After Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ended and with Voyager scheduled to conclude, Paramount asked Rick Berman and Brannon Braga to create a new series, and they chose to set it a century before The Original Series rather than continuing in the 24th century, in order to explore new, unexamined parts of the Star Trek timeline.
Fans speculated online that the new series would be based on Starfleet Academy or the adventures of Hikaru Sulu, but the producers revealed the Academy idea was never seriously considered and kept the actual concept secret.
The original plan was for the entire first season to take place mostly on Earth while the Enterprise was being rushed to completion, but studio executives rejected this and the idea was condensed into just the pilot episode, 'Broken Bow.'
The producers initially wanted to directly link the series to The Original Series by making Vulcan character T'Pau (from the episode 'Amok Time') a main character, but she was instead reworked into an original character, T'Pol.
The show dropped the 'Star Trek' prefix from its title for its first two seasons, becoming simply 'Enterprise,' before Paramount Television executives demanded it be renamed Star Trek: Enterprise starting with the third-season episode 'Extinction' to reconnect with franchise fans.
Dominic Keating and John Billingsley reportedly impressed casting staff immediately, with producers noting they were right for their roles 'right off the bat'; Keating had previously auditioned for Voyager but was held back for a future main role.
Linda Park was cast as Hoshi Sato without an audition, based on her performance in a scene from The WB series Popular alongside co-star Anthony Montgomery, even though the character had originally been envisioned as older.
Scott Bakula's casting as Captain Archer took the longest due to extended contract negotiations, and Berman later admitted the producers had no backup plan if Bakula had turned down the role.
Jolene Blalock and Marjorie Monaghan were finalists for the role of T'Pol, with Braga saying the producers were seeking a 'Kim Cattrall type'; Blalock, a lifelong Star Trek fan whose favorite character was Spock, was cast despite her agents initially rejecting early audition requests.
There were long-running rumors that William Shatner would guest star; one pitch involved him reprising his Mirror Universe Captain Kirk via a reworked 'tantalus field' backstory, while producers countered with an idea for him to play a time-displaced Enterprise chef impersonating Kirk, but neither concept was used, leading instead to the two-part episode 'In a Mirror, Darkly.'
The series was filmed on the Paramount lot on stages 8 and 9, which had housed Star Trek sets since the abandoned 1970s project Star Trek: Phase II, while the permanent bridge, engine room, and armory sets were built on stage 18, which had never before been used for a Star Trek production.
Roughly 130 to 150 crew members worked on constructing the sets for the pilot, dropping to just 20 to 25 crew members once the show went into regular series production.
Starting with the fourth season, Enterprise switched from traditional 35mm film to shooting digitally on a Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta camera using Sony's CineAlta 24P technology, an unusually cutting-edge choice for a TV series at the time, decided unanimously by the three executive producers and the director of photography.
The theme song, 'Faith of the Heart' (retitled 'Where My Heart Will Take Me'), was a cover of a Rod Stewart song originally featured on the soundtrack of the 1998 film Patch Adams, performed for the series by British tenor Russell Watson; the choice sparked a fan backlash including an online petition and a protest outside Paramount Studios.
Before 'Faith of the Heart' was chosen, U2's 'Beautiful Day' had been used as a temporary placeholder track on test reels for the opening sequence.
The opening title sequence, inspired by an illustration by John Eaves depicting real and fictional vessels leaving Earth, features real-world craft such as the HMS Enterprise frigate, the Wright Flyer III, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and the Mars rover Sojourner alongside the Phoenix (Earth's first warp ship from Star Trek: First Contact) and the NX-01 Enterprise.
The two-part episode 'In a Mirror, Darkly' uses an entirely different opening title sequence from the rest of the series, reflecting the militaristic, conquest-driven themes of the Mirror Universe.
The pilot episode 'Broken Bow' drew 12.5 million viewers on its first UPN broadcast, but ratings declined over the course of the first season despite cross-promotion with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Roswell.
UPN cancelled the series in February 2005 after four seasons, ending an 18-year unbroken run of new Star Trek television episodes; the cancellation news was delivered to cast and crew during the sixth day of filming the episode 'In a Mirror, Darkly.'
A fan campaign via the website TrekUnited.com raised $32 million in an attempt to fund a fifth season, but the effort ultimately failed and the donations were refunded.
Showrunner Manny Coto had begun developing a potential fifth season before cancellation, including plans to bring recurring Andorian character Shran (Jeffrey Combs) on as a series regular and an episode called 'Kilkenny Cats' that would have featured Larry Niven's Kzinti species from his Known Space novels.
