TOS 3rd Season:Who's To Blame???

Wow, this thread has been very informative, far from the Friedberger "bashing" I had expected (well, at least to the degree I expected).

Sincerely,

Bill

 

I like the majority of Season 3. Not perfect, but even Season 1 had a couple of duds.

 

Someone else who is much wiser than I am described the 3 ST seasons as such:

Season 1 - Growing pains
Season 2 - Full maturity
Season 3 - An early demise

 

Director Ralph Senensky was fired from the episode, The Tholian Web. You can hear his thoughts on how the studio changed over the years in this interview:
http://www.startrekhistory.com/interviews.html

 

Desilu was a studio run by actors and writers who knew a thing or two about putting on a show and making the talent feel welcome.

After the buyout and merger, Paramount Studios was a plaything for the clueless owners of a sugar company who knew NOTHING!!! about film or television other than it cost a helluva lot of money to produce these shows and involved these strange people called actors, writers, and producers.

 

I did some research into Fred Freiberger a short while back and made revisions to the wikipedia entry on him to give a better perspective on his career. Have a look.

 

Lucy and Desi founded the studio and it was successful for them up to the point of their divorce. Herb Solow and Bob Justman did not like Lucy's next husband, Gary Morton, who tried to force his way into being a major studio mogul. According to their book, Inside Star Trek, one of Morton's ideas was to build a 3/4 scale European town. Solow was aghast at such a ridiculous idea, and Justman called it "Toonerville". Desilu was a studio in decline when Paramount merged with it.

 

Anyone who's been on the Universal Studios tour knows where Morton got the idea for that backlot...still a boneheaded idea.

 

The third season still has quite a few episodes that I enjoy so from a historical accounting I would blame NBC ultimately.

 

NBC kept the show on the air as long as it could, even longer than the ratings alone justified. I don't think the NBC executives can be blamed for doing their job. They had to make sure their network made a profit or they would've risked losing their jobs -- and maybe costing others their jobs if their decisions hurt the network financially. Airing Star Trek was never profitable for NBC (not at the time, anyway), and they bore the burden as long as they could justify due to the profits their parent company RCA was making from the color-TV sales ST promoted, but eventually they just couldn't sustain the loss anymore.

 

I suspect by '69, those color tv sales had started to plateau a bit...

 

NBC is to blame. They were the ones who changed the time slot and ticked off Roddenberry so he would leave.

And can you blame him? He sunk how much of his own money into the that show, worked day and night causing his marriage to fail and he still was willing to stick with it into Season Three and after all NBC was dumping into a horrible time slot??? C'mon!! I would've told NBC to "stick it" too!

Nimoy was nominated a number of times for his performance as Spock. The series was also nominated for special effects and scripts. What did it take for NBC?

They did it. They set the chain reaction going.

 

They had more than one show on their network. They had to decide on the lineup that would be strongest overall. TOS was very, very far from being their strongest-performing show. So this wasn't an arbitrary or malicious decision. They liked Star Trek. They were pleased to have it on their network. But it wasn't a show they could afford to indulge at the expense of other, more successful and profitable shows. They made the choices that were best for the network as a whole, because that was their job.

And Roddenberry didn't have to leave. A more responsible producer would've stuck with his show through thick and thin, or at least made sure that it was in good hands if he was too burned out to run it directly. Roddenberry could've fought to give the job to Justman, or to keep Lucas on staff. Or he could've avoided alienating Fontana or Coon. Either way, he also could've lived up to his responsibilities as executive producer rather than just abandoning the show while it was still in production. I mean, I don't care how burned out he was, that's just a crappy thing to do, walking out on a responsibility like that.

Why is it that so many people think commercial television is a charity? NBC needs money to pay for the shows it airs, because those shows are very expensive to make. It gets that money from advertisers who buy ad time. Advertisers' willingness to pay for ad time on a particular show is proportional to how many people they think will watch the show and therefore see the ads. So if the audience doesn't watch a show, then advertisers won't pay for the show and the network can't keep it on the air no matter how much it wants to or how many award nominations it gets. Seriously, it shouldn't be so hard to understand that.

