1951–1966: Early stage, film, and television work Shatner's movie career began while he was still attending college. In 1951, he had a small role in a Canadian comedy drama, ''The Butler's Night Off'': its credits list him as Bill Shatner, and describe his role simply as "a crook". After graduating, he worked as an assistant manager and actor at both the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal and the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa before joining the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. His roles at the festival included a part in
Marlowe's
Tamburlaine, in which he made his Broadway debut in 1956. His brief appearance in the opening scene of a high-profile production of
Sophocles's
Oedipus Rex by
Tyrone Guthrie introduced him to television viewers across the whole of Canada. In
Henry V, he combined playing the minor role of the Duke of Gloucester with understudying
Christopher Plummer as the king: when a kidney stone obliged Plummer to withdraw from a performance, Shatner's decision to present a distinctive interpretation of his role rather than imitating his senior's impressed Plummer as a striking manifestation of initiative and potential. Plummer later appeared as a Klingon adversary of Captain Kirk's in
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Guthrie too rated the young Shatner very highly, later recalling him as the most promising actor that his Festival employed, and for a time, he was seen as a potential peer of
Steve McQueen,
Paul Newman and
Robert Redford. In the view of Pat Jordan, author of an in-depth profile of Shatner for
The New York Times, his subsequent failure to achieve the acclaim accorded to his starrier contemporaries was attributable to his professional philosophy of "work equals work", and his consequent participation in many "forgettable" projects that probably did his career more harm than good. On the eve of his momentous casting as James Kirk, he was in Jordan's opinion seen merely as an actor who "showed up on time, knew his lines, worked cheap and always answered his phone". In 1954, Shatner decided to leave Stratford and move to New York City in the hope of building a career on the Broadway stage. He was soon offered the chance to make his first appearance on American television: in a children's program called
The Howdy Doody Show, he created the role of Ranger Bob, co-starring with a cast of puppets and
Clarabell the Clown, whose dialogue with Shatner consisted entirely of honks on a bicycle horn. It was four years before he won his first role in a major Hollywood movie, appearing in the
MGM film
The Brothers Karamazov as Alexei, the youngest of the brothers, in a cast that included
Yul Brynner. In December 1958, directed by
Kirk Browning, he appeared opposite
Ralph Bellamy as a Roman tax collector in
Bethlehem on the day of Jesus's birth in a
Hallmark Hall of Fame live television production entitled
The Christmas Tree, the cast list of which included
Jessica Tandy,
Margaret Hamilton,
Bernadette Peters,
Richard Thomas,
Cyril Ritchard, and
Carol Channing. His American television profile was heightened further when he had a leading role in an episode in the third (1957–58) season of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "The Glass Eye". (left) and
Kurt Kasznar as
Nero Wolfe in the aborted 1959
CBS television series
Nero Wolfe In 1959, Shatner received good reviews in the role of Lomax in
The World of Suzie Wong on Broadway. In March of that year, while still performing in that production, he also played detective
Archie Goodwin in what would have been television's first
Nero Wolfe series, had it not been aborted by
CBS after shooting a pilot and a few episodes. in
The Intruder (1962) Shatner appeared in two episodes of
The Twilight Zone, "
Nick of Time" (1960) and "
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1963); when the
anthology film The Twilight Zone: The Movie was produced twenty years later, the movie climaxed with a remake of the latter episode. He appeared twice as Wayne Gorham in
NBC's
Outlaws (1960), a
Western series with
Barton MacLane, and then returned to
Alfred Hitchcock Presents for a 5th-season episode, "Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?". In 1961, co-starring with
Julie Harris, he appeared on Broadway in
A Shot in the Dark, directed by
Harold Clurman;
Gene Saks and
Walter Matthau took part in the play too, Matthau winning a
Tony Award for his performance. Shatner was featured in two episodes of the NBC television series
Thriller ("The Grim Reaper" and "The Hungry Glass") and the film
The Explosive Generation (1961). He took the lead role in
Roger Corman's movie
The Intruder (1962). which
Stanley Kauffmann of
The New Republic described as Shatner's first interesting performance, and had a supporting role in the
Stanley Kramer film
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). In the 1963–64 season, he appeared in an episode of the
ABC series
Channing. In 1963, he starred in the
Family Theater production called "The Soldier" and received credits in other programs of
The Psalms series. That same year, he guest-starred in
Route 66, in the episode "Build Your Houses with Their Backs to the Sea". In 1964, Shatner guest-starred in the second episode of the second season of the ABC science fiction anthology series
The Outer Limits, "
Cold Hands, Warm Heart". Also that year, he appeared in an episode of the CBS drama
The Reporter, "He Stuck in His Thumb", and played a supporting role in the Western feature film
The Outrage, a remake of
Akira Kurosawa's
Rashomon starring
Paul Newman,
Laurence Harvey,
Claire Bloom and
Edward G. Robinson. The same year, Shatner was cast in an episode of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that featured
Leonard Nimoy, later to be his co-star in
