Sulu was gone for several episodes while Takei was filming The Green Berets. His lines and scenes got transferred whole to Cheekoof.
Interesting responses, I guess I was wrong on the one-and-done comment. I never knew NBC told Seinfeld the show needed a woman or else. There certainly were a LOT of women on the show, but I think Julia LD fit into the core group just fine. No hugging, no learning.
There’s a huge gender disparity in TV and film even considering just 21st century productions.
The Bechdel test is a pretty low bar. This is a really interesting graph of the percentage of male and female dialogue in 2000 films. It shows how unbalanced it is:
This site has a few graphs of percentage of women leads, directors, and producers. There’s actually a dip in female leads post-pandemic:
Anecdotally when I’m watching TV and movie credits, I always make a note of who gets top billing and how many men vs. women are in the cast. It’s surprising how unbalanced it is. I’m a male and that is a bias, but rarely is a woman top-billed or the supporting cast isn’t 2x males.
In the US, The Good Place had a balanced cast and was a better show for it. We watch a lot of British mysteries and the new productions are balanced as well.
Isn’t it Tolkien women?
I would say that, if a single guy is the main character of a show, it’s rare for him to have more than one female platonic friend (with exceptions like Three’s Company). And similarly, if a single woman is the main character of a show, it’s rare for her to have more than one male platonic friend (with exceptions like New Girl).
Considering there were only 8 female characters† in LotR (the book) compared to dozens of male characters