Star Trek Continues, Episode 4 - "The White Iris"

I wish Exeter was still filming. It was classic Trek without having to mimic already established lore, not that I dislike what has been done. I love ST:C, but man, Exeter was awesome.

 

To be fair, this a bit different than Cusman's malarkey, since he claims that NBC had the "real" ratings numbers all along, but lied about them because they disliked Roddenberry.

 

I don't remember the source. It wasn't the Onion or a similar publication. It didn't claim that NBC knew anything. It just stated that they reexamined the raw data collected and that modern statistical approaches showed much higher viewership. Perhaps it's only in NYC, but most people I meet who are old enough to have been watching at that time claimed they were watching. For years I wondered if everyone had false memories or what, so when I read it (wherever it was) it rang true to me. You Hollywood guys know everything, so I'm sure you all know everything about this, too.

I just did a search, and it wasn't Cushman. He just asserts the ratings weren't all that bad. The writer claimed to have gotten the raw data and re-examined it based on how it would be analysed today.

 

That sounds like the oft-repeated and false "demographics" story that Gene liked to tell.

Harvey's done the best job I've seen trying to get to the bottom of this, as per this thorough and interesting blog post (linky).

 

For what it's worth, the ratings data that does exist in the public sphere indicates Star Trek did better in urban markets like New York City than in rural markets during its first run.

Cushman actually starts with a very similar personal anecdote to the one you present -- that everyone he knew was watching Star Trek, so how could it be a ratings failure? Whenever I read this, I'm reminded of the infamous (and somewhat apocryphal) Pauline Kael statement that she didn't understand how Nixon could have won reelection, since no one she knew voted for him.

I'm wondering if what you're remembering has to do with Roddenberry's claim that if NBC had used modern demographic measurement in 1966-69 that Star Trek would never have been cancelled? It's an oft-repeated story, but there are multiple stories in the trade papers and elsewhere from Star Trek's original run indicating that NBC in fact DID measure and value demographics, which were one of the reasons cited for renewing the show.

 

My story is a little broader than that. It isn't just people I knew then, it's a conversation I have when I start talking to anyone else at a sale or when waiting on a line.

However, before I read that article I had assumed a lot of these folks actually had watched re-runs years later. That could be the explanation.

 

Regardless of what the ratings/demo data said or didn't say at the time, any lack of information would have affected decisions concerning ALL of network television, not just Star Trek, so it is impossible to determine what the lineup would have looked like with different data. It might have helped Star Trek, or it might have allowed some other show to rise instead.

 

Anyhoo...

 

Yep.

 

Is it on Vimeo's Apple TV app yet? If I'm going to rewatch this, I want to be on my couch with my surround sound turned up.

 

There also could have been calculation that took into account not merely the number of butts-in-chairs but the cost of production as well. The "dollars-in, dollars-out" ratio.

This is the kind of "thought" process which lead later networks to dump scripted dramas in favor of "reality" shows which got marginally smaller viewership but cost much less to produce.

 

And we're the poorer for it. I fucking hate reality shows. Among the most boring and stupid shit I've ever seen on television. That people actually watch this crap is unnerving.

That said there are exceptions. Technically a sports event as well as game shows are reality television since you are seeing them as they happened. A cooking show and talk shows are to some extent reality shows. Awards shows and contemporary descendents of shows like Candid Camera and shows featuring standup comics are also reality shows of a sort. But these things have been around since almost the birth of network television so they're not really identified as reality shows.

But it's downhill form there.

 

Exeter enjoys the fact it was produced before fan-films had become a phenomenon, before you could raise high six-figures on crowdfunding and before it was expected to bring celebrities into your production. As such, it has a hand-crafted feel that ST:C (or its cousin, Farragut) can't fake. Probably the closest thing to Exeter going on these days is Valiant.

 

Thanks MOS, one of the things that we pride ourselves on Valiant is that we want to be different. Sure, we could do romulans, klingons, gorns, etc and that's fine if others do but we actually saw so little of the universe in the original star trek and I want to see more of the unexplored. So with that in mind we consciously made the decision to stray away from established lore and create something, (aliens-worlds, etc) that were unseen. In our next episode we'll be seeing a new race that inhabited TOS while still focusing on the character development that started with Legacy. As always, thanks for giving us a shot.

 

I think it's great that we get so many different visions of the Star Trek Universe these days, and it's certainly not limited to STC. I think Valiant's got off to a good start, and I'm really hopeful for Barratis; add in New Voyages and Farragut and the TOS era is in a wide variety of good hands.

 

Any news on White Iris returning to YouTube?

 

Only that YouTube is Mrs. Butterworth and takes her own sweet time.

 

Two weeks after it was taken down and STILL not up? Makes the whole "It was a CBS error" thing sound suspicious.

It doesn't take two weeks to get a film back up.

 

If you say so. YouTube is notoriously slow fixing takedowns like this. There's no conspiracy here.

 

It does (and has numerous times in the past) if one is dealing with Youtube.

YouTube's infrastracture for putting back the videos it (sometimes) carelessly takes down is as slow as molasses. I've seen it happen to at least three different people over the years and the result is always the same. This time is no different.

We have no reason to believe there's anything going on here beyond more of YouTube's snail's pace momentum.