Star Trek: Enterprise, titled simply Enterprise for its first two seasons, is an American science fiction television series created by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. It originally aired from September 26, 2001, to May 13, 2005, on UPN, spanning 98 episodes across four seasons. The fifth series in the Star Trek franchise, it served as a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series. The show is set in the 22nd century, a hundred years before the events of The Original Series and just prior to the formation of the United Federation of Planets. The series follows the adventures of the Enterprise, Earth's first starship capable of traveling at warp five, as it explores the galaxy and encounters various alien species.
Following the culmination of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and with Star Trek: Voyager scheduled to end, UPN asked Braga and Berman to devise a new series to continue the franchise. Rather than setting it in the 24th century alongside Deep Space Nine and Voyager, the duo decided to set Enterprise in an earlier period, allowing them to explore new parts of the Star Trek fictional universe. Wanting a more basic, relatable, and character-driven series, Berman and Braga concentrated the episodes around a core trio of characters: Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), Commander Charles "Trip" Tucker III (Connor Trinneer) and Sub-commander T'Pol (Jolene Blalock). The show broke with Star Trek convention in several respects: in addition to dropping the Star Trek prefix, Enterprise used the pop-influenced song "Where My Heart Will Take Me" (performed by Russell Watson) as its theme.[1] It was filmed on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, California, on the same stages that housed the Star Trek series and films since the abandoned Star Trek: Phase II in the late 1970s.
The first two seasons were characterized by stand-alone episodes that explored topics like humanity's early relations with the Vulcans and their first encounters with the Klingons and Andorians, alien species already familiar to the Star Trek franchise. Wanting to attract greater viewers, UPN called for changes for its third season. The series was renamed, pursuing more action-driven plots and a single, serialized storyline: the crew's mission to prevent the Earth being destroyed by a newly introduced alien species called the Xindi. UPN cancelled the series after its fourth season; a fan-led campaign for a fifth proved unsuccessful. The cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005 marked the first point in eighteen years that no new Star Trek episodes were produced, the beginning of a hiatus that continued until the launch of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017.
