratings were going downward, hence the show being axed. Even if Assignment Earth was objectively great, a network would be hard-pressed to green-light a full series - especially if the ratings for it didn't skyrocket above preceding it.

I wasn't there on initial viewing, but a story that's so overtly by-the-numbers, where things happen overtly on cue, doesn't feel organic or compelling. Since this isn't a show about a ship in outer space, which the network execs were already disliking, something Earthbound isn't a piece of cake because it's set on Earth.

Nor do the characters. More on them later.

It's heavily doused with topical then-popular styles just for the sake of being "hip". The pandering in this episode is almost impressive.

Roberta is just a cipher and proxy for the audience living this vicariously, to tell us about how all the hippies are worried about teh nukes and not living to be 30 and think they know more than everyone else who have more regular direct contact on issues - complete with empirical experience, and so on. (Maybe she gaffed her line, which read "80"? I doubt it.) The caffeine-addicted bull in the antique porcelain store would feel embarrassed if it saw what the kids were doing at the time, and some wrote a song about not needing to know anything - and some 4.4 decades later, maybe the songwriters were right. Unless they were wrong but it's not 1979 any longer either. What's truly sad is that even "The Way to Eden" did a better job at discussing the hippie movement than Roberta's throwaway one-liner.

At least Q had some intrigue. Gary Seven is just a popsicle stick of equal depth, whose ancestors were taken centuries ago and he's a good little pet to those teaching him how to place nice with the humans on his planet of ancestral origin. On top of all that, there's also no tension in his allegedly diabolical scenes Kirk and Spock keep hem'n'hawing on about (as accompanied by the muzak). Whether this is intentional because of the ending, or because it's just bad will undoubtedly be up for debate for centuries.

Robert Lansing actually elevated a line that easily could have been delivered far worse:

Phew, thank goodness only the Federation has something like the Prime Directive, which Kirk is either completely rigid about, apart from the episodes when bypasses it whenever he feels it's right - and sometimes he isn't and there are a couple episodes that are real doozies in this regard. Also, when Charlie X, Trelane, the Organians or Metrons meddle, that's okay - it gets Kirk a chance to shout. For 1960s television standards, it wasn't anyone's idea to hint at anything bigger than Kirk's pedestal of the week and Kirk was always right, even if one week he's utterly contradicting a previous episode. And, in a way, that's part of the fun! Each episode is generally its own encapsulated and isolated thing, with no need for continuity as that wasn't the real point. When writers say excessive continuity can impede storytelling, they're not wrong - and to have a set of characters and series laid out so detailed as to bypass such impasses and have creative openings elsewhere is massive. Not to mention cast on-screen chemistry and if actors bring something unexpected-but-better to the show, how to change that sufficiently without breaking the intended and original continuity? Spock himself is a great example of this, noting the differences between "The Cage" through the first half or so of season 1. Even Kirk changed by season 3 and his were more subtle.

That said, as a standalone encapsulated story, is this one really good? Comparing it to the other TOS episode that went back to the 1960s for historical research, this one pales. Despite the bold pink and orange fashion fad, which is admittedly refreshing to see as there's a sense of liveliness and excitement to it. But any show made in 1968-70 will have similar styles. This episode needed to stand out more with its ideas, and it doesn't.

Also, aren't we lucky that force can be in methods other than muscular strength?

Aren't we luckier that the computer opted not to tell Gary about its findings regarding his two fellow agents and how they were killed in a car accident? Wasn't Gary watching the news or recording it? Or is the computer watching the news and not being bothered to tell Gary of the simple "put two plus two together" because even the computer would know where its fellow pets were going to, but never seemed to be bothered to tell Gary. There's a neat plot twist for a later episode if they wanted to take a more cynical route, or two... but for such an advanced alien race of non-humanoid doggie trainers, their technological advances seem a heck of a lot spottier and less thought-out than ours circa 2023 is. It came across as a joke back then. It's not changed and is arguably worse.

Aren't we even luckier that Gary and his cohorts have nothing special on them to recognize them from all the humans, since Gary's owners certainly figured out that his two agent buddies hadn't reported in -- maybe something like that servo that can easily be misplaced and cause a world of much greater problems if anyone picked it up and started fiddling with it, given how much it can do on cue for no rhyme nor reason... (mental interface? Fine and dandy. When the mental aspect ceases, a homing beacon or other signal would be the first thing to activate, if this technology really is that advanced - the basics would be the first thing to comprehend, before getting to the magical plot-advancing deus ex machina disposable fluff. Not that I have any opinions on the servo or anything...)

How many generations? Since this episode is ostensibly taking place in our world and universe and not Trek's own, these would seem to be valid questions: How are these non-humanoid aliens in their strange alien forms able to keep up with human customs and language development and so on so rapidly so they can blend in more easily as well as to convince humans to grow up vicariously? Didn't we get slight variations of this in a few dozen previous episodes, only this time they're directly meddling instead of saying humans will be great? And I presume it's all to train Garry and his other agents, all except for agents 99 and 86 of course, to do more than jump through hoops, clap on cue, then catch a fish in their mouths, arf arf!

