Star Trek

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Trek began with a starship called the USS Enterprise and a mission stated in plain words: "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." The series premiered on the 6th of September 1966 on Canada's CTV network, then reached American living rooms two days later on NBC. Gene Roddenberry created it, and Paramount came to own it. What started as one television show grew into films, novels, comic books, video games, and a fandom with its own name. This documentary asks how a canceled program became one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. It looks at the man who pitched a Western in space, the fans who refused to let the show die, the technologies it inspired, and the corporate hands the property passed through across six decades.

• 2. A Wagon Train To The Stars

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  As early as 1964, Gene Roddenberry drafted a proposal for the series, marketing it publicly as "a Wagon Train to the stars." Privately he told friends a different story. He was modeling the show on Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, and he wanted each episode to work on two levels. One was a suspenseful adventure. The other was a morality tale.

  Roddenberry drew on more than Swift. He took inspiration from C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and television westerns such as Wagon Train. The crew he imagined would serve in Starfleet, the peacekeeping armada of the United Federation of Planets, a fleet built in the 23rd century.

  Many conflicts in Star Trek were allegories for the issues of their decade. The Original Series addressed the 1960s, and later spinoffs took on the concerns of their own times. War and peace, authoritarianism, imperialism, racism, religion, sexism, and the role of technology all surfaced in the storytelling.

  Roddenberry described the strategy bluntly. "By creating a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles," he said. He added that the network never caught the messages about purple people on far-off planets. They were more concerned, he claimed, about cleavage, even sending a censor to the set to measure how much of a woman's chest was showing. He depicted the Federation as an optimistic version of the United Nations, an anti-war vision the network opposed over worries about marketability.

• 3. Saved By The Fans

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  By the end of its first season, the show's average rating had dropped to 52nd out of 94 programs. NBC threatened cancellation during the second season. The fan base, led by Bjo Trimble, mounted an unprecedented letter-writing campaign to keep the program on the air. NBC renewed it, but moved it to the "Friday night death slot" and cut its budget sharply.

  In protest at the demotion, Roddenberry resigned as producer and stepped back from his creation. Fred Freiberger took over for the third and final season. Despite a second letter campaign, NBC canceled the series after three seasons and 79 episodes.

  The first Star Trek convention took place on the 21st to the 23rd of January 1972 in New York City. Organizers expected a few hundred fans. Several thousand turned up. Fans still gather at similar conventions around the world, and they have adopted the names "Trekkies" and "Trekkers" for themselves.

  The pattern repeated decades later. When UPN threatened to cancel the prequel series Enterprise after its third season, fans launched a campaign echoing the one that had saved the Original Series. A group called "Save Enterprise" tried to raise 30 million dollars to privately finance a fifth season. The drive earned press but failed, and Enterprise aired its final episode on the 13th of May 2005, ending an eighteen-year continuous run of Star Trek programming on television.

• 4. Rerun To Resurrection

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  After cancellation, Paramount Television licensed syndication rights to recoup its losses, and reruns began in late 1969. By 1974 the series aired in over 140 domestic and 54 international markets. By 1977 it had reached 120 countries, and the cast described Star Trek as "the most popular series in the world."

  Filmation, working with Paramount Television, produced Star Trek: The Animated Series, with the original cast reprising their roles. It ran on NBC for 22 half-hour episodes over two seasons of Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1974. Short-lived as it was, it earned the franchise's only Emmy in a "Best Series" category, for Outstanding Entertainment Children's Series.

  Plans for a series called Star Trek: Phase II, begun in May 1975, collapsed when the proposed Paramount Television Service folded. Following the box office of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Paramount turned the planned Phase II pilot into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It opened in North America on the 7th of December 1979 to mixed reviews and earned 139 million dollars worldwide, below expectations but enough for a sequel.

  The sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, turned the franchise's fortunes around. It grossed less than the first film but cost far less to make, so it netted more profit. Paramount produced six feature films between 1979 and 1991, each starring the Original Series cast. By 1983 the studio saw Star Trek as a property it could carry across books through Simon & Schuster and video games through Sega, and in 1987 it returned to television with Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• 5. The Berman Era And The Reboot

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  Roddenberry died on the 24th of October 1991, and executive producer Rick Berman took control of the franchise. Inside Paramount the property was simply called "the franchise," a tent pole the studio leaned on when other projects failed. The Next Generation held the highest ratings of any Star Trek series and became the most syndicated show in the final years of its seven-season run.

  Paramount answered that success with Deep Space Nine in 1993, which lasted seven seasons of its own. Voyager followed in January 1995 and became the flagship of the new United Paramount Network. Star Trek production peaked in the mid-1990s, with Deep Space Nine and Voyager airing at the same time and Next Generation feature films arriving in 1994, 1996, and 1998. By 1998 the franchise funded a significant portion of the studio's operations.

