{"id":13562,"date":"2011-12-09T11:15:04","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T19:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trektoday.com\/content\/?p=13562"},"modified":"2011-12-09T11:15:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T19:15:04","slug":"billingsley-studio-greed-killed-enterprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/2011\/12\/billingsley-studio-greed-killed-enterprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Billingsley: Studio Greed Killed Enterprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Star Trek: Enterprise<\/em>‘s John Billingsley<\/strong> , who played Phlox on the series, spoke about what made Star Trek<\/em> great and why Star Trek: Enterprise<\/em> ended so soon.<\/p>\n

According to Billingsley, the future that Star Trek<\/em> portrayed was a hopeful one. “For me, its success originally came from the idea that it was positing the hope and future for mankind, and (creator Gene<\/strong>) Roddenberry<\/strong> certainly was of a mind that Star Trek<\/em> was designed to say first and foremost, ‘Yes we can.’ There is a time when different cultures and different races can bury the hatchet and we can find a way through our problems and thrive and grow.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>“When the show premiered in the 1960s we were going through a period in our history not unlike the period we’re going through now,” said Billingsley. “There was a tremendous amount of divide in our country…race riots, divisions over the Vietnam War, we\u2019d lost a president, we were in a tremendous amount of social turmoil. And I think Star Trek<\/em> suggested it was possible to get through that.”<\/p>\n

Billingsley himself is not as optimistic about mankind as Roddenberry was. “While I admire the conceit of Star Trek<\/em>, and the optimism of it, I don\u2019t necessarily share that opinion,” he said. “I’m considerably more cynical about mankind.”<\/p>\n

Star Trek: Enterprise<\/em> ended after only four seasons, and Billingsley blames that on the studio and its greed. “But what happened with Voyager<\/em> and our show Enterprise<\/em>, and I don’t mean this in any way as a knock on our executive producers, …but Paramount was saying more, more, more, more, more, because they viewed this as a commercial product. Nothing (in television) works when it is brought into being by the marketing department. Paramount kind of sabotaged itself. I think they got greedy, and that\u2019s what studios do, unfortunately, because they are run largely by bean counters.<\/p>\n

“I say this, sounding harsh to my own ear: Everybody is in business to make a buck. But the idea that you have to have a product that has some artistic viability, that it just isn’t cash in, sometimes eludes the folks who are looking at the bottom line.”<\/p>\n

Low ratings didn’t help the show either. “It’s a miracle we got four seasons,” said Billingsley. “Any other TV show would have been yanked after one season. Our ratings were abysmal. We opened well, we had a great audience for the first episode, and they watched it and they said, ‘This is nothing new. It’s the same Star Tre<\/em>k I’ve been watching for years and years. It’s a retread.’ And they ran away.”<\/p>\n

Billingsley will be attending Starbase Indy, which begins today and runs through Sunday at the Indianapolis Marriott East in Indianapolis, Indiana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Star Trek: Enterprise‘s John Billingsley , who played Phlox on the series, spoke about what…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2413,2437],"tags":[2623],"class_list":["post-13562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cast-crew","category-star-trek-ent","tag-billingsley"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":"","newsphere-slider-full":"","newsphere-featured":"","newsphere-medium":""},"author_info":{"display_name":"T'Bonz","author_link":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/author\/tbonz\/"},"category_info":"Cast & Crew<\/a> Star Trek: ENT<\/a>","tag_info":"Star Trek: ENT","comment_count":"13","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13564,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13562\/revisions\/13564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trektoday.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}