Star Trek: The Original Series

Essential to the history and genuinely optional as a watch, which is an uncomfortable thing to say about the show that started all of this. Seventy-nine episodes made between 1966 and 1969 on a television budget, with the production values of the period and the gender politics of the period, and a modern viewer coming to it cold after Strange New Worlds will find the adjustment real.

What holds up is the writing at its best and the central trio. The show was staffed by working science-fiction authors and the good episodes are short stories with a premise and a turn: a planet that has computerised its war so that casualties report voluntarily for disintegration, an immortal who cannot die and has become unbearably tired, a man who must choose between a woman he loves and the course of the Second World War. The Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrangement, where every moral question gets argued by three people who each represent a different answer, is the engine that every later series rebuilt in some form.

The bad episodes are very bad and there are more of them than enthusiasts admit, particularly in the third season after the budget and the showrunner both left. Nobody should watch all seventy-nine.

Treat it as an anthology and pick episodes. The standard shortlist runs to about fifteen and almost every version of it includes The City on the Edge of Forever, Balance of Terror, The Doomsday Machine, Mirror Mirror, Amok Time and Space Seed, which is the one Wrath of Khan is a sequel to. That is six hours, and it is the right six hours.