 

Justman would have been the wrong guy to tap creatively but Lucas would have been great. What happened with him and wasn't there as guy named daniels?

 

Where has it been claimed that Gene sunk any of his own money into the show? He was paid by Desilu to make the show, and he got extra money for rewriting scripts (and there's been some insinuation that he rewrote scripts just to get more money, not necessarily because they needed it). And, to be fair, given all his extramarital flings, who can really say it was the hours he spent on Star Trek that ruined his marriage?

QFT.

 

Again, Justman contributed a lot of creative stuff behind the scenes that he wasn't credited for. And, yes, Lucas would've been that natural go-to guy, since he line produced the show for the latter part of the second season, while Gene Coon had his meltdown.

Marc Daniels was a frequent director (in fact, he directed more Star Trek episodes than any of the other directors), and if memory serves, wrote the animated episode "One Of Our Planets Is Missing".

 

You know, I resist using the old hedge of "It's probably a little of both", but since all these points-of-view seem equally correct in being guilty of contributing to the ultimate demise of TOS, it feels sort of like a 'which piece of the pizza tastes best' debate.

Going back to an earlier post about the phases of TOS, gives a strong indication that the ground was not stable long before the ship began to show signs of sinking.

It is very true that TOS has very definite feels to the shows it aired, almost as if was constantly in a state of flux, trying to figure out exactly what is true format and presentation style was.

As an example, an episode like 'Miri' has a very Twilight Zone feel to me; whereas 'Devil in the Dark', now that is Classic TOS to me; and 'Spock's Brain', well, that feels like Lost In Space to me, agreed?

Now look a 'Couch Show' like 'All in the Family', except for the progression of the characters, all those shows, and even into it's re-make, 'Archie's Place', all have the same feel.

Heck, even 'Gilligan's Island' and 'McHale's Navy', all had the same feel through their runs, and 'The Brady Bunch', they didn't suffer from 'Trek Identity Crisis' either.

One of the most dramatic one which did do this was 'Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea', which, as I am sure 99% of you know, started out as a B&W cold-war para-military spy show, and then morphed right into a colorized 'Lost in Space' under the water.

TOS really suffered from a schizophrenia, unlike any other show I am aware of.

So, why then did TOS have such a morphing quality to it, when other shows don't suffer this affliction at all, and those that did work it out, did so within the first half or so of the first season?

You can't cry 3rd season budget, as the Twilight Zone could present and maintain their identity and consistent feel with great scripts, featuring two characters in a luncheonette booth. (what,.. Shatner busted in here again!!!).

Anyone?,.... anyone?,... Bueller?,.. Bueller?

 

Well, I dunno... Gilligan's Island took a while to find its voice. The very earliest episodes are pretty dumb and unfunny. Sure, it was always a silly show, but it ended up being silly in a fun and well-executed way, whereas the early episodes were just labored and inept. Which is probably why it acquired such an undeserved bad reputation -- because the critics made up their minds based on those early bad episodes and then never re-evaluated it once it got better.

Lost in Space itself had a similar arc. The first half-dozen or so episodes are, while a family show, a fairly serious drama overall, and though the emphasis on Dr. Smith as comic relief increased over the first season, it was still played fairly straight overall. But in the second season, in order to compete with Batman, it became outright camp, a farce of its former self. The third season initially made an attempt to be somewhat more serious and serve the whole cast better, but it didn't last.

