The “Star Trek” franchise, despite its longstanding presence of nearly 60 years and numerous TV series, surprisingly has never clinched an Emmy Award for an actor’s performance. It might be surprising, considering Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed Mr. Spock, was the only actor ever nominated for such an accolade. This is particularly interesting given the array of esteemed actors who have appeared in the franchise. These include Emmy winners like Ricardo Montalbán and Kelsey Grammer and Oscar winners Louise Fletcher and Michelle Yeoh, with Yeoh even starring in her own spin-off movie, “Section 31.”

The franchise isn’t short on Emmy Award consideration, having received and won accolades for various technical categories, such as best costuming, editing, and special effects. Moreover, both the original “Star Trek” series and “The Next Generation” were nominated for outstanding drama series, with the original series receiving nods in two of its three seasons. However, they ultimately lost to “Mission: Impossible” in 1967 and ’68, and “Picket Fences” in 1994.

Despite this, “Star Trek” superstar Patrick Stewart has been well-recognized outside of the franchise, securing four Emmy nominations for his non-“Star Trek” work. He’s a three-time Golden Globe nominee and even won a Grammy Award for his 1996 spoken word album, “Prokofiev: Peter And The Wolf.” However, Stewart contends that another member of “The Next Generation” cast, Brent Spiner, is overdue for an Emmy as well.

Patrick Stewart may be the most beloved cast member of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and perhaps the most widely recognized when it comes to awards. But according to Stewart himself, if anyone in the cast of “TNG” deserved an Emmy for their performance, it’s Brent Spiner, who played the stoic android Data. Not only does Stewart point out just what a challenge it was for Spiner to effectively portray a character with no emotions — while still making him effectively funny, dramatic, and even charming at times — but he specifically pointed to Spiner’s performance in the third-season installment, “The Offspring.”

In that episode, one of the saddest in “Trek” history, Data creates an artificial daughter named Lal (Hallie Todd), but when her programming proves faulty, he must race against the clock to stabilize her neural network before she dies. With not so much as a glint in his eye and a rapid movement of his hands, Spiner is able to elicit genuine heartrending emotion from the audience, who suddenly believes that an emotionless android is feeling some measure of pain.

“Brent Spiner’s performance is staggeringly good,” Stewart remarked in his memoir, “Making It So.” “He found new depths to his character’s Pinocchio-like predicament of being a human invention who wishes to become human. It’s a major injustice to me that Brent has never won an Emmy for playing Data.” But it wasn’t just his performance as the franchise’s iconic emotionless android that impressed Stewart.

While co-star Michael Dorn gets credit for having appeared in more episodes of “Star Trek” than any other, Brent Spiner might hold the record for playing the most characters, at least among the principal cast of “The Next Generation.” Because he didn’t just play Commander Data but also Data’s evil twin brother, Lore (a role that factored into the “TNG” episode that was Spiner’s most challenging to shoot), his human creator, Dr. Noonien Soong, and his long-lost android brother, B-4, in various episodes of “TNG.” 

Episodes like “Masks” and “Fistful of Datas” are also memorable for allowing Spiner to stretch his performance beyond the Data character, where he played different heroes and villains when he was possessed by alien spirits or stuck in a malfunctioning Holodeck. Spiner’s pitch-perfect performance as Data playing Sherlock Holmes is also a standout, not just because he was inhabiting a different role, but because he was playing a character who is playing a character, a tricky assignment for any actor.

After “The Next Generation,” Spiner continued in the franchise, both as Data — in the four “TNG” movies — and in episodes of spin-offs like “Enterprise” and “Star Trek: Picard,” where he played Noonien Soong’s ancestors, Arick Soong, Adam Soong, and Altan Indigo Soong. He got to perform Data’s death scene in Season 1 of “Picard” and still returned in the final season, this time as a new version of Data that was far more human, finally realizing the character’s Pinocchio-like dream. Perhaps one day Spiner will achieve Stewart’s dream for him, taking home a lifetime achievement Emmy for his part in making “Star Trek: The Next Generation” a hit.