Solow has described negotiating with NBC’s West Coast sales vice president over Spock’s ears for the second pilot. The sales executive’s objection was the same as before: the pointed ears were too alien, too unusual, would create problems with Southern affiliates. Solow’s response was to offer a conditional concession: the ears would stay unless the first six episodes of the eventual series underperformed, at which point they would give Nimoy an “ear job.” This was not a sincere concession on Solow’s part — he had no intention of removing the ears — but it gave the sales executive something to tell his colleagues and allowed the negotiation to move forward.
The second pilot cost more than anticipated. NBC had agreed to fund it, but the terms of the funding and the question of who absorbed cost overruns placed additional financial pressure on Desilu. The studio was already managing the deficit financing inherent in any network television production; additional cost overruns from the second pilot added to the strain.
NBC accepted “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” The network commissioned a full season of *Star Trek*.
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## The Board Vote and the Nod
The full season commission from NBC should have been straightforwardly good news for Desilu. It was, in one sense, exactly what Roddenberry and Solow had been working toward. In another sense, it created the financial crisis that led to the board of directors vote.
By early 1966, Desilu was simultaneously committed to producing three significant new series: *Star Trek* for NBC, *Mission: Impossible* for CBS, and *The Long Hunt of April Savage* for ABC. Each of these series was being deficit-financed — meaning Desilu was covering the gap between what the networks paid per episode and what the episodes actually cost to produce. For a studio that was generating substantial income from facilities rental and from *The Lucy Show*, the deficit financing of one or two new series would have been manageable. The simultaneous deficit financing of three series pushed the studio’s financial position into genuinely precarious territory.