Star Trek. Also in 1964, he played the titular
Alexander in the pilot for a proposed series called
Alexander the Great alongside
Adam West as
Cleander. The
Alexander series was not picked up, and the pilot remained unaired until 1968, when it was repackaged as a TV movie to capitalize on the fame that West and Shatner had won in the interim. Shatner had hoped that the series would be a major success, but West was apparently unsurprised by its failure to proceed, later castigating the pilot for "one of the worst scripts I have ever read" and recalling it as "one of the worst things I've ever done." In 1965, Shatner guest-starred in ''
12 O'Clock High as Major Curt Brown in the episode "I Am the Enemy". In the same year, he had the lead role in a legal drama, For the People'', starring as an
assistant district attorney married to a woman played by
Jessica Walter; the show's cancellation after its 13-episode first season allowed him to walk onto the bridge of the
Enterprise the following year. Shatner starred in the 1966
gothic horror film
Incubus (Esperanto:
Inkubo) the second feature-length movie ever made with all dialogue spoken in
Esperanto. He also starred in an episode of
Gunsmoke in 1966 as the character Fred Bateman. He appeared as attorney-turned-counterfeiter Brett Skyler in a 1966 episode of
The Big Valley, "Time to Kill". In 1968, he starred in the little known
Spaghetti Western White Comanche, playing both a white-hat character and his black-hat evil twin: Johnny Moon, a virtuous half-Comanche gunslinger, and Notah, a bloodthirsty warlord.
1966–1969: Star Trek on television in
Star Trek (1966–1969) Shatner was cast as Captain
James T. Kirk for the second pilot of
Star Trek, titled "
Where No Man Has Gone Before". He was then contracted to play Kirk for the remainder of the show, and he sat in the captain's chair of the USS
Enterprise from 1966 to 1969. During its original run on NBC, the series achieved only modest ratings, and it was cancelled after three seasons and seventy-nine episodes. ''
Plato's Stepchildren, aired on November 22, 1968, earned Shatner a footnote in the history of American race relations: a kiss that Captain Kirk planted on the lips of Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) is often cited as the first example of a white man kissing a black woman on scripted television in the United States. In 1973, Shatner returned to the role of Kirk, albeit only in voice, in the animated Star Trek'' series, which ran for two seasons and twenty-two episodes.
1970–1978: overcoming typecasting In the early 1970s, in the immediate aftermath of the cancellation of
Star Trek in 1969, Shatner had difficulty finding employment, being somewhat typecast as James Tiberius Kirk. With very little money and few acting prospects, he was for a time so poor that he was reduced to living in a truck-bed camper between theater jobs. Shatner's film work in this phase of his career was limited to such B-movies as Roger Corman's
Big Bad Mama (1974), the horror film ''
The Devil's Rain (1975) and Kingdom of the Spiders'' (1977). On television, he made a critically praised appearance as a prosecutor in a 1971
PBS adaptation of
Saul Levitt's play
The Andersonville Trial, and was also seen in major parts in the movies
The People (1972) and
The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973). He had a starring role too in the western-themed secret agent series
Barbary Coast during 1975 and 1976, and appeared as a guest of the week in many popular shows of that decade, including
Columbo,
Ironside,
Kung Fu,
Mission: Impossible,
The Rookies and
The Six Million Dollar Man. One of the special skills that Shatner was able to offer to casting directors was an expertise in a martial art: he was taught
American Kenpo karate by the black belt Tom Bleecker, who had in turn been trained by the founder of American Kenpo,
Ed Parker. To supplement his income from acting, Shatner performed as a celebrity guest in a multitude of television game shows, among them
Beat the Clock,
Celebrity Bowling,
The Hollywood Squares,
Match Game,
Tattletales and
Mike Stokey's
Stump the Stars. His
curriculum vitae in this genre included several visits to
The $10,000 Pyramid and its more generous sequels, shows in which contestants attempted to guess a word or phrase with the help of hints from a famous partner. Shatner's contributions to the Pyramid series included a week-long match-up that pitted him against Leonard Nimoy in an event billed as "Kirk versus Spock". In a 1977 episode, he perpetrated a blunder that has been preserved on YouTube: at the climax of the show, attempting to guide his partner to the phrase "things that are blessed", he blurted out the word "blessed" instead of, as he had intended, citing the
Virgin Mary. His mistake meant that the contestant paired with him was automatically disqualified from receiving what would have been a prize of $20,000. Shatner was so furious at himself over his error that he leapt out of his chair, picked it up and threw it out of the show's iconic Winner's Circle. During an
Archive of American Television interview,
Richard Dawson disclosed that when
Mark Goodson was considering whom to employ as the host of the pilot of
Family Feud (1976), he would have chosen Shatner if he had not been intimidated into awarding the position to Dawson by a threat from Dawson's agent. Advertising agencies also played a part in helping Shatner through his post-Kirk doldrums. Among the television commercials for which he was hired were spots promoting
General Motors'
Oldsmobile brand,
Promise margarine, the
British Columbia-based supermarket chain
SuperValu and its
Ontarian equivalent,
Loblaws; Canadian viewers became familiar with the former hero of
Starfleet reassuring them that "At Loblaws, more than the price is right. But, by gosh, the price is right."
