ABSTRACT
Cult television has been recurrently debated and defined in scholarship, with particular attention being paid to whether it is an audience-activated and fan-generated status or whether textual criteria can be discerned. This chapter focuses on the 50th anniversaries of three different cult TV series: Doctor Who, Thunderbirds, and Star Trek. Doctor Who began on November 23rd, 1963. And for the vast majority of its run, it became synonymous in the UK with Saturday night entertainment. Thunderbirds began on September 30th, 1965. The show's golden anniversary in 2015 featured a remake, now titled Thunderbirds Are Go!, which had its opening episode screened on ITV1 on April 4th. Star Trek began on September 8th, 1966. Star Trek has evidently made good use of 'extended seriality' in the past, cleverly linking together its different franchise entries in episodes such.
