After 50 years, Captain Pike got the Star Trek show he deserves

polygon.com:

In 1965, television producer Gene Roddenberry presented NBC with “The Cage,” the pilot episode of his space Western, Star Trek. The show starred film actor Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike of the USS Enterprise, a stern starship commander with a chip on his shoulder and a faraway look in his eyes. Flanked by a pointy-eared alien named Spock and a stoic first officer known only as “Number One,” Pike confronts a race of telepathic aliens who can make his darkest thoughts or deepest desires indistinguishable from reality. “The Cage” provides the audience with a shortcut to intimacy with Pike, revealing that his front as the strong, silent type hides a great discomfort and dissatisfaction with himself. It’s a heady and heavy tale, and NBC’s executives were wary of picking up such an “atypical” adventure show as a series, but they were intrigued enough to shell out for a second Star Trek pilot. When Jeffrey Hunter declined to return, Roddenberry decided that, rather than recasting Pike, he would create a new lead character. The less severe Captain James T. Kirk, portrayed by William Shatner, would go on to become one of the most famous fictional characters of the 20th century.

Now, the character who could have remained a curio in the history of Paramount’s crown jewel franchise is instead returning, by popular demand, to the captain’s chair for a new spinoff series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. No longer a relic of the 1960s, Christopher Pike has been resurrected as a poster boy for Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic future as we imagine it today, essentially emerging as a totally new character. But this opportunity might never have presented itself if not for one inconvenient fact: Making television is very expensive.