1979–1989: Star Trek movies and T. J. Hooker After
Star Trek was cancelled, it acquired a
cult following among people watching
syndicated reruns of the series, and Captain Kirk became a
cultural icon. Fans of the show—so-called
Trekkies—began organizing
conventions where they could meet like-minded enthusiasts, buy
Star Trek merchandise and enjoy question and answer sessions with members of the show's regular cast. Many of the actors who had crewed the
Enterprise became frequent guests at these events, Shatner included. In the mid-1970s, noting the growing appetite for
Star Trek,
Paramount began pre-producing a sequel show,
Star Trek: Phase II, in which they planned to present new, younger actors alongside the stars of the original series. However, astounded by the enormous success that
George Lucas's film
Star Wars achieved in 1977, the studio decided that
Star Trek would earn them more money if the next adventure of the
Enterprise took place not on television but in theatres. Shatner and all the other original
Star Trek cast members returned to their roles when Paramount produced
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979. He went on to play Kirk in six further
Star Trek films:
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982),
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984),
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986),
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989),
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and—in a story that culminated in the captain's self-sacrificial death—
Star Trek Generations (1994). His final appearances as James Tiberius Kirk were in the movie sequences of the video game
Starfleet Academy (1997), in a 2006
DirecTV advertisement that used footage from
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and at the
2013 Academy Awards, in which he reprised the role for a comedic interlude with the show's host,
Seth MacFarlane. Although the resurrection of
Star Trek from oblivion only came about because of the enthusiasm of Trekkies, Shatner's attitude towards them is not uncritical. In a much-discussed 1986
Saturday Night Live sketch about a
Star Trek convention, he advised a room full of Trekkies to "get a life". The comment was an apt summary of the view of his fans that he had expressed in several interviews. Their adoration of him took unwelcome forms almost from the beginning of his time as Captain Kirk; as early as April 1968, a group of them attempted to tear his clothes from him as he left
30 Rockefeller Plaza. His amusement at the behaviour of the lunatic fringe of his admirers was reflected in the romantic comedy movie
Free Enterprise (1998), in which he contributed a caricature of himself to a film that satirized some Trekkies' Kirk idolatry. He also mocked the cavalier, almost superhuman, persona of Captain Kirk in the films
Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) and ''
National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1'' (1993). In 1982, Shatner was once again the leading character of a high-profile television show when he was cast as a veteran Los Angeles police sergeant in
T. J. Hooker. Running for five seasons and ninety-one episodes until 1986, the series partnered Shatner with
Heather Locklear and
James Darren, later to be a recurring cast member of the third live-action
Star Trek show,
Deep Space Nine. The success of
T. J. Hooker led to Shatner's hosting the popular dramatic re-enactment series
Rescue 911 from 1989 to 1996. His career diversified further in the 1980s when he began working as a director, taking charge of many episodes of
T. J. Hooker. A clause in his
Star Trek contract giving him parity with
Leonard Nimoy meant that after Nimoy's directing of
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Shatner was entitled to direct a
Star Trek movie too: he exercised his right in
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, although many Trekkies were disappointed by the film that he delivered, something that he attributed principally to the weakness of the movie's visual effects. His growing success on television and in movie theatres in the 1980s did not lead him to stop working for advertisers. The
VIC-20 home computer, for example, was endorsed by him both on television and in print. On May 19, 1983, the iconic status of Captain Kirk was acknowledged with a ceremony celebrating Shatner's being awarded the 1,762nd star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. Shatner also has a star on
Canada's Walk of Fame, granted to him in recognition of his being the first Canadian actor to star in major series on three American networks—NBC, CBS and ABC.
