re exeptionalism
Star Trek (fuck this "TOS" noise) was exceptional as a package in that it was arguably one of the early [American] science fiction dramatic series that (mostly) tried to play it straight, where other shows in the genre may have started serious enough but quickly ended up in silly-town. The 1959 CBS series
Men Into Space depicted future efforts by the USAF to explore and develop outer space. It was not silly or campy. If anything, it was dry. So
Star Trek wasn't first in that territory.
In other words,
Star Trek was exceptionally well-made for a science fiction TV series.
Outer Limits and the SF episodes of Twilight Zone were also well made. But they were anthology series, and both episodes tended to work in the horror genre, while Star Trek was a
series with returning characters and standing sets. Star Trek was the first
series to use its SF tropes in a reasonably competent way to write more or less adult stories in the adventure genre.
Star Trek borrowed a lot from recent print SF. This may not sound like much but is actually pretty groundbreaking, given the nearly religious fervor with which SF series since have resolutely avoided recent print SF. Indeed, that ground is now so overgrown it is ripe for new breaking.
Star Trek of course borrowed from the movies. It's not quite certain how anyone who's watched Forbidden Planet means Star Trek was groundbreaking if that's supposed to mean something that had no precedents. In television terms, borrowing from movies is a kind of groundbreaking, being an adaptation to a novel medium.
On the other hand, as a series—minus subcategory—it was not so exceptional.
Production Value. Watch I Spy or Mission: Impossible or Gunsmoke or Have Gun Will Travel and you'll quickly see that the acting, production, music, and even the writing is pretty average for a dramatic series of the time.
Topicality. Other shows had plenty to say on the subjects Roddenberry and Co. put in scifi drag without the need to disguise it. I Spy's episode "The Loser" dealt head-on with drugs and featured Eartha Kitt as a heroin addicted jazz signer without the need to hide it in a coy metaphor. In one single skit ("Bonanzarosa") The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour poked fun at more topical issues than any 10 Trek episodes put together.
Race & Nationality
Other shows had non-whites and non-Americans in significant roles: I-Spy, Mission: Impossible and Julia all had black lead characters, not as background players. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had a Russian character as co-star. Sure, they weren't enough by a long shot, but Star Trek was merely on the curve, not on the leading edge. In this regard, Star Trek was not at the top of the heap, whereas I-Spy and Mission: Impossible were.
Even Spock's not a new character. As pointed out in other threads, he's basically a pointy-eared version of the character Mingo from Daniel Boone: a well educated "half-breed" who lives amongst us. Nimoy's performance is what makes Spock exceptional, and why he was nominated for three Emmys.
Visual Effects. Now here Star Trek is mostly at the top. No sci-fi show prior to it had as convincingly depicted a spacecraft moving through space, and—with come exceptions—many of the effects on the show were state-of-the-art for TV.
Camp. By the standards some people here apply, most everything from 60s TV would be camp, so this is an argument not even worth having.
Most of this is breathtaking for its obliviousness. The idea that television SF should have production values and have serious dramatic values more or less on par with regular dramatic series is pretty groundbreaking. Most SF television since almost explicitly disavows normal notions about quality drama. Normally, quality drama is expected to have plots that make sense, are set in a functional world and are populated by people with comprehensible motives.
The idea that Spock is closely parallel to Mingo is particularly symptomatic. Whether there are really are some significant number of triumphalists who are raving about the unprecedentedness of Star Trek and its unique contributions to the lively arts of television is moot. I think the implication is largely a red herring. But the idea that Star Trek was just a Western in drag, or some sort of typical Sixties TV drama is completely absurd, even if repetition has worn away the shock of its inanity.
It seems to me that the issue of Star Trek's originality is closely tied to current trends in opinion on the famous "optimism" of Star Trek. This optimism (which is not in my opinion a particularly good way of phrasing it, no matter how popular a cliche it is---really, it's just that Star Trek is
not misanthropic,
not convinced that human nature is immutable,
not sure that nothing under the sun is new) is not particularly original in one sense. The Sixties were the last reform era in the US. It was a time of pre-revolutionary ferment. Star Trek's progressivism was neither bold nor original in this context, but as SF, it addressed the larger hopes of the time in a way that contemporary dramas mentioned in the citation above could not. In that sense, Star Trek broke new ground. And since US society and polity have regressed, there has been no new SF series that has broken futher new ground in representing a progressive view of the future.
You could with equal justice say that Star Trek wasn't so groundbreaking, it just seems like it in retrospect because we're moving backwards. Star Trek's originality, whether excessively vaunted or not, is sort of an optical illusion. TV in a deeper sense keeps getting mustier and moldier, resurrecting tired, stale ideas, even as they advertise them as new.
At the very least they were a honey trap that warped people's thinking and repressed creativity and development etc. Freedom is also having opportunities.
