Would Star Trek be remembered today if TOS series had lasted five years?

[JonnyQuest037]

A one-season Trek might have remained mostly underground, rather like The Prisoner, remembered and viewed only by a coven of fanatics (i.e., like us, only smaller).

And this thread would be titled "What If Star Trek Had Made It To A Second Season?"

 

[Lance]

Were it still slogging along after five years, I suspect they'd have found a way to extend it beyond that. I think it would have been rather unusual for a series of that time to have a set time limit.

Around the same time, there was this series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_for_Your_Life_(TV_series)
The premise was that the protagonist had two years to live. That didn't stop them from doing a third year while their ratings held out.

And it's not uncommon for dramas set during real life events -- say, during war time -- to last years longer than the wars themselves did, although we might (at least) assume that in some of those cases the conventional wisdom of 1 season = 1 year simply does not apply. (Although it does get silly when we see characters in a show set specifically during world war two, for example, to celebrate 9 Christmases on screen, or something! )

If I put my cynics hat on for a minute () I might hypothesize that the whole "five year mission" thing was just Gene Roddenberry trying to arbitrarily set a "sweet spot" for the show to end and reach the magical number 100. Star Trek thrived in syndication even with it's 79 episodes, but most TV shows of the period preferred a tally of 100 or more to be sold for syndication. It wasn't uncommon therefore for many TV shows to have a 'five year plan' hard baked into the series format, to try and help and bump the shows over that landmark 100 episode figure.

Interesting list of this here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveYearPlan

 

[Mojochi]

Thankfully, there was three seasons which was enough episodes to survive in syndication. If it had five seasons, then I think we would have gotten the same franchise results. It would have been a problem if it only had one season.

^This. What brought about the resurgence that took it to cinemas, & built the franchise we know today, was #1 the success of the show in reruns (Which would still have been the same, even had it run a little while longer) & #2, the overwhelming success of Star Wars, opening the industry up for mass sci-fi appeal. Alien, & The Black Hole were released the same year as Star Trek TMP

Had #2 not happened you might only have seen a few tv movies of Star Trek, much like Gilligan's Island got, or a short run like Desilu's other franchise, Mission Impossible, which came back shortly in the 80's as well. The primary catalyst for those shows to reap later resurgences was the effect of their success in reruns, which became a new television programming force throughout the 70s. Star Trek got another boost because it's fanbase were even more die hard & there was a call for notable sci-fi right at that time. The stars aligned, so to speak

I, myself was born in 1971. I've been a life long Trek fan, & only ever knew it in reruns from the 70s. It was on tv a LOT

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Two factors I don't think we've noted so far:

1) The U.S. landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, which led to a general increase of interest in space travel in general.

2) A couple of years after Star Trek ended, the networks started using demographics, and they discovered that ST had some of the most desirable audience demographics of any show. If they'd started measuring those in the late 60s, TOS could've had a longer run than it did.

So who knows? If TOS had made it to five seasons, it could very well have had higher ratings by the end of the fifth year!