“We were wiped out, off the schedule, killed. I was looking for other things to do next year, and finding that everyone still thought of me as Captain Kirk. Fortunately, so did Paramount.”
Star Trek Memories, William Shatner
“It was an easy decision, yes. Do I regret it? A little. But the fun was gone, the magic was gone, and the money was gone, so moving over to Mission was the right thing for me to do. I didn’t even watch them until they came out on VHS.”
Starlog, June 1986, Interview with Leonard Nimoy
“To get us on the air again after the second season, it took five hundred thousand letters. To get us back on after the third season, it took five hundred thousand dollars.”
Beyond Uhura, Nichelle Nichols
“It hurt, to be knocked off the air by something I’d helped create. Though naturally I was thrilled for my friends on the show, so I had mixed feelings, definitely.”
Inside Star Trek, Herb Solow and Bob Justman
After the filming of Turnabout Intruder, Star Trek was dead. Off the schedule, a show that had - in the opinion of everyone involved - fallen past its prime, and it was time to move on. Paramount certainly thought so, and many executives were relieved to be rid of their unwanted show, able to focus more attention on their successful Desilu acquisitions - Mission: Impossible and Mannix, both still performing strongly in the ratings. Star Trek, however, still had an unexpected shot left in its locker - Kaiser Broadcasting. As early as the first season, Henry J. Kaiser had bought Star Trek for his syndication network, and had plans for the show, running it against the nightly news shows of the ‘Big Three’ networks, hours earlier than it had ever been shown before, and surprisingly, it did well. Very well. Well enough for him to be annoyed that there would be no more ‘product’ to show, that he only had seventy-nine episodes. That led to a meeting with the head of Paramount, and an unprecedented offer.
Later, some would suggest that Kaiser had offered to part-fund episodes to go straight to syndication, but that was never realistic. Not for the 1969-70 season, anyway. What he did do was offer to provide a contribution to funding of any future episodes, considerably reducing Paramount’s production costs. That made a new season of Star Trek at least a faint possibility. What gave it a stronger chance, ironically, were Herb Solow and Robert Justman, two of the people critical to the original success of the show. They had produced a pilot movie, ‘Then Came Bronson’, for NBC, and the network’s reaction was, to put it mildly, questionable. A show about a man travelling America to ‘renew it’s soul’, they looked at it, and wondered if it could work as a series. It was pencilled in - very loosely - for Wednesdays at 10pm, but at this point, a Paramount executive suggested that they might take a lesser payment for another season of Star Trek, should NBC be interested. At this stage, it was all theory, all discussion, and NBC Burbank was the site of a major argument in late March. When it was over, Star Trek - astonishingly and to the amazement of its still-protesting fanbase - was back on the air, with the Wednesday night slot, and Then Came Bronson was gone.
Producer Fred Freiberger was the most surprised of all. He was convinced that - despite all of his efforts - Star Trek was dead, and being informed on April 1st that it was back to life seemed somehow ironic, but he and Arthur Singer immediately started to pull things together. Then stopped, as Singer accepted an offer from Hawaii Five-O, and left the show. The first job was to find a new script editor from anywhere, and he immediately decided to try and lure D. C. Fontana back to the job. This almost failed as soon as it began, and it took the intervention of Gene Roddenberry - reportedly his only contribution to the fourth season - to bring her back, and then, only on a thirteen-episode contract. Assigning scripts was going to be difficult at best, and Fontana immediately offered assignments to people she knew ‘got’ Star Trek, and started to scour through the list of previously-rejected premises. Within a week, she, ‘Lee Cronin’, David Gerrold, Stephen Kandel and Jerome Bixby were working on the first five episodes of the season.
Bringing the cast back should have been straightforward. William Shatner was still under contract, and there was never a debate about whether he should return, as was DeForest Kelley. The only condition Shatner made was that he wanted to direct an episode in the first thirteen, to make up for one he had lost in the third season; this was agreed to with some qualms. The other cast members might have had some qualms, but work was work - though the increasingly tight budgets meant that it was indicated that almost all episodes would have either Sulu or Chekov, not both of them, though they hoped to have them together on occasion. James Doohan pitched for a promotion to the title credits, but at this point, did not get it - but signed on to appear in every episode of the season - at this point, they were only committing to thirteen.
One remained - Leonard Nimoy. Already, Mission: Impossible had been making suggestions that he would be an ideal replacement for the departing Martin Landau, and he had provisionally accepted, but the fact was that he was tired of Spock, tired of Star Trek, and tired of fighting over his character and the quality of the scripts. He was out, and Freiberger opted to simply release him from his contract, figuring that a replacement ‘alien’ would probably cost less to hire, and certainly would be less trouble. Of course, this now meant that the Enterprise would return without what many had considered to be the leading character of the show…
Star Trek Memories, William Shatner
“It was an easy decision, yes. Do I regret it? A little. But the fun was gone, the magic was gone, and the money was gone, so moving over to Mission was the right thing for me to do. I didn’t even watch them until they came out on VHS.”