  The prequel series Enterprise did not match its predecessors, and the 2002 film Nemesis performed poorly at the box office. Paramount relieved Berman of control, and the future of the franchise looked uncertain.

  In 2007 Paramount hired a new team to revive it on the big screen. Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman and producer J. J. Abrams created the franchise's eleventh film, simply titled Star Trek, releasing it in May 2009 with a new cast playing the original crew. Set in an alternate continuity later called the Kelvin Timeline, its marketing targeted non-fans with the line "this is not your father's Star Trek." The film won the franchise's first Academy Award, for makeup, and was followed by Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013 and Star Trek Beyond on the 22nd of July 2016.

• 6. The Streaming Universe

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  Star Trek: Discovery premiered on the 24th of September 2017 to help draw subscribers to the CBS All Access streaming service. Netflix funded the production in exchange for international screening rights, a deal that ended right before the fourth season premiere in November 2021. By then the service had been renamed Paramount+.

  In June 2018, after becoming sole showrunner of Discovery, Alex Kurtzman signed a five-year deal with CBS Television Studios to build out the franchise. He wanted multiple series in one universe, each with its own distinct feel, an approach he compared to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The shows would not tell a single connected story, so audiences could watch any one without seeing the rest. CBS and Kurtzman called this the Star Trek Universe.

  The franchise's television presence reached a new peak in 2022, with five Star Trek series airing at once. Picard's finale aired in April 2023, and Discovery's in May 2024. Paramount also planned a television film every two years, beginning with Star Trek: Section 31, starring Michelle Yeoh as Empress Georgiou, given a release date of the 24th of January 2025.

• 7. Where No Show Has Gone

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  The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before" was taken almost verbatim from a U.S. White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in 1957. The fiction would loop back into the real world again and again. The franchise inspired designers of the Palm PDA and the handheld mobile phone, and Michael Jones, chief technologist of Google Earth, cited the tricorder's mapping ability as one inspiration for Keyhole and Google Earth.

  The Tricorder X Prize, a contest to build a medical tricorder, was announced in 2012, with ten finalists chosen in 2014. No team met all the criteria, so smaller prizes went to three finalists instead. The show also brought teleportation to popular attention, and its famously misquoted phrase "Beam me up, Scotty" entered everyday speech. In 1976, after a letter-writing campaign, NASA named its prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise after the fictional starship.

  In the 1960s it was controversial for the Enterprise crew to include a Japanese helmsman, a Russian navigator, and a black female communications officer. The kiss between Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura in the episode "Plato's Stepchildren" was daring, though it is often mis-cited as American television's first scripted interracial kiss.

  Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, nearly left the series. She recalled meeting a fan at an NAACP dinner who turned out to be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan," he told her, saying Star Trek was the only show he let his children stay up to watch. When she mentioned leaving, he replied, "You can't. You're part of history." She stayed, then later recruited the first non-white people and women into the US Space Shuttle program, working for NASA from the late 1970s into the late 1980s. In 2020 a Star Trek fan, Peter Marks of the Food and Drug Administration, suggested the name Operation Warp Speed for the US COVID-19 vaccine effort.

• 8. Owned By The Franchise

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  Star Trek began as a joint production of Norway Productions, owned by Roddenberry, and Desilu, owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. The series lost money during its initial broadcast, and neither NBC nor Paramount expected to recoup the losses through syndication. Around 1970, Paramount offered its share of the series to Roddenberry, but he could not raise the 150,000 dollars the studio asked.

  The corporate lineage grew tangled. Desilu was acquired by Gulf+Western, which had bought Paramount Pictures in 1966, and was reorganized as Paramount Television. Gulf+Western later renamed itself Paramount Communications. Sumner Redstone acquired a controlling stake in Viacom through his family's theater chain, National Amusements, and in 1994 Viacom merged with Paramount Communications. Viacom then merged with its former parent CBS Corporation in 1999.

  In 2005 the Redstone family split Viacom into two independent groups, dividing Star Trek between them. CBS held the copyrights, marks, production assets, characters, names, and licensing rights for the television series. Viacom, which housed Paramount Pictures, kept the feature film library and the rights to produce new films. The split fueled delayed and canceled productions, and executives at CBS even resisted the 2009 film and its sequels.

  The halves came back together. On the 13th of August 2019, the CBS and Viacom boards agreed to reunite as ViacomCBS, finalized on the 4th of December. The company was renamed Paramount Global on the 16th of February 2022. A deal to merge with Skydance Media, approved on the 7th of July 2024, completed on the 7th of August 2025, producing a company officially named "Paramount, A Skydance Corporation" and widely called Paramount Skydance. The merchandise alone had generated 4 billion dollars for Paramount by 2000, a measure of how far the property had traveled from a starship that once lost money on first broadcast.