NBC opened Star Trek on the night of September 8, 1966 with the sixth episode filmed rather than either of the two pilots it had paid for, because the network wanted a monster in the first hour; its own leading man called it one of the worst hours the show ever made.

By the summer of 1966 NBC had paid for two Star Trek pilots: one it turned down, and one it liked well enough to order a series from. When the network finally put the show on the air, on the evening of Thursday, September 8, it opened with neither of them.

Why did "The Man Trap" air first?

Because somebody at the network wanted a monster.

The hour that went out at 8:30 that night was production number six, written by George Clayton Johnson and directed by Marc Daniels. Its villain is a shape-shifting creature on the dead world M-113 that kills by pulling the salt out of a human body, and it spends most of the episode wearing the face of a woman it murdered years earlier. Robert Justman, one of the show's producers, later described the network's reasoning without affection: NBC wanted a show that would return a lot of numbers, and that meant a monster every week.

Justman had argued for "The Naked Time" instead, on the grounds that an audience meeting seven strangers needs to like them first. He lost. NBC had rejected the other candidates one by one for qualities the series would later be admired for: "Where No Man Has Gone Before" carried too much exposition, "The Corbomite Maneuver" lacked scope, "Charlie X" was too gentle, "Mudd's Women" was too scandalous. William Shatner, writing about it decades later, called the episode that won a dreadful show and one of the worst they ever made.

The audience disagreed. The first half hour drew a 25.2 Nielsen rating, with 46.7 percent of every American television set then switched on tuned to it.

The pilot nobody was allowed to see

The first pilot was called "The Cage." It was shot in late 1964 with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike and Majel Barrett as a female first officer known only as Number One, and NBC rejected it in February 1965. The objections that come down to us are that it was too cerebral and short on action.

What the network did next is the part that almost never happens. Rather than dropping the project, it paid for a second pilot.

Hunter's exclusive option ran out on June 1, 1965; he wanted a film career, and his wife, acting as manager, turned the part down for him. William Shatner took the captain's chair as James T. Kirk, and Leonard Nimoy's Spock became the only character to survive the rebuild intact. Most of "The Cage" was later cut apart and rebuilt into a two-part episode called "The Menagerie," which is how a rejected pilot became canon.

Did Lucille Ball save Star Trek?

She let it live, which is a smaller thing and was enough.

Gene Roddenberry took the show to Desilu Productions in 1964, after MGM passed. Desilu was run by Lucille Ball, who had bought out Desi Arnaz's stock in 1962 and held a majority of the company; its head of production, Herbert F. Solow, signed Roddenberry to a three-year development deal. In February 1966, with NBC's series order in hand, Solow defended the show, by his own account, before a board that wanted the money going to Mission: Impossible instead. Ball, as chairwoman, could overrule the board. She did.

Everything past that point gets thinner the harder you look at it. The research project Fact Trek, working from Desilu's own records, finds no evidence that Ball ever leaned on NBC for the second pilot, though her interventions on behalf of other Desilu shows are documented. No evidence that she spent personal money on either pilot. (The studio, not the network, absorbed the overruns: Fact Trek puts the first pilot's at $430,751.) One letter from her about the series survives, a note of congratulation from October 1966. Gary Morton, her husband and the studio's co-chairman, said the show was never a script brought to them, and Solow doubted she had read it at all.

What critics said in 1966

Variety predicted the show would not work and called it an incredible and dreary mess of confusion and complexities. The New York Times and The Boston Globe were unimpressed. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle liked it.

The ratings told the same story more slowly. Against a night of summer reruns the premiere won its hour with a 40.6 share in Trendex's twenty-six cities, then fell to second behind CBS once the other networks put real programming up against it. Two weeks later it ranked 33rd out of 94 network shows; the two after that ranked 51st. It never reached Nielsen's top twenty in three years on NBC.

Canada saw it first, and the record on why is thin

The first television audience anywhere to watch Star Trek was Canadian. CTV ran "The Man Trap" on Tuesday, September 6, two days ahead of NBC, and put it on at 7:30 in the evening instead of 8:30.

Why is less settled than the fact. Pip Wedge, a former CTV executive, told the writer Bill Brioux that the earlier slot was a deliberate play for a younger audience: they scheduled it earlier than the Americans did, he said, and got the kids. A competing explanation, that CTV moved it off Thursday to avoid border stations carrying the NBC feed, is repeated widely without a document behind it. What survives is a listing in old Canadian schedules and one man's recollection, thinner than a world premiere usually gets.

Did a letter-writing campaign really save the show?

Something like one did.

When cancellation rumors reached fandom late in 1967, Bjo Trimble and her husband John took a mailing list of roughly 4,000 science fiction convention attendees and asked every name on it to write to NBC and to recruit ten more people to do the same. Between December 1967 and March 1968 the network counted almost 116,000 letters, more than 52,000 of them in February alone. The show got its third season.

Two things usually go missing from that story. The figure often quoted is a million letters, said to have come privately from an NBC executive while the network admitted publicly to 116,000; nobody has produced a count. And Solow and Justman wrote that Roddenberry secretly started and paid for the campaign; Bjo Trimble denies it, saying he was kept at arm's length so NBC could not call it a put-up job, and that the fans paid. The third season went out Friday nights at ten with its budget cut to $175,000 an episode, and NBC canceled the show in February 1969 after 79 of them.

Where the audience actually came from

Reruns.

The show that could not hold a Thursday night found its viewers in afternoon syndication. By 1972 the Associated Press was calling it the show that would not die; it was running in more than 100 American cities and 60 other countries, and 3,000 people turned up to a convention in New York that January. By 1986 it was the country's most popular syndicated series, and in 1994 the reruns still aired in 94 percent of the United States. Nichelle Nichols had played Uhura, the first role of that weight given to an African-American woman on an American series, to an audience that largely found her in the afternoons.

The franchise that grew out of one bad Thursday now runs to thirteen television series and fourteen films, thirteen of them theatrical.

And Christopher Pike, the captain from the pilot NBC threw away in 1965, has been headlining a series of his own since 2022. Fifty-seven years is a long time for a network's rejected first draft to sit on a shelf before someone decides the audience was there all along. The people commissioning the next one will not be waiting on premiere night to find out.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "The Man Trap"
• Wikipedia, "Star Trek: The Original Series"
• Wikipedia, "The Cage (Star Trek: The Original Series)"
• Fact Trek, "Lucy & Star Trek" (facttrek.com)
• Bill Brioux, "Why did Star Trek start two days earlier in Canada? We check the captain's log," brioux.tv, 2021
• SlashFilm, "Nobody But The Network Wanted The Man Trap To Be Star Trek's Series Premiere"