Why The Original Star Trek: Enterprise Pitch Didn't Sit Well With Studio Executives
These days, 2001's "Star Trek: Enterprise" stands as a crucial pillar of franchise canon, expanding the scope of the "Star Trek" timeline by moving its space exploration narrative to the distant past rather than the future. But while it may be difficult for fans to imagine the series being different from how it turned out, it just so happens that the original pitch for the series had a pretty wildly different premise and format — one that the studio executives at Paramount didn't much appreciate at the time.
In a behind-the-scenes featurette from the Blu-ray release of "Star Trek: Enterprise" Season 2, titled "In Conversation: The First Crew," series co-creator Brannon Braga revealed that he and fellow creator Rick Berman had a controversial first pitch. The pair conceived of the series as an earthbound adventure that would eschew the spacefaring setting of the other "Star Trek" entries — at least, for the first chunk of its run. "It was much more mud-on-the-boots, gritty show set on Earth for the first large part of the season," Braga explained. "So the launching of the ship was gonna be a much bigger deal."
Unfortunately, Braga and Berman's concept wasn't a hit with the higher-ups. "The studio said, 'Are you out of your mind? You're not in space? You should be in space,'" Braga recalled. Thus, the premise was shifted into the version of "Star Trek: Enterprise" fans know today.
Enterprise's creators had to push to make it a prequel
The lack of space adventures in the original "Star Trek: Enterprise" pitch wasn't the only thing the executives at Paramount weren't particularly thrilled about. According to Brannon Braga's account in the featurette, the studio wasn't initially on board with turning the show into a prequel to "Star Trek: The Original Series."
Standing by their drive to develop a prequel series, Braga and Rick Berman managed a sort of compromise with Paramount that resulted in the Temporal Cold War, a time-traveling plot thread that has since permeated a number of other works in the "Star Trek" franchise. "They wanted some futuristic element to be in the show," Braga explained. "So we interwove that so it was kind of a prequel and a sequel. We did battle with them over being able to do this concept from the very beginning, so it's a miracle we even got it there."
Over the years, other stories have come out about major elements of "Star Trek: Enterprise" that almost turned out completely differently or were otherwise scrapped. In fact, fans may be surprised to learn Scott Bakula's casting as Captain Jonathan Archer almost didn't happen due to a certain issue that lasted until just before production on the series began.