I took dutiful time recently to complain about my teenager's television habits. His repartee was merciless and quick: "How many hours have you wasted watching Star Trek?" Leave it to me not to have a snappy answer to such a trivially stupid arithmetic question; all in all, good comeback. Rats.

I remember an internet answer on the order of 600 hours but, like tiny spiders outside the window, can't recall the source. So I dusted off my calculator, did a little browsing through the official site episode titles, and finished with a trip through the internet movie database for film runtimes. Episodes for all live-action series are assumed to be 1 hour, and animated episodes at 30 minutes.

TOS measures in with 80 hours of material including "The Cage." TNG piles in with 178, DS9 follows at 176, and Voyager trails the longer series with 172. TAS contributes 22 episodes for 11 hours, and ENT boldly contributes its 26 hours with many more promising ones to come. (Should ENT go the seven-year distance - like Pon Farr? - we can recalculate the numbers then.)

From TMP to INS, in minutes the nine movies (director's cut time in parentheses) ran 132(143), 113(116), 105, 119(136), 107, 113, 118, 110, 103. Hey - what's the extra 17 minutes in TVH? (The average on the movies is 113 minutes but can't assume that value for NEM until after its release.) All together the movies total 1020 minutes - 17 hours. Hmm ... seemed longer at the time.

What have we learned? Star Trek directly involves 660 hours of imagery. Seeding it all, The Original Series contributes 12% of the material. TNG and DS9 weigh in with 27% apiece, VOY another 26%, ENT with 4%, all the films with 3%, and TAS at 2%. (Future research could compensate for commercial or bumper lengths.)

It might also be interesting to weight the measurements by the production cost involved. As much as I like TAS, it's hard to suggest (by similar magnitude of hours) that it's affected Trek as much as the films. Heck, TOS probably accounts for a full third of a better metric, TWOK by itself another quarter, and the rest can divvy the spoils.

So the next time I catch my son watching a tinsel-town turkey, the answer will leap from my lips: "Out of 660 hours to watch, I have not wasted a single one." (I might have watched a few of them wasted however. Good think he didn't ask it that way. That'd take another column!)