Ellison won the Writers Guild of America award for the episode and also criticized the produced version publicly and persistently. The debate between his account of what he wrote and the production’s account of what was needed has become one of the standard reference points for understanding the relationship between individual creative vision and institutional television production. What is uncontested is that the episode, in its produced form, represents something that neither Ellison nor Roddenberry could have made alone.
David Gerrold wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles” at age 23, before he had a professional television writing credit. The episode — a comedy involving small reproducing creatures that overrun the ship — became one of the series’ most beloved entries, reprinted, referenced, and revisited across the franchise’s subsequent productions. Gerrold’s later memoir of his experience writing for *Star Trek* provides one of the most candid accounts of what it was like to be a young writer navigating the production in its first season.
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## What NBC Saw and What NBC Missed
The relationship between NBC and *Star Trek* across the show’s three-season run was a continuous negotiation between the network’s commercial interests and the show’s creative ambitions — a negotiation in which the creative side consistently felt undervalued and the commercial side consistently felt exposed.
NBC’s investment in *Star Trek* was genuine. The network had, after all, committed the unprecedented act of funding a second pilot after the first was rejected — an investment that reflected real advocacy within NBC’s programming department for what the show was trying to do. The executives who championed the show within NBC — Mort Werner, Herb Schlosser, and others — were acting on a sincere belief that it was quality television worth supporting.