Then again, it's apparently impressive that Gary can have a static mechanical interface rigged via glowing green box to automatically type out complete letters, much to the unprocessed human's shock. Can't the computer take notes via verbal interface and even get correct punctuation 100% of the time when it prints out the letter, because the little screen was used to show pictures of rockets and nothing more? It's like nobody at the time thought paper could be recycled or wasted or anything, and yet someone managed to think up a spaceship with theoretical methods of propulsion with impressive amounts of detail. (Word processors would first become available in 1972, ask Lexitron and Linolex about that, but even by 1968 it wasn't such an outlandish concept based on known existing concepts and products.)

Kirk and Spock even play up the melodrama until the end, when they reveal everything's happened exactly as it should - which, the more you think about it, comes across as being incredibly cheap. They were faking it, just like ~50% of all marriages.

Oh yes, and the cat was the best actor of the lot. Even better than Lansing. And Lansing was taking a very weak and limited scope and too-easily-worn of a premise (pushing humans along while preventing "alien invasion o' the week" for 26 episodes a season.) A premise that could work if Lansing's leash-keepers had an enemy species realizing they were setting up Earth and would then try to stop-- people didn't think "A Private Little War" was a great episode, either.

I'll freely admit loved the episode as a kid. But I also hated the Bond movie "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". A handful of years and a re-watch based on a dare later and *ding*, people really can change. The fashion still looks more exciting and comparatively individualized, and decor still look more refreshing than today's white/steel laboratory look.

 

A superficial version, if not caricatured. Unwittingly, since North American audiences didn't get to see the show until the 1970s, and not initially wide-scale. Assignment Earth feels like a caricature of DW without even knowing of DW's existence. Talk about "ahead of its time."

Also of interest, is that the 1963-1989 era didn't use its equivalent of "the servo" - aka the sonic screwdriver, as frequently and as lazily as Assignment Earth had for plot contrivances (deus ex machina). Not until the rebooted/modernized 2005-present era anyway. It generally had one purpose and wasn't a lazy do-all.

 

Just because a backdoor pilot doesn't garner a series order doesn't mean the series couldn't have worked if it had gotten better luck. Okay, Roddenberry's original 1966 half-hour pilot script was kind of lame, but the reworked Roddenberry/Art Wallace premise had potential. The Trek episode was flawed, because it was trying to be both Trek and A:E at once and therefore wasn't the best example of either. It's possible that the series would've worked better. I mean, as I said, The Questor Tapes was basically a third go at the concept, and that actually did get a series pickup, although the network wanted to retool it so much that Roddenberry killed it rather than compromise his vision.

That doesn't follow. Just because one of a producer's TV shows is cancelled doesn't mean a network wouldn't be willing to pick up a different one. Every experienced producer has done shows that failed -- indeed, it's virtually a given that they'll have more failures than successes -- and they still get new series picked up, because industry professionals know that nobody bats a thousand, and that cancellation can happen for many reasons that don't reflect at all on a creator's abilities.

There's no reason that Star Trek's ratings would've had any effect on the decision to pick up A:E, because A:E was not a Trek spinoff in any real sense; it was a separate creation that Roddenberry snuck into production as a Trek episode when he couldn't get the budget to film a pilot independently. The 1967 prospectus makes it clear that the goal of the series was to be far more down-to-Earth and grounded in its stories, to be in the vein of fairly conventional adventure or spy dramas and focus on human problems and antagonists. If anything, it was probably designed to be more appealing to executives and audiences than a space opera like Trek, more conventionally crowd-pleasing and more affordable. The prospectus described a plan to edit a demo presentation for the series that would delete any Trek-related elements from the pilot episode, suggesting that the series would've detached itself from any Trek connections.

Also, contrary to myth, the show was never "axed" in its second season. Its renewal was on the bubble, but any contemporary reports of its cancellation came from less-than-reliable sources.

Why even question that? Of course she meant 30. The threat of imminent nuclear war loomed over everyone in her generation, and in mine when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Nobody knew if we'd still be alive in a week, let alone 50 years.

Huh? If you mean "Tomorrow is Yesterday," that was an accident, not a research mission. The only other depiction of Starfleet using time travel for research was in "Yesteryear" with the Guardian of Forever, and that wasn't to Earth.

 

It wasn't a show that was on and got cancelled, it never existed in the first place.

 

Spy-fi stuff was popular in the sixties. No reason it couldn't have run as long as THE MAN FROM UNCLE, THE AVENGERS, or at least as long as THE PRISONER.

It's basically THE MAN FROM UNCLE meets THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Seems like a good premise for a sixties action series.

 

I wonder if they'd have brought in aliens. I sure hope so.

 

Now I want to see Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln meet the Third Doctor and Jo Grant.

 

You do have a point there. Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space, The Brady Bunch. As T.S Elliot said, "TV is a vast wasteland."

 

That's a very good elevator pitch for it.

