It’s almost ten years since the day Gene Roddenberry called me to say he had sold a series to NBC called Star Trek. “It’s going to be a sophisticated Wagon Train to the Stars,” Gene said; and we both laughed.[3] We both laughed because Gene was making fun of the tunnel-vision thinking of many television network programming clowns who cannot perceive of any new property in an original way, but must tag it in as being “just like The Fugitive, except the guy is running to keep people from taking his blood, which makes people immortal” (The Immortal), or “similar to Bonanza, except the father is married to a beautiful Mexican woman” (High Chapparal), or “it’s Mannix with a fat detective” (Cannon), “an old, thin detective” (Barnaby Jones), “a blind detective” (Longstreet), “a crippled detective” (Ironside).

Star Trek went on the air in September of 1967 and despite the wild enthusiasm of science fiction aficionados, it had a rough go its first year, due mainly to that purblind arrogance of the nameless decision-makers on their skyscraper mountaintops.

(As an aside: I was asked to do a magazine piece on the show, in 1968, and in researching the subject, from an intimate knowledge of what went on behind the scenes because of my personal involvement, I discovered that at one point, early in the show’s existence, NBC wanted to make Mr. Spock more “human.” He wasn’t going to be that jaundiced shade of yellow, he wasn’t going to have the arched eyebrows that always made Leonard Nimoy look as though he’d just been caught in the act of doing something unspeakable, he wasn’t going to have the pointy hobbit ears. He was going to be a more human-style extraterrestrial. NBC even went so far as to have photos of Nimoy in the Spock regalia retouched, and those airbrushed photos were included in promotional flyers. I managed to get hold of one, long after the series had become a hit, and when I started following up the chain-of-command that had ordered the alterations [what Trekkies would term] a desecration, I found no one would cop the rap for it. Every network official I spoke to said it had never happened…until I whipped the actual flyer on him. Then he’d go fumfuh-fumfuh and aim me in the direction of the next higher-up. Till finally I confronted the then-president of NBC—I can’t remember his name nearly a decade later; they change scapegoats at the networks more regularly than normal people change their socks—and he feigned an attitude of horror that such a thing could even have been considered; an attitude so convincing he should have been nominated for an Emmy in the category of Executive Dissembling. With all the ethic of a Nixon throwing a Mitchell to the dogs, he picked up his phone and demanded his staff find out exactly who had been responsible for such a cataclysmic awfulness. Naturally, all the well-creased and dryer-blown dudes who had second-guessed the alien makeup were covered, and the only martyr they could serve up was some poor schlepper in the art department who, they assured me, had taken it upon himself to make the changes. Now, you know and I know there isn’t any rational way in which a 32nd art assistant down in the advertising department at NBC is going to presume to alter one of the major elements of a prime-time series, but they actually thought I’d go for it. And they fired the poor slob. To prove they were upright and conscientious. I must confess I felt considerable guilt about that chain of events, even though I was innocently the catalyst that caused the reaction. But it solidified for me, for all time, the reality of just how far, and how low, television executives will go to cover up their mistakes and avoid even the faintest scintilla of bad press.)