Its finest creative hours, in retrospect, came in those last three years before the sale: the period when it was simultaneously producing *Star Trek* and *Mission: Impossible*, when it was deficit-financing science fiction ambition and spy thriller craft in parallel, when it was taking the financial risk that the board had voted against.
*Mission: Impossible* ran for seven seasons and 171 episodes after Desilu sold it to Paramount. It won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1967 and 1968. It spawned a film franchise in the 1990s that remains commercially active. The first Mission: Impossible film, released in 1996, starred Tom Cruise and grossed over $450 million worldwide. The franchise has since generated six additional films.
*Star Trek* has generated, as of the 2020s, more than 900 hours of television programming across more than a dozen series, thirteen theatrical films, and a franchise value estimated in the billions of dollars.
Both franchises were produced from their inception on Desilu lots. Both were funded, in their initial seasons, by Desilu’s deficit financing. Both were projects that the board had voted, in one form or another, to cancel.
Lucille Ball’s legacy at Desilu is thus a complex thing to assess. She was not a creative visionary in the sense of having personally shaped the content of *Star Trek* or *Mission: Impossible*. She was not primarily responsible for identifying either show as a development opportunity — Solow, Katz, and the respective creators did that work. She was not the person who managed the productions through their difficult first seasons.