A Brief Guide to Star Trek

his series. He only knew the show had to focus on Rice (Gary Lockwood), while each episode had to introduce one-off characters and situations for him to learn from.
    Screenings of the pilot were arranged for LA’s freelance TV writers in the hope they could generate fresh story ideas. Roddenberry picked pitches he liked and commissioned scripts, appointing Del Reisman (
The Twilight Zone
) as story editor. Unhappy with the quality of the scripts and story outlines coming in, but finding it difficult to articulate exactly what he wanted, Roddenberry began to rewrite each script until he was happy with it. Reisman found himself on the receiving end of many complaints from the nineteen different writers who contributed to the twenty-nine episodes of the series. Roddenberry only scripted the opening and closing episodes, but he rewrote just about every other instalment.
    From September 1963
The Lieutenant
began airing on NBC, opposite the ratings giant
The Jackie Gleason Hour
on CBS. The show was quick to catch on, proving to be a ratings record-breaker. However, the behind-the-scenes troubles continued. By early 1964 the Pentagon had complained about
The Lieutenant
directly to NBC, who in turn raised the issue with MGM. The final straw was a script called ‘To Set It Right’, dealing with racism in the service. Always aware of the big issues of the day, Roddenberry had decided to spice up his show by including some ‘hot-button’ topics. The episode saw a black Marine and his wife (
Star Trek
’s Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, with whom Roddenberry also later had an affair) attacked by a racist Marine (Dennis Hopper). Although Rice is able to overcome the issue and the men agree to work together for the good of the platoon, it was not enough to mollify the military: official cooperation was finally withdrawn.
    Thanks to the use of the MGM back lot, as well as materials left over from assorted war movies and a lot of stock footage,
The Lieutenant
was able to struggle through to completion of its one and only series. As the US involvement in Vietnam escalated and looked ever more questionable, a series extolling the virtues of the armed forces looked decidedly out of date: NBC decided not to renew the show. Roddenberry wrote the final episode himself, sending Rice to an unnamed south-east Asiancountry where he has to cooperate with a representative of ‘the enemy’ in order for both to survive. The episode features a debate on the nature of war and warfare that prefigured several episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s much more successful second TV series as producer:
Star Trek
.

    Gene Roddenberry was desperate to get another TV series up and running to prove he was not a one-hit wonder. This time it had to be entirely his idea and a production wholly under his control. He’d realised control by the producer was necessary, but also that such control was often hard won in battles with networks and financiers. He was equally realistic that both the broadcast networks and the financiers were necessary evils he’d have to contend with.
The Lieutenant
was only the beginning: after all, as a natural storyteller he had so many other tales to tell.
    One he’d outlined previously concerned a Zeppelin-style dirigible crewed by a team of multi-racial explorers that crisscrossed the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, discovering ‘new civilizations’. The idea had not progressed far, until Roddenberry revived it after
The Lieutenant
. This time, it was to be set in the future, the hot air balloon replaced by a spaceship.
    The suggestion to develop a science fiction series had come from Alden Schwimmer, Roddenberry’s agent and the West Coast head of the Ashley-Famous agency. In 1963 the space race between Russia and the US was starting to heat up. Two years previously President John F. Kennedy had made his speech committing the country to ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth’ before the 1960s came to an end. Russia had been active in space since the launch of Sputnik, with Yuri Gagarin the first man in space in April 1961. Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr had become the first American in space in May 1961, followed by John Glenn circling the Earth in 1962. A TV series that could capture the excitement and optimism of the space programme would surely attract a huge Americantelevision audience hungry for drama chronicling the conquest of this wild, new frontier.
    The first few years of the