1989–1999: TekWar and other diversifications Working on
T. J. Hooker inspired Shatner with the idea of developing a television show in which he would play a character that would be a hybrid of Hooker and Kirk—a hard-boiled former police officer working as a private investigator in a dystopian future. When the production of
Star Trek V was delayed by a Writer's Guild strike, Shatner began transforming his initial concept into a novel, assisted by an established author of pulp science fiction,
Ron Goulart. Goulart described his contribution to Shatner's endeavour as merely that of an adviser, but Shatner credits him with rewriting. The first fruit of their collaboration,
TekWar, was published in 1989, and launched a sequence of books that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The novels led to four
TekWar television movies, in which Shatner played not the lead character but his boss, Walter Bascom. Shatner reprised the role in a
television series that followed, as well as directing several episodes of it himself, but its run on the
USA Network,
Syfy and Canada's
CTV was brief. In December 1989, Shatner took part in the British television series
This Is Your Life, a show in which a celebrity is ambushed by the host and then taken to a studio for the story of his life to be told in a stream of anecdotes related by his acquaintances: Shatner's episode began with
Michael Aspel taking him by surprise on the set of the
Starship Enterprise at
Universal Studios in Hollywood. In 1994, Shatner revisited
Columbo to play the murderer-of-the-week in the episode "
Butterfly in Shades of Grey". In 1995, he narrated Peter Kuran's documentary film
Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, and his TekWar franchise expanded into the world of computer games with a
first-person shooter release, ''
William Shatner's TekWar. In 1996, an episode entitled Eye, Tooth'' saw him guest-starring in
Will Smith's television show,
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He narrated a television miniseries shot in New Zealand
A Twist in the Tale (1998). In the television series
3rd Rock from the Sun, Shatner appeared in several 1999–2000 episodes as the "
Big Giant Head", a high-ranking officer from the same alien planet as the Solomon family who becomes a womanizing party-animal on Earth. The role earned Shatner an Emmy Award nomination. In the late 1990s, Shatner became closely associated with the travel website
priceline.com, appearing in many television commercials for the company as a pompous caricature of himself. He has said that while it is true that his work for priceline earned him
stock options, reports that they are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars are exaggerated. He was also the chief executive officer of the
Toronto, Ontario-based
C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, a special effects studio that operated from 1994 to 2010. In May 1999,
Simon & Schuster published Shatner's book
Get a Life!, a memoir of his experiences with Trekkies. As well as anecdotes about
Star Trek conventions, the book features interviews with some of the most devoted fans of the
Star Trek franchise, including conversations with several Trekkies who regard the show not just as entertainment but as philosophically significant.
2000–2009: Further films, and Denny Crane In the
Sandra Bullock comedy movie
Miss Congeniality (2000), Shatner played the supporting role of Stan Fields, the co-host of the Miss United States Pageant; his future
Boston Legal co-star
Candice Bergen took part in the film too. Shatner also appeared in
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005), in which Stan Fields is kidnapped in Las Vegas together with the winner of the pageant of the previous year. (Life imitated art in Gary, Indiana in 2001, when Shatner visited the town to host the
Miss USA Pageant for real). In
Osmosis Jones (2001), a high-concept satirical movie that blended live action with animation, Shatner voiced Mayor Phlegmming; the film depicted the cells and
microbiota of a human body as the citizens of a community, the city of Frank, governed by an egoistic politician who prioritizes his convenience and political self-interest over the welfare of his public. In
Groom Lake, released the following year, Shatner repeated his
Star Trek V feat of directing and starring in a movie based on a story of his own invention—a film exploiting the interest in
Area 51 kindled by
The X-Files, and co-starring a young
Amy Acker, later best known as a regular colleague of
Joss Whedon. In 2003, Shatner appeared in
Brad Paisley's
Celebrity and
Online music videos along with
Little Jimmy Dickens,
Jason Alexander and
Trista Rehn. He also had a supporting role in the comedy
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), which starred
Ben Stiller and
Vince Vaughn. In the October 2004 issue of
Star Trek Communicator,
Manny Coto, one of the producers of
Star Trek: Enterprise, revealed that he was planning a three-episode story arc guest-starring Shatner, but the cancellation of the series shortly afterwards meant that Shatner was denied the opportunity to take part in it. After
David E. Kelley saw Shatner's commercials, he brought Shatner on to the final season of the legal drama
