Star Trek is one of the most culturally influential televsision shows—and perhaps the most influential science fiction TV series—in history. The original series, which aired in the late sixties, has since spawned five successor series, eleven movies, a plethora of merchandise, and a multi-billion dollar industry collectively known as the Star Trek fracnchise.
Gene Rodenberry sold Star Trek in 1964 to NBC as a classic adventure drama, calling it a "Wagon Train to the Stars". In reality, Roddenberry wanted to tell more sophisticated stories, using futuristic situations as analogies for current problems on Earth and rectifying them through humanism and optimism. The show's writers frequently addressed moral and social issues in the episodes by tackling topics such as slavery, warfare and discrimination. The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before" was taken almost verbatim from a US White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in 1957.
A major inspiration for Star Trek was the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet. There were previous sophisticated science fiction TV shows that were either anthology series such as The Twilight Zone, but Star Trek was the first American science-fiction series with a continuing cast that was aimed at adults telling morality tales with complex narratives.
Although earlier British science-fiction shows done with marionettes and soap operas had interracial casting, it was unique for an American live-action series to do this. When there were few non-white or foreign roles in American television dramas, Roddenberry created a multi-ethnic crew for the Enterprise, including an African Woman, a Scotsman, a Japanese American, and—most notably—an alien, the half-Vulcan Spock. In the second season, reflecting the contemporaneous Cold War, Roddenberry added a Russian crewmember. The original series is also credited with American television's first interracial kiss.
The series gained multiple Emmys award nominations during its run, but never won. Despite a restricted budget (obvious at times), the show's special effects were superior to contemporary TV shows (if you can believe it now), its stories were often written by prominent science fiction authors (though often re-written by the show's regular writers), and many of its production values—such as costumes and set design—were of high caliber for such a low budget. Some of the production staff of The Outer Limits worked on Star Trek and often made creative re-use of effects of props from the earlier series.
During its network run from 1966 to 1969, ratings were mediocre. A letter-writing campaign by fans, unprecedented in size, contributed to NBC's decision to renew the series for a third season, but the network put the show in a, and TOS was finally canceled after its third season. Ironically Star Trek is one of the few shows that is immortalized and more popular in re-runs than when it was originally broadcast.
