Herb Solow’s testimony about Ball’s level of knowledge of *Star Trek’s* content is probably accurate as far as it goes: she was not a science fiction fan, she had not carefully read the pilot scripts, and her initial understanding of the show was confused. But knowing what a show is about and deciding whether to commit a studio’s resources to it are different activities, and Ball’s performance of the second of these was demonstrably consequential.
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## The Series Premiere: September 8, 1966
*Star Trek* premiered on NBC on Thursday, September 8, 1966, at 8:30 p.m. The episode NBC chose to broadcast first was “The Man Trap” — not the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” which had been produced first. “The Man Trap” was a monster story involving a shape-shifting creature, chosen by NBC’s marketing team on the theory that a visceral threat would attract audiences more immediately than the more cerebral second pilot.
This decision — to debut the show with an episode that did not represent its full range — is one of the small decisions in *Star Trek*’s history that illustrates the gap between the show Roddenberry was making and the show the network was selling. The marketing team was not wrong that “The Man Trap” was more immediately accessible than “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” They were also not wrong that the most accessible episode might not be the most representative one.
The cast of the series had undergone substantial changes from the two pilots. The command crew that viewers would come to know — Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Scotty (James Doohan), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Sulu (George Takei), and later Chekov (Walter Koenig) — was assembled from multiple sources. Some had been in the second pilot; others were new additions.