The Practice. According to Pat Jordan, Shatner's Emmy Award-winning role, the eccentric but highly capable attorney Denny Crane, was essentially "William Shatner the man ... playing William Shatner the character playing the character Denny Crane, who was playing the character William Shatner." Shatner took the Crane role to
Boston Legal and won a Golden Globe and an Emmy in 2005, and was Emmy nominated again in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. With his 2005 Emmy accolade, he became one of the few actors (along with co-star
James Spader as
Alan Shore) to win an Emmy Award while playing the same character in two different shows. Shatner remained with
Boston Legal until, after five seasons and one hundred and one episodes, it ended in 2008. Two high-profile animated pictures released in 2006 featured Shatner in their cast. In
DreamWorks'
Over the Hedge, he voiced Ozzie, an opossum; in
Walt Disney's
The Wild, he had the role of the movie's villain, Kazar, a megalomaniacal wildebeest. In January 2007, he began posting daily autobiographical
vlogs on the LiveVideo platform in a project that he named
ShatnerVision; rebranded as
The Shatner Project, his vlogging migrated to YouTube the following year. In December 2008, he experimented with the chat show genre in the humorous ''
Shatner's Raw Nerve, which aired until March 2011. He expanded his work on YouTube in 2009, supplying the voice of Don Salmonella to the animated series The Gavones''. Shatner made several guest appearances on ''
The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, including in cameos in which he made fun of the Republican politician Sarah Palin. He opened mock-hostilities on July 27, 2009, with a poetry slam inspired recitation of the speech in which she had resigned the governorship of Alaska. Two days later, he ridiculed some of the tweets that she and Levi Johnston, the father of her grandchild, had published on Twitter. On December 11, 2009, he returned to Palin once more to read excerpts from her autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, and she, taking his teasing in good part, responded by reciting extracts from his 2008 memoir, Up Till Now'' (co-written with David Fisher, who later collaborated with Shatner on a book about Leonard Nimoy and Shatner's relationship with him). Shatner also contributed to O'Brien's recurring "
In the Year 3000" feature, which began with Shatner's disembodied head floating in space and delivering the segment's portentous tag line: "And so we take a cosmic ride into that new millennium; that far off reality that is the year 3000. It's the future, man". Shatner was not "offered or suggested" a role in the 2009 film
Star Trek. Director
J. J. Abrams said in July 2007 that the production was "desperately trying to figure out a way to put him in" but that to "shove him in ... would be a disaster", an opinion echoed by Shatner in several interviews. At a convention held in 2010, Shatner described the film as "wonderful". Two years before its release, his own tale of how the characters of the original series of
Star Trek might have come together was published in his novel
Star Trek: Academy – Collision Course. 2010–present: a miscellany of projects In April 2010, Shatner began hosting the
Discovery Channel show
Weird or What?, which aired until August 2012. Each episode of the series supplied lovers of arcana with several segments exploring news reports relating to left-field topics such as
UFOs and
cryptozoology. Later that year, his career as a comic television actor reached its zenith in a CBS sitcom based on
Justin Halpern's Twitter feed
Shit My Dad Says,
$#*! My Dad Says, which was cancelled in May 2011 three months after the first broadcast of its final episode. 2011 also saw him guest-starring in one episode of the USA Network's
Psych, "In for a Penny", playing the estranged father of Junior Detective
Juliet O'Hara (
Maggie Lawson) (a role that he reprised in the show's 2012 season). For Trekkies, his most notable project of the year was the first
Star Trek film that he had directed since
Star Trek V.
The Captains, which he also wrote and presented, was a feature-length documentary in which he interviewed all five of the actors who had played the principal role in the
Star Trek sequels that had been created up to that point—
Patrick Stewart of
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
Avery Brooks of
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
Kate Mulgrew of
Star Trek: Voyager,
Scott Bakula of
Star Trek: Enterprise and
Chris Pine of
J. J. Abrams's 2009 movie. The film also included a conversation between Shatner and his
Star Trek VI co-star Christopher Plummer, a sequence celebrating a friendship that began when the two actors both took part in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and reflecting Shatner's profound admiration for his colleague. Shatner's 2012 began with his return to his roots in theatre. In February, he appeared on Broadway in a one-man show called ''Shatner's World: We Just Live in It
. After a three-week run at the Music Box, the show toured throughout the United States. In May, he was the guest presenter on the British satirical television quiz show Have I Got News for You, earning a footnote in the history of neologisms by melding "pioneer" and "pensioner" into the portmanteau coinage "pensioneer". On July 28, he appeared on the premium cable TV channel Epix as the star of Get a Life!
