The specific episodes that made this case most powerfully were among the show’s most written-about and most rewatched. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (1969), featuring a character who was literally half black and half white, addressed American racism in terms so direct that they would have been difficult to put on the air in a contemporary realistic setting. “A Private Little War” (1968) used an allegory of two technologically matched factions on a primitive planet to address the Vietnam War in terms that the audience recognized immediately. “Plato’s Stepchildren” (1968) featured, by most accounts, the first interracial kiss on American network television — between Kirk and Uhura, under coercion in the story but visible and present on screen.
These episodes are part of what Ball’s 1966 nod helped make possible. The board that voted to cancel was not voting on “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” because that episode hadn’t been made yet. They were voting on a financial analysis of a production commitment. What the financial analysis could not show was what the production commitment was going to produce — the specific cultural work that the show would do in its three seasons and in the syndication decades that followed.
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## A Studio’s Finest Hours
Desilu Productions was, by the time it was sold to Gulf + Western in 1967, the largest independent television production company in the United States. It had reached that position because of the foundational success of *I Love Lucy*, the operational discipline of Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s decision to take sole control and professional management under Herbert Solow and Oscar Katz, and the accumulated library of shows produced on and around its studio lots.