Starlog, June 1986, Interview with Leonard Nimoy
“To get us on the air again after the second season, it took five hundred thousand letters. To get us back on after the third season, it took five hundred thousand dollars.”
Beyond Uhura, Nichelle Nichols
“It hurt, to be knocked off the air by something I’d helped create. Though naturally I was thrilled for my friends on the show, so I had mixed feelings, definitely.”
Inside Star Trek, Herb Solow and Bob Justman
After the filming of Turnabout Intruder, Star Trek was dead. Off the schedule, a show that had - in the opinion of everyone involved - fallen past its prime, and it was time to move on. Paramount certainly thought so, and many executives were relieved to be rid of their unwanted show, able to focus more attention on their successful Desilu acquisitions - Mission: Impossible and Mannix, both still performing strongly in the ratings. Star Trek, however, still had an unexpected shot left in its locker - Kaiser Broadcasting. As early as the first season, Henry J. Kaiser had bought Star Trek for his syndication network, and had plans for the show, running it against the nightly news shows of the ‘Big Three’ networks, hours earlier than it had ever been shown before, and surprisingly, it did well. Very well. Well enough for him to be annoyed that there would be no more ‘product’ to show, that he only had seventy-nine episodes. That led to a meeting with the head of Paramount, and an unprecedented offer.
Later, some would suggest that Kaiser had offered to part-fund episodes to go straight to syndication, but that was never realistic. Not for the 1969-70 season, anyway. What he did do was offer to provide a contribution to funding of any future episodes, considerably reducing Paramount’s production costs. That made a new season of Star Trek at least a faint possibility. What gave it a stronger chance, ironically, were Herb Solow and Robert Justman, two of the people critical to the original success of the show. They had produced a pilot movie, ‘Then Came Bronson’, for NBC, and the network’s reaction was, to put it mildly, questionable. A show about a man travelling America to ‘renew it’s soul’, they looked at it, and wondered if it could work as a series. It was pencilled in - very loosely - for Wednesdays at 10pm, but at this point, a Paramount executive suggested that they might take a lesser payment for another season of Star Trek, should NBC be interested. At this stage, it was all theory, all discussion, and NBC Burbank was the site of a major argument in late March. When it was over, Star Trek - astonishingly and to the amazement of its still-protesting fanbase - was back on the air, with the Wednesday night slot, and Then Came Bronson was gone.
Producer Fred Freiberger was the most surprised of all. He was convinced that - despite all of his efforts - Star Trek was dead, and being informed on April 1st that it was back to life seemed somehow ironic, but he and Arthur Singer immediately started to pull things together. Then stopped, as Singer accepted an offer from Hawaii Five-O, and left the show. The first job was to find a new script editor from anywhere, and he immediately decided to try and lure D. C. Fontana back to the job. This almost failed as soon as it began, and it took the intervention of Gene Roddenberry - reportedly his only contribution to the fourth season - to bring her back, and then, only on a thirteen-episode contract. Assigning scripts was going to be difficult at best, and Fontana immediately offered assignments to people she knew ‘got’ Star Trek, and started to scour through the list of previously-rejected premises. Within a week, she, ‘Lee Cronin’, David Gerrold, Stephen Kandel and Jerome Bixby were working on the first five episodes of the season.
Bringing the cast back should have been straightforward. William Shatner was still under contract, and there was never a debate about whether he should return, as was DeForest Kelley. The only condition Shatner made was that he wanted to direct an episode in the first thirteen, to make up for one he had lost in the third season; this was agreed to with some qualms. The other cast members might have had some qualms, but work was work - though the increasingly tight budgets meant that it was indicated that almost all episodes would have either Sulu or Chekov, not both of them, though they hoped to have them together on occasion. James Doohan pitched for a promotion to the title credits, but at this point, did not get it - but signed on to appear in every episode of the season - at this point, they were only committing to thirteen.
One remained - Leonard Nimoy. Already, Mission: Impossible had been making suggestions that he would be an ideal replacement for the departing Martin Landau, and he had provisionally accepted, but the fact was that he was tired of Spock, tired of Star Trek, and tired of fighting over his character and the quality of the scripts. He was out, and Freiberger opted to simply release him from his contract, figuring that a replacement ‘alien’ would probably cost less to hire, and certainly would be less trouble. Of course, this now meant that the Enterprise would return without what many had considered to be the leading character of the show…