It's not really that uncommon. Lots of shows undergo similarly radical changes when they change showrunners, when different people take over making them. You'll hear a lot of such complaints around here about the Roddenberry-inspired shows produced by Tribune Entertainment, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda, both of which underwent profound changes of format, tone, and intelligence after their developers/showrunners were fired and replaced with cheaper producers. The '88 War of the Worlds: The Series transformed into an almost completely different show in its second season when a new showrunner took over, a much darker, more dystopian, and much worse show (and all the nonwhite actors were fired). Sliders fell completely apart when its creator/showrunner Tracy Torme left, becoming one of the worst shows ever made in its later third season, but then became a reasonably good show again in its fourth season when the hacks writing it in season 3 were replaced by a more competent staff. There are lots of examples of shows that transformed much more drastically than TOS. Heck, look at TNG -- feeble first season, mediocre to decent second season, then the greatness starts in the third season when Michael Piller comes aboard. Or Enterprise, which didn't really find its voice until Manny Coto took over as showrunner in the fourth season.

It's the showrunner who defines a show's identity and direction, who makes all the final decisions about the stories and rewrites all the scripts to give them a consistent voice and style. So naturally, if a showrunner leaves and is replaced, the voice of the show will change, just as if a role is recast with a different actor. TOS's third season changed because Roddenberry wasn't supervising the writing anymore, and most of the producers and story editors from earlier seasons were no longer on staff.

 

CHRISTOPHER, awesome response, as usual.

So if I am hearing you on the idea that when the showrunner changes, the impact is such that although the character names have been preserved to retain the audience, the whole feel of the show and presentation is subject to the vision and dare I say 'mentality' of the new showrunner (what I would know as a 'hands-on' Exec. Prod),.. wherein he takes over the show from his predecessor, now "as his baby" and is the ultimate craftsman, by way of his hard line decisions,... and what ultimately appears on screen to the viewing audience.

Well, it makes a lot of sense. I do not think there is person on this board who, would if they could, resist making significant changes to what we saw all through the TOS run, and therein creates the shift in tone and feel.

So, considering your insights, if we re-examine the TOS arc of moods and tones - expressed as these "phases" - we can clearly see the multiple shifts in Season One, as vacillating while 'finding the shows voice', as you say,.... then moving onto Season Two with the staff, cast, and crew at full pace & compliment, then as the breakdown begins, we enter into Season 3,....

Wow, things really must have been a chaotic mess behind the shifting scenes, as the 'peak' did not last that long after getting up to pace, and then so quickly the decline,... Kind of like reading 'The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization' in a Wiki article! LOL!

Hey! Doesn't that then make all of us like some sort of 'damaged foster-kids', being shuffled from one environment to another, and just when we get in a safe place where it seems like everything is going to be alright,.. wham, we get shipped off again! LOL!

Makes me feel like one of those 'And The Children Shall Lead' kids from the colony on Triacus!

Great insights CHRISTOPHER,.. sad, but illuminating, thanks.

HAIL, HAIL, FIRE & SNOW,... CALL BACK THE PRODUCER WE ALL KNOW,... BRICK-A-BRACKA, FIRE-CRACKA, SIS-BOOM-BAH,... GENE COON, GENE COON, RAH-RAH-RAH!


Sorry, I couldn't resist ;-)

 

Essentially, yes. The change isn't always drastic, though. A lot of shows change showrunners and are only subtly altered as a result, because the new showrunner was part of the staff all along or has a good understanding of the show and characters or has a similar vision to the original guy. But usually there's some change in emphasis and attitude if you look closely.

The definition of a "showrunner" is the executive producer in charge of the writing staff. Basically there are two kinds of producer/executive producer in TV, writer-producers who are in charge of the creative side and "line" producers who are in charge of the logistics of the production, all the physical and budgetary and other stuff that's involved in turning the words and ideas into sets and costumes and performances and music and visual effects and so forth. The showrunner is the head of the writers' room.

Well, no. Gene Roddenberry was the head creative producer, what we would now call a showrunner, throughout the first two seasons. But he was learning as he went, and the other members of the writing staff who came and went had a lot of influence on the show as well -- people like fellow producer Gene L. Coon and story editors including John D. F. Black, D. C. Fontana, and John Meredyth Lucas. Not to mention that TV in the '60s wasn't as "room-driven" as it is today and relied more on the contributions of freelance scriptwriters.