, a documentary film about Star Trek
fandom developed from the 1999 book about Trekkies that he had written in the aftermath of his Saturday Night Live'' rebuke to them. On September 25, he revisited the music video genre, appearing as a
home plate umpire in the crooner Brian Evans's baseball-themed "At Fenway". On April 24, 2014, Shatner performed an autobiographical one-man show on Broadway, which was filmed for subsequent screening in more than 700 theatres across Australia, Canada and the United States. A large portion of the revenue of the project went to charity. In 2015, he played
Mark Twain in an episode of the Canadian historical crime drama series
Murdoch Mysteries, and Croatoan – the dangerous, interdimensional father of Audrey Parker – in the last episodes of the fifth and final season of SyFy channel's fantasy series
Haven. In August of that year, Trekkies were treated to a sequel to
The Captains which he produced, scripted and directed and in which he starred:
William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge, a behind-the-scenes documentary film about
Star Trek: The Next Generation. Premiering on August 23, 2016, the NBC reality miniseries
Better Late Than Never followed Shatner and a quartet of other aging celebrities—
Terry Bradshaw,
Jeff Dye,
George Foreman and
Henry Winkler—as they took a grand tour around Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia. Shatner joked that Bradshaw, famous as a quarterback with the
Pittsburgh Steelers, was "putty in my hands". Another new enterprise that he launched that year was Shatner Singularity, a publisher of comic-books, which has a list including the graphic novel ''Stan Lee's "God Woke"'' by
Lee and Mariano and
Fabian Nicieza. The book won the 2017
Independent Publisher Book Awards' Outstanding Books of the Year Independent Voice Award. Shatner's most notable television work in 2017 was in the second season of
Better Late Than Never: a preview episode of December 11, 2017, was followed by an official season premiere on the New Year's Day of 2018. His equestrian enthusiasm found an outlet in the animated children's show
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, where in the seventh season episode "
The Perfect Pear" he supplied the voice of Grand Pear, the estranged maternal grandfather of Applejack and her siblings. 2017 also saw him appearing in a second music video with Brian Evans, this time promoting Evans's cover of the Dolly Parton song "Here You Come Again". Shatner became the focus of political controversy in 2021, when it was revealed that a popular science documentary show that he would host, ''I Don't Understand with William Shatner'', was scheduled to be aired on
RT, formerly known as Russia Today, from July 12. RT's editor-in-chief,
Margarita Simonyan, said that "Captain Kirk has come over to the good side." Criticized by a Russian journalist for his involvement with the government-controlled outlet, Shatner branded his accuser a hypocrite and compared his contract with RT to the arrangement through which the channel had acquired the right to broadcast American football games. Four days after the
Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Shatner issued a statement via Twitter expressing unqualified support for the Ukrainians in the resistance that they were mounting against their assailants. On March 2, he withdrew from his show, citing the invasion as his reason for doing so. RT America ceased transmitting altogether on March 3. Also in 2021, Shatner starred in the film
Senior Moment, which co-starred
Jean Smart and
Christopher Lloyd. The movie was released in March 2021 on the same week Shatner turned 90. In 2022, Shatner competed in
season eight of
The Masked Singer as "Knight" (depicted as a knight riding a golden goose). A running gag is that the golden goose that "Knight" rides keeps trying to attack
Nick Cannon. He was eliminated in the first episode alongside
Eric Idle as "Hedgehog" and
Chris Kirkpatrick as "Hummingbird". Shatner hosted and executive-produced
The UnXplained on
History from 2019 to 2023. Since its premiere the show has received very negative reviews from critics. Writing in
Irish Film Critic, Thomas Tunstall reported that the show's "subject matter runs all over the board", as if designed for an audience with attention deficit disorder. Though Shatner enthusiastically poses many questions, he provides far fewer satisfactory answers than he should – perhaps by design to retain the sense of mystery." In
2025, Shatner received a Special Lifetime Achievement
Saturn Award. ==Career as a recording artist==