Word: treks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...great marketing appeal, and it was only a matter of time before the stations that own rerun rights to the show began to cash in on it. For example, the Kaiser Broadcasting chain, which owns rights to the show in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, gave its own Star Trek conventions as part of its fall promotion campaign for the show. In addition, the chain is taking heed of fan complaints and suggestions: it owns the series unedited and in the same order as NBC did. (A common complaint is that callous station managers have butchered the reruns by editing...
With so much interest in the show and with all of its marketing possibilities it is hard to believe that NBC cancelled the show, yet it did. A collection of charges and counter charges surrounds the network's decision to axe Star Trek. "When you're working in television," said NBC Vice President Stanley Robertson, "you've got to realize that some shows are going to make it and some aren't. Star Trek was never a hard core success in the ratings, and we would have been justified in cutting the show after the first season...
...denies this charge. "We kept switching it to save the show," Robertson said. 'NBC is not in the business of not being successful. We all liked Star Trek and we wanted to see if the show could do better in a different time slot...
...besides network and rating problems, Star Trek also had internal troubles. Throughout the first season Roddenberry kept firm control of the show, but talk of cancellation prompted him to take more of a background role during the second season. "I told them I would continue to produce it only if we could get a reasonable time slot," he said. "But I couldn't budge them, and I had no choice but to live up to my promise...
After Roddenberry left, Fred Frieburger, whose previous television experience consisted mainly of the short-lived Ironhorse series, was called in to run the show. Two separate sources say that Frieburger's first contact with Star Trek was when network executives locked him into a screening room and made him watch eight or nine hours of the program. "Most of Frieburger's scripts were due to nepotism, favors he owed people. Some of that stuff was so bad it made me ashamed to be a fan," says Bjo Trimble who followed the switch closely. "It literally killed the show...