The board of directors that voted on this situation was not a group of television visionaries. They were businesspeople responsible for a studio’s financial health, and the financial analysis they were doing was straightforward: Desilu was taking on more deficit financing than its income could comfortably absorb. The rational business decision was to reduce the number of commitments to whatever the studio could actually fund.
Of the three new series, *Star Trek* was the most expensive. It was science fiction, which meant extensive production design, special effects work, and the construction of sets and props that had no equivalent in existing television production. It was conceptually ambitious in ways that added cost — the diversity of the cast that Roddenberry was insisting on required more principal actors per episode than a simpler show would. It was, by the board’s assessment, the highest-risk and highest-cost of the three commitments.
The vote to cancel was nearly unanimous. Bernard Weitzman, Desilu’s chief legal counsel, was the sole dissenter. Herb Solow, who was not a voting member of the board, spoke in the show’s defense but could not vote.
Ball’s decision to override the board has been characterized in various ways in different accounts. The most hagiographic versions present it as a visionary creative judgment — Ball recognizing the show’s potential and acting on that recognition. The more skeptical versions, including the account given by Solow himself, suggest that Ball’s approval of the show was less about understanding its content and more about trust in Solow’s judgment and a general inclination to support the new programming direction the studio had committed to under his leadership.