Sorry that you're surrounded by bad over-actors, Chris. That's gotta be tough. Most people I know don't spout memorized speeches, but. They don't. Dramatically stop. After two or. Three words. Most of the time. They are. Speaking.
And neither does Shatner. You're mistaking the caricature for the reality.
And realism is a lame attempt at a defense. It's Star Trek. There's almost literally nothing that's realistic about it.
By 1960s standards, yes, there was. Roddenberry's specific, explicit intention for
Star Trek was to make it the first SF television drama with continuing characters to be approached as naturalistic adult drama in the vein of shows like
Gunsmoke and
Naked City. The first
three pages of the second-season writers' bible are an extended lecture about realism and the importance of not having the characters act in a way that would be unbelievable in a present-day setting. And
Star Trek was one of the vanishingly few SFTV series until recent decades to bother with scientific consultants or make even the most cursory attempt at plausible science, though it often made informed concessions for dramatic or budgetary purposes.
But the standards of realism have changed over the generations. Art evolves over time. For thousands of years, all drama was done on the stage and had to be stylized and larger than life for the performances to be legible to people in the back rows. Once film and television came along, once cameras and microphones could get up close to the performers, acting styles began to evolve in a more naturalistic direction. Eventually the same happened with cinematography as well, with more handheld camera use, lens flares, and other techniques suggesting a documentary feel. But it was a gradual process of evolution, so what audiences half a century ago would have seen as realistic would seem stagey and artificial to modern audiences. It's not just
Star Trek; look at any "naturalistic" show or movie or docudrama of the '60s or '70s, anything that was made with the goal of feeling true-to-life and grounded or even meant to simulate actual documentary footage, and it will seem far more staged and artificial than a modern equivalent.
And that's what I'm saying about Shatner's performance style -- at least the performance style he started out with and made his name with in the '50s and '60s, as opposed to the self-caricature he's embraced in the past couple of decades. It's stagier than modern acting styles, yes, but it's fairly naturalistic within the context of the theatrical, Shakespearean tradition in which he was trained. It's a stylized representation of natural hesitation, a calculated simulation of a character making up his lines as he goes rather than reciting them as rote. Everything is relative, and I judge Shatner's performance style in the context of the theatrical tradition in which he was trained.
And as per that clip, it's about an actor who can't completely remember their lines adding time to recall them. Certainly not something people tend to do in the real world.
And I've already pointed out that, yes, they absolutely do. My father did it all the time -- pausing to decide what he wanted to say next. I often got very impatient waiting for him to finish a sentence. (And I think I must do the same thing to some extent, because I know he'd often interrupt and try to finish my sentences for me. Except it wasn't the usual "finish each other's sentences" thing where two people are perfectly in sync, because whenever my father tried to finish one of my sentences, he almost invariably guessed wrong about what I was going to say.)
But to try to explain away his over-acting is more than a bit disingenuous.
I'm not "explaining it away," I'm putting it in context. Because it's unfair to judge it without that context.
