10 Times Star Trek Appeared In Other TV Shows
7. Mad Men
While most of the TV shows on this list are unsurprisingly animation or sitcoms, there's a little room for solid-gold prestige TV drama too. Mad Men of all shows pulled off a totally unforgettable nod to Trek's Original Series in the season five episode "Christmas Waltz."
With Mad Men being a 60s-set period show, this episode takes place in Christmas 1966, while The Original Series was mid-way through its first season.
One of the episode's subplots involves the re-emergence of ex-copywriter Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis), who meets with former colleague Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) at a coffee shop to catch up.
Among other developments, Paul hands Harry a script that he wrote on spec for Star Trek, hoping that Harry would pass it to the right people and get it seen.
The episode was called "The Negron Complex" and focused on a race of white people who were subservient to a race of colour.
The script was by Harry and Peggy's (Elisabeth Moss) declaration quite terrible, prompting Harry to try and gently let Paul know that he didn't have a future in screenwriting.
There's some additional amusing context, here, though: The Negron Complex is actually somewhat similar to an episode that did get produced - season three's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield."
As a result, though Harry ultimately advised Paul not to try and sell his script, this could suggest that he did indeed persevere and get the script bought, which was then heavily rewritten into Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.