10 Epic TV Shows That Never Made It To Our Screens

Now to boldly go...or not go, in Star Trek: Phase II's case.

When Paramount Television Service announced in June 1977 that Star Trek would be returning and that it would be 'superior' to what we'd seen in The Original Series, they definitely set themselves a ridiculously high bar.

The original plan was to bring back as many of the original cast as possible, whilst also infusing some new faces into the mix. Plans were even put into place to debut a television movie that would launch the new series, which at the time would have been the most expensive TV movie ever made - at $3.2 million.

Various problematic decisions meant that production for the project continued to be pushed back, before the studio decided that they didn't want to use the story being pushed for the first episode of the new show on TV and instead wanted that to be the premise for a full blown feature.

Around this time, Paramount also realised that the money they'd be earning from Phase II's landing, wouldn't be enough to justify creating the series at all. Yet, they'd already spent $500,000 on the project and didn't want to lose face.

The project would eventually be reframed and released as Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and Phase II went on to prove influential to The Next Generation and Voyager. Yet, many fans still mourn over what could have been with the spiritual TV successor of the original Star Trek series.