Honestly, Roddenberry's sci-fi pilots were a mixed bag, and their quality depended largely on his collaborators. "The Cage" is his only solo sci-fi script that I think was really good. Genesis II, which he wrote solo, was weaker than it could've been, while Planet Earth, which he co-wrote with future Rockford Files stalwart Juanita Bartlett (with Bob Justman as producer), was stronger. Spectre, which he co-wrote with Samuel A. Peeples, was a mixed bag but had potential. The Questor Tapes, written with Gene L. Coon, was unsurprisingly the best of them.

So the success of an A:E series might have come down to Art Wallace's contribution, assuming he stayed on as producer or story editor. Wallace had a long career writing for various shows, most notably co-creating Dark Shadows and writing the first two episodes of the Planet of the Apes TV series. Certainly the 1967 version of A:E that Wallace developed with Roddenberry was an improvement on GR's 1966 solo script.

Conceivably, if A:E had been picked up, then GR might've brought in some of the former Trek staffers who didn't stick around for season 3, like Coon and Fontana. That sure wouldn't have hurt.

 

Agreed, but I feel the template for "Assignment: Earth" would have been best served as a 90 minute TV movie, with the door open for a sequel TV movie. The concept was strong enough for single movie stories, but i'm not sure it would survive the demands of a then typical 26 - 30 episode season format.

Being a Star Trek spin-off (and considering Gary Seven's origin), one would would expect aliens to appear more than few times (being a sci-fi / espionage series), but my fear is that the series would end up leaning too much in the direction of Quinn Martin's The Invaders (ABC, 1967-68), with earth-bound protagonists fighting a threat unknown to the general public. That worked for the somewhat underrated Quinn Martin series, but it would hang a "ripoff" sign around the neck of Roddenberry's show airing in the same era.

 

I don't know about that. Certainly it wasn't uncommon in the '60s and '70s to do multiple TV movies, as was done with the first few installments of The Six Million Dollar Man or with the Mystery Movies like Columbo and McMillan and Wife. But that was more a '70s thing than '60s, I think. And there were a fair number of hourlong adventure shows along the same lines intended for A:E, telling fairly conventional action/intrigue/spy stories where the hero's advanced powers/gadgets were the only regular science fiction element, like the bionic shows or the couple of short-lived invisible-man shows in the '70s. So I don't see any reason to doubt it would've worked in an hourlong format.

Doubtful. As I said, the A:E series prospectus document specifically critiqued The Invaders' focus on alien villains as something A:E would avoid, stressing that stories about human antagonists and human problems were more relatable. Which also implies that the show would've avoided tying into Star Trek much, if at all. I think A:E was conceived as an alternative or replacement for Trek, a fallback for Roddenberry if Trek should fail, so it would have stood apart from Trek. It is possible that they would've brought in aliens as occasional antagonists, since it was hard to find an Earth-based sci-fi show in that era that didn't -- see The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, Logan's Run, etc. But they probably wouldn't have been Trek aliens.

Indeed, I suspect A:E would've gone its own way and disregarded or contradicted Trek continuity, since doing the pilot as a Trek episode was merely a matter of convenience, a way to get the budget to shoot it when nobody was willing to commission it as a standalone. It wouldn't have been the only time a series was in a different continuity from its pilot; for instance, I gather that the version of Sheriff Andy Taylor and Mayberry that initially appeared in The Danny Thomas Show had some differences from The Andy Griffith Show, and Happy Days was reworked some from its pilot in Love, American Style. And more recently, Doom Patrol ended up being in a different continuity from Titans despite introducing its lead actors and characters in a Titans episode.

 

Agreed. "Assignment: Earth" had the sort of superhero flair of Airwolf or Knight Rider. If the hero has superlative powers, the more extreme the enemies or challenges need to be to make a suitably engaging and suspenseful story. For Airwolf there were only a small fraction of episodes in seasons 1 and 2 worth bringing in "the Lady." The others became silly or juvenile, like a hero of Superman's capabilities fighting common crime in one city. In the case of Knight Rider, it was juvenile from the start—the technology available to Knight Industries deployed in a car.

"Assignment: Earth" gave Seven an opponent on his own level. (The Enterprise.) One small change might have opened the door to much broader possibilities in a potential spin-off series. Instead of the previous agents dying in something as "useless" as a car accident, suppose they were taken out by a previously unsuspected enemy on Earth? The people responsible for grooming Seven might have been from the future, or at least had knowledge of it. (Suppose they did not travel themselves, but could send information back?) Thus, their experience and knowledge of Earth might have the broad outlines. "What else do your record tapes show?" And perhaps Seven's mission was to maintain a core history, while the smaller details around that might be dynamic. That uncertainty would avoid the series from becoming stale from knowing that "the good guy always wins." Perhaps Trek's Eugenic Wars were allowed or even orchestrated by Seven & Co. in the same way the orbital weapon misfire was—because the resultant payoff is worth the price/risk.

 

The much-maligned US version of Life on Mars had its initial pilot set in L.A. (with Colm Meaney as Gene Hunt), then became a NYC location when it went to series.

In fact I'm fairly sure the L.A. version never actually aired at all.

 

Seven could be fighting Temporal cold war agents as the big enemy.