Pioneers of Television: Boldly Going…

The second season of PBS’ Pioneers of Television debuted Tuesday night, starting its exploration of television history with the science fiction genre – specifically three series: the original Twilight Zone and Star Trek, as well as Lost In Space. These are shows that paved the way for the genre as we know it today. Certainly, I wouldn’t have grown up on Star Trek: The Next Generation if not for the original series.

Did you know that Gene Roddenberry was a police officer before he became one of the biggest names in science fiction? That exploring hot-button issues such as race was always part of his creative goals? The installment sheds a light on how Star Trek came to be. When it finally reached air in 1966, the Texas Western Miners had just pulled off a stunning upset of the Kentucky Wildcats in the NCAA men’s basketball championship in the face of prejudice and racism; at the same time, Roddenberry was bold enough to cast African-American actress Nichelle Nichols in the major role of Lt. Uhura. There are interviews with Nichols, William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy throughout that shed light on what it was like to be a part of the series; even for people like me who aren’t fans of Shatner, there’s still information here worth listening to. In particular, Nichols talks about her life-changing encounter with a fan – that fan being Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the same time that Roddenberry was pushing Star Trek, Irwin Allen was pitching Lost In Space, a show that couldn’t be more different. The series was intended to be fun and campy, and only became moreso after it was pitted against Batman and tried to emulate that wildly successful show. At the same time, Allen was also working on several other series, including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel. As the dissection of Allen’s work is intercut with the exploration of Star Trek, it’s hard not to laugh; one moment we’re talking about racial equality, and then we’re discussing talking vegetables. It’s a good contrast, though, to show how series can be vastly different – not every show wants to be substantive or intentionally groundbreaking.

Before both of those series, however, Rod Serling put together The Twilight Zone and set to scaring the daylights out of an audience every week. Considering that some of the episodes still terrify audiences today, it’s really interesting to see how the episodes came to be – or almost didn’t come to be at all. Like Roddenberry, Serling was faced with censorship that motivated him to use the show’s science-fiction genre as a shield to tell more controversial stories. Even then, he couldn’t wholly escape the pressure of outside influences.

All of these shows have their own stories to tell – not just on screen but off of it. They educate television viewers about a different time, when making programs was an entirely different battle, one much harder and complicated, yet still with echoes of the same arguments we have today. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, the uproar was about race; that might not exist today, but now we deal with conflicts of sexuality on television. It makes us think about what television really takes, and how much has changed.

Most importantly, we remind ourselves of one of the reasons I loved science fiction in the first place – anything is possible and nothing is absolute. No matter who or what we were, there was a place for us within science fiction. Nowadays, when there’s so much emphasis on special effects and scary monsters, I think we’ve forgotten that. The science fiction I loved was driven by character, with the promise of acceptance for the different, and infinite possibilities for us all. None of that, none of those aspirations I had as a child, would exist without the Star Trek Gene Roddenberry saw decades ago. I’ll always owe a debt of gratitude to these series, and I know that I’m not the only one.

Pioneers of Television airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on PBS.