Myth: Star Trek was produced on a low budget

Star Trek had a low budget for what it was trying to pull off – constantly building new sets, alien makeup, special effects, and an ensemble cast, but it wasn’t a cheap show broadly speaking.

The first season of the original series cost $190,000 per episode, and only dropped to $170,000 in its third.

Compare that to a sitcom during the same era that cost as little as $15,000 per episode, or on the higher end about $100,000 for the top-rated shows having casts demanding a big salary, you can see how Star Trek was a very expensive show to produce. Even Bonanza – the highest rated TV program – only cost between $100,000-$150,000 per episode during that period.

This, coupled with a misunderstanding of its audience to sell advertisers, is actually the primary reason it got canceled when its new owners, Golf and Western, weren’t willing to sink money into what it considered a bleeding asset.

In fact, Star Trek was bleeding Desilu dry, but Lucille Ball believed in the show and fought with the Board to keep it going. She knew she could make up current losses down the road with syndication. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened.

Much like Enterprise in 2005, the original Star Trek fell victim to a corporate merger whose new owners didn’t see value in continuing. It was expensive to produce and a hard sell to advertisers at the time who had a false understanding of Star Trek’s audience. Let’s be honest, Gulf and Western didn’t want Desilu Studios for Star Trek – it was wanted it for ownership to I Love Lucy, and for its studio lots, which were being utilized by such popular shows as The Andy Grifith Show – which, by the way, the streets of Mayberry were repurposed for “Miri.” And Floyd’s Barbershop is plainly visible in “The  on the Edge of Forever.”

It wasn’t until its success in syndication that it realized the value of the show.

How about budgets the spinoff shows? Well… The Next Generation had a $2 million per episode budget from the fourth season onward. This is comparable to Cheers, which was the most watched show on television at the time.

Deep Space Nine was around $4 million per episode during its final seasons. Putting that into perspective, Friends was $10 million per episode its final season but that’s with each of the 6 cast members receiving $1 million each – five years after Deep Space Nine ended.

Enterprise was the only Trek series that can truly qualify as a small budget with only $1.6-$1.7 million per episode during its first seasons and down to $800,000 its final season.

Now, the term “per episode” budget is somewhat misleading because Star Trek actually received a season budget, which it could allocate accordingly. This is why bottle shows arose, to solve budget overruns.