It is a decade since
Star Trek was last on TV, but it's now coming back with a brand-new series which will air starting in January of 2017. What's caused debate, and even consternation, about the news is that after its pilot episode, the show will be made available exclusively on CBS All Access. That's broadcaster CBS's digital subscription service, and the announcement surprised many. However, it shouldn't have been such a shock -- because almost every
Star Trek has boldly gone where no show has gone before in terms of using new ways to reach audiences.
Since the very first
Star Trek, most of the series have specifically been used to lead viewers to new services and new platforms. They have been the big headline-making marquee shows that were intended to launch and establish new methods of bringing you video. This doesn't include
Star Trek: The Original Series (as it is now called), which aired as a regular show on NBC, and it doesn't include
Star Trek: The Animated Series which was also a network show, if only on Saturday mornings.
However it does very much include
Star Trek: Phase II, the series you think you haven't seen. You haven't. What you've seen is
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was made on the back of the development that went into
Phase II. The sets, most of the revamped USS Enterprise model and later, some scripts that were filmed for
The Next Generation, were all created and worked on for this "lost" Star Trek series. They were created for this show that was being produced specifically to launch what, in 1978, would have been America's fourth television network alongside ABC, CBS and NBC (Fox came along in 1985).
That was going to be the Paramount Television Service, and though it failed to get off the ground, it came close to working.
Star Trek: Phase II would've been its flaghip new series, and the channel was going to start off running a few evenings a week before hopefully expanding to a full schedule. This idea presaged later alternative mini-networks like The CW.
PTS evaporated, and
Star Trek: Phase II became
Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It got audiences into movie cinemas, and despite being dreadful
(editor's note: for you, maybe), it made enough money to warrant a cheap sequel. The sequel was
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and it is the movie that launched Trek into a long series of successful films of alternating quality.
Those films kept
Trek off television for nearly 10 years, but in 1987,
Star Trek: The Next Generation launched -- just not on regular network television. If you're outside the US, this will seem like a difference that makes no difference, but instead of selling the show to a network, Paramount sold it to individual TV stations across America. They sold it station by station, with some of them airing it during hours in which the network didn't provide programming, and others actually dropping network shows in order to screen
TNG in prime time.
It's called "selling into syndication" now, and it was a bold move. At the time, no regular network would fund an entire season of
TNG, and Paramount's accountants needed 20 or more episodes in order to make it economically viable. It's a fascinating and complex piece of economic cleverness, which meant Paramount took on a lot of risk, but thereby also hit it very, very big when the show was a success. It was so much of a success that the idea was copied, and it was copied so much that it is now commonplace to have shows sold direct into syndication.
So common that the syndication market was much harder to crack for
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in 1993. This may well be the best of the
Trek series dramatically, but it struggled against a surfeit of other science fiction and fantasy series that by then were being sold into syndication this same way.
That's possibly why, for the next show, Paramount went in a different direction -- or rather, went back to an old idea. They hadn't forgotten the plans for a Paramount Television Service and while it had failed then, it succeeded far better in 1995 when it was launched as UPN. Ultimately, that channel limped along from then until 2006, but it got on air and it started strongly -- in part because of what aired on its opening night. The highlight of UPN's opening evening on January 16, 1995 was the feature-length pilot episode of
Star Trek: Voyager.
So
Phase II, The Next Generation and
Voyager all launched -- or tried to launch -- new services. Now CBS's Leslie Moonves says that this is exactly the plan for the new 2017
Star Trek TV show. "
Star Trek is a family jewel; it's an important piece of business for us as we go forward," he said. "We're looking to do original content on All Access and build up that platform. All Access will put out original content, and knowing the loyalty of
Star Trek fans, this will boost it ... there's about a billion channels out there, and because of
Star Trek, people will know what All Access is about."
Moonves also revealed that the production cost of the new show is already halfway to being covered by overseas sales. If you're outside the USA, you will see
Star Trek as a regular broadcast show, just as you did all of the previous ones. It's possible that it will be bought by other non-broadcast services:
Outlander airs in the UK only on Amazon Prime, for instance. That is working and
Outlander is getting a surprising amount of attention for what is a very niche service.
Yet you can't underestimate the difficulty of putting broadcast-quality television online. This year, the sitcom
Community went the on-demand route in the States, and officially the same way around the world, but the launch was a huge misfire. Viewers in America had problems finding episodes or getting them to play, but even then they had better luck that overseas ones.
For instance, UK viewers went to the Yahoo website exactly as instructed, and could see everything about the latest episodes -- except the latest episodes themselves. The site even talked continually about how great the series was, and urged you to come back next week. Only, in what was presumably a last-minute deal,
Community had been bought in the UK by a digital TV channel, and the sale precluded any online screening. You wouldn't know that from the Yahoo site, so cue a lot of annoyed UK viewers.
Star Trek rather owes it to its viewers to get the technology right so we expect that CBS All Access will work smoothly. Even if it doesn't, though, the odds are that
Star Trek fans will get to see it anyway.
If you know your
Trek, you've noticed that we've made no mention of
Star Trek: Enterprise in 2001. That didn't launch any service, not officially, but it did become pirated.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had led the way in piracy with a worldwide circulation of VHS tapes. As Paramount sold that show direct to thousands of stations, it was handiest to distribute each new episode to them via satellite: Paramount "aired" the TNG episode on a private channel, and the TV stations recorded it for broadcast later. Very quickly, fans began pointing satellite dishes at the right spot in the sky, and getting the episodes early.
Speaking of Sky, that is also the name of a satellite broadcaster in the UK, and it used
The Next Generation to drive sales of satellite dishes. So important was
TNG that Sky implemented a special encryption system that they updated every year, and named it after the show. It was known as the season 5 system, the season 6 one and so on. TNG ran seven seasons, but the encryption carried on at least long enough that there was a season 8 system.
Flash forward to 2001 and the launch of
Star Trek: Enterprise. VHS tapes were out: fans with at least a little technical knowledge were distributing the episodes over the Internet instead, and that means over the world. America's peculiar landline telephone system with free local calls meant that some fans would download
Enterprise episodes over dial-up: sometimes taking an entire week to get a single episode.
It was a different world then. Yet for decades,
Star Trek in all its many forms has grabbed fans enough that they go to great lengths to see it.
Star Trek has grabbed audiences in sufficient numbers that TV channels and services can be launched or expanded on the back of the show. CBS All Access's move is not a surprise, it is practically an inevitability and -- go on, then -- perhaps just a bit enterprising.
William Gallagher is a MacNN
contributor who also writes books on television history. William was a columnist for BBC News and also the Radio Times
, the UK's equivalent of TV Guide.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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