What was it about the Roddenberry approach which differed totally from other television at the time?

Roddenberry�s approach was primarily different because you had humans interacting with other species. You had a mix of ethnic races here from Earth interacting together. And you put it all together with some pretty good plots. They had some bad ones, but they also had some very intelligent plots and very good scripts in that three years.

It stood apart because of the characters and the good scripts. Look at it from a turn-of-the-century perspective and the first thing you notice is the cheesy special effects, the orange and powder blue bridge and those kind of things.

It really dates it in that perspective, but if you just sit back and ignore that, and actually listen to what the scripts are saying, a lot of them are actually saying some really interesting things about the state of humanity and about where Mankind could go in the future.