One of my earliest memories of watching TV involves William Shatner. My first exposure to Shatner was watching T.J. Hooker with my family. I actually don’t remember T.J. Hooker at all except that I saw it. Little did I know that two of its stars, Shatner and James Darren, were/would be major figures in Star Trek. Shatner played Captain James Tiberius Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and seven big-screen features. Darren played Vic Fontaine, a holosuite-based crooner, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Eventually, while still a kid in Hawaii during the early-1980s, I saw Shatner-as-Kirk in re-runs of ST:TOS. To be honest, I don’t remember much of TOS from those days, either. Although I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager on and off while they were on the air, I didn’t become a full-blown Trekkie until I started reviewing Star Trek on DVD and interned with StarTrek.com. I now have a vinyl banner of Shatner-as-Kirk in my living room.

Shatner has always been considered something of a ham, but he seemed reluctant to embrace that role until the mid-1990s, when he began making fun of himself, appearing in Priceline.com commercials even though he professed little knowledge of computer use, and making comedy albums. He is such a lovable, silly goof that he even won Emmies for his role as Denny Crane in The Practice and Boston Legal. Shatner is now praised by the mainstream for the very traits that once marginalized him.

Cable channel Comedy Central saw fit to add Shatner to its list of roastees, and the Roast of William Shatner is a chance for Trekkies to see Shatner, Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), and George Takei (Sulu) together for possibly one last time. The three spew outrageous jokes about each other. Not meaning to sound politically-incorrect, I must admit that some of the program’s best jokes involve George Takei’s homosexuality. Unfortunately, most of the roast is rather boring and even downright lame. Most of the roasters have nothing to do with Shatner or with Star Trek, and most of the roasters roast each other rather than roasting Shatner. This misses the point in two ways. First, the show is supposed to be a roast of Shatner, not of other people. Second, people usually roast the successful, not the nobodies that Comedy Central subsidizes for times when the channel runs out of programs to air.

David McCoy