Harlan Ellison: Star Trek Was Just "A Cop Show"

Don't think so.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Wesley_Crusher (Seasons 1-5, 7)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Alexander_Rozhenko (Seasons 4-7)

 

I stand corrected. I must have blocked them out. Wesley shouldn't count, especially once he started wearing a uniform.

 

There's also Naomi Wildman, born during Season 2 of VOY and maturing to a little girl by the end of the series.

 

I think you have to wait for ENT to get your seasons going by without seeing a kid aboard the starship/deep space station, or go back to TOS/TAS.*

* - Counter-clock incidents and rascalizations don't count.

 

Sim is the closest to a baby or a kid I can remember on ENT.

 

Oh, good one.

 

Most of the time it's just dumb luck, Star Trek was rerun at the right time and found the right audience for Gene Roddenberry to sell his "vision" to (college kids in the "We will make a better future" phase of their lifes), then Star Wars came along and started the Trek movie franchise which in turn led to TNG. Without Star Wars there would have been a few seasons of Phase 2 at best and looking at the test footage it would have been spockless cheesy 70s schlock, as unexiting as TMP was at least it looked really good, maybe a bit too beige but the effects were phenomenal.

 

There's no way to tell how Phase 2 would have panned out. And test footage is just that, a test to see what works and what doesn't. Heck look at most pilots. Even today most are just ok and some are bad or outright crap but the executives can see the promise and give the green light to shows that go on to be very popular. And while there are elements of TOS that mark it as a product of the 60's it's more than just the times that made it popular. If not then why is it still an on going concern?

You have to go back to the 60's and 70's to understand how popular Star Trek was. After cancellation NBC and Paramount were still receiving multiple bags of mail. Unheard of at the time. It was so bad they hired secretaries that their only job was to handle this mail. In syndication even in the early days it was driving ratings for the stations that aired it up to 200% of what they were previously, depending on time slot. Hell Paramount called those 78 episodes the crown jewels. When TNG failed to land on any network and Paramount decided on syndication they forced stations who wanted TOS to take TNG. TNG or no TOS. And that's in the 80's

It's more than just luck. It's more than just a cop show or Wagon Train to the Stars. Or can you point to a cop show or western that has as large and devoted following as Star Trek? Or has become part of our culture as Star Trek?

 

Between this and the Bill Maher thing, reminds me just how much it triggers intellectuals when popular entertainment gets compared to high culture.

 

In his defense Ellison was more attitude and bluntness than actual holier-than-thou feelings about himself but he did love a good argument about how TV was basically a dumbed-down wasteland and only his ideas for what would make good television were the answer. Thing is, he wasn't necessarily wrong about that.

 

Guess it depends on how you define those things. Besides today's high culture was yesterdays pop.

 

This is a good book:

I learned a lot about television and American culture from Ellison. This, and the sequel, compares favorably to Agee on Film as criticism, as well as anything Hunter Thompson wrote during the same time.

 

"Yay, let's take the kids into deep space and get assimilated by the Borg dudes"
Never liked the "kids on the ship" idea

 

Unless you count Trip and T'Pol's baby in the Terra Prime story.

 

True, but Sim came over a year earlier and was the first.

 

So, ENT seasons 1-2 were kid-free aboard ship?

 

Pretty much. Porthos was the youngest member of the crew if you don't count the alien animals in cages and containers in sickbay.

 

The treatment I read a few years ago was called “Footbeat.” The only note I wrote down was the silly name of the main character — “Jack Island.” My memory is that it was cookie cutter cop stuff indistinguishable from other programs already on the air at the time.

Are you sure it was produced? I’d like to know more about Roddenberry’s Screen Gems experience; not much has been written about it and the pilots he produced and/or developed aren’t really available.

Police Story was produced as a pilot in 1965, right around the time Roddenberry was working on Star Trek’s second pilot and producing another unsold pilot, The Long Hunt of April Savage. A few seconds can be seen on YouTube, though the whole thing has never been online, as far as I know.

Roddenberry moved to Los Angeles to write for TV, but he got there a little early in terms of the development of the medium. Police work was a fallback gig while he worked on his writing and tried to break into TV.

 

Yeah. Though I do feel like mentioning Breaking the Ice where they answer letters from children on Earth. Not the same thing as children being on board the ship, but meh.