Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the essay “Spaced Out: The Star Trek Literary Phenomenon: Where No TV Series Has Gone Before” by Michael M. Epstein, which appeared in Television Quarterly (©1996 by The National Academy of Television Arts and Science).

On September 8, 1996, when NBC premiered its new futuristic series, Star Trek, few were watching. Conceived by television writer Gene Roddenberry as part American Western, part science fiction, and part contemporary morality play, Star Trek languished for two and a half years before being canceled as a ratings flop in January 1969.

Two years later, Star Trek somehow had captured the imagination and viewer loyalty of million of Americans who “discovered” the show anew in syndicated reruns. Star Trek‘s meteoric rise to popularity was unprecedented for a television program. By January 1972, the show was airing in over one hundred local markets in America and seventy more around the world.

Perhaps more than other television series, Star Trek benefited greatly from being the right show at the right time. In middle-class America, social and political change in the late 1960s made it increasingly difficult for people to unite in common purpose. Civil rights struggles, the Vietnam War, and the rise of a culturally empowered youth movement, among other things, divided many Americans by race, gender, age, and politics.

Although television news programs helped focus the country on the rifts that had begun to percolate on campuses, in city street, and around dining room tables, as a rule entertainment programming avoided conflict and controversy. Escapist comedy about suburban witches, genies, and rural townspeople was standard fare. Network drama emphasized law, order, and conformity, whether on the police beat, in a courtroom, or out on the great Western frontier.

Star Trek was different. Created in the optimistic afterglow of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration of the space race, Star Trek’s exploration of the “final frontier” was a theme that resonated with million of idealistic and awestruck Americans who looked at the Apollo moon landings as a crowning, positive achievement for humankind. Still, as Gene Roddenberry often claimed, Star Trek was less about the future than the present.

Indeed, it was precisely because of its futuristic storyline that Star Trek was able to address many of the contemporary social problems that other programs shunned. Star Trek's visionary episodes on race relations, nuclear deterrence, multiculturalism, and ecology (among others) were not threatening to those who saw it as fantastic science fiction. For those who saw the program as a window into current controversy, Star Trek offered insight and added perspective to continued American cultural and political change in the 1970s. Either way, the show’s wide appeal in syndication was such that, by 1977, Star Trek had become the most-watched off-network series drama of all time.

In nearly thirty years, Gene Roddenberry’s fantasy space concept has spawned four prime-time series, continued syndication, a cartoon, eight major motion pictures, countless toys, games, and computer software. Nearly overlooked, however, is the unparalleled impact Star Trek has had on an industry that has only recently become television friendly: publishing. Since the early 1970s, when the first novels hit bookshelves, the world of Star Trek has exploded in print like no other phenomenon in American popular culture. Star Trek fan volumes, cast memoirs, and novels continue to appear—and in record numbers.

Of all the “classic” and contemporary shows available to a critic, none illustrates the scope of America’s cultural evolution as eloquently as saga of Star Trek and its next-generation spin-offs. In a culture that has undergone dramatic and far-reaching change in the last thirty years, Star Trek sweetens the often bitter alienation of contemporary change with the type of familiarity and constancy that constancy that only a show with a thirty-year history can offer.

Star Trek offers viewers the paradox of a program that combines provocative insight into changing cultural values with the reassuring comfort that the “known” universe of Starfleet, Klingons, and phasers can nonetheless survive intact, and even grow.

Because of its active fandom, Star Trek has become a television phenomenon like no other in American culture. And just as the original Star Trek has found new expression in series such as The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, an Voyager, I suspect fans will find new ways to indulge express their private affection for Star Trek by reading—and writing—books in greater numbers. As America goes boldly into the next millennium, so will Star Trek in print, on television, and in formats yet to come.