Star Trek

Start date: Country of Origin: Genre: sci-fi Director: Producer: Writer: Cast: Quirky Quote:

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One of television’s longest-running shows, Star Trek is a sci-fi drama series spanning forty years and five series (or “generations” of cast). The original Star Trek series featured icons William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and was famed for its tagline, “To boldly go where no man has gone before”. Star Trek initially only ran for three years and was cancelled after the third season due to low ratings. It was in repeat broadcasts of the show that cult popularity swelled, with Star Trek now having undergone four series revivals (with a different “crew” each time, set in varying eras) and generating 11 feature-length movies.

Each Star Trek episode follows the adventures of a United Federation of Planets starship crew and explores the interaction between humans and aliens, the latter of which sometimes being crew members and other times being newly-encountered. Arguably the most significant and revered of these alien species are the Klingons and the Vulcans. The original series depicts the crew of the starship Enterprise, under the captaincy of James Tiberius Kirk (Shatner), exploring space in the 23rd century after Earth has survived World War III. The crew’s science officer, and first officer of the USS Enterprise, Mr. Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy), has become one of the franchise’s enduring characters and an icon of American television, with his trademark straight fringe and pointy ears (being half-“Vulcan”).

The second series of Star Trek is named Star Trek: The Next Generation. Set a century after the original series, it features the Enterprise-D starship, captained by Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). Third series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine features Avery Brooks as Commander Benjamin Sisko and is the only Star Trek series to be set on a space station rather than a starship. The series is set in the same period as The Next Generation. The following series, produced in 1995, ran for six years and is titled Star Trek: Voyager, with Captain Kathryn Janeway – the show’s first female captain - played by Kate Mulgrew. This time the show, set in roughly the same era as Deep Space Nine, follows the starship USS Voyager. The most recent series of Star Trek, Enterprise, is a prequel set 100 years before the original Star Trek series. It features a pre-Federation starship Enterprise in 2151, a decade before the founding of the United Federation of Planets.

The show has issued some 726 episodes in total, across 22 seasons, and is second only to Doctor Who in terms of sci-fi series duration. The 11th feature-length film began production in 2007, featuring the original crew characters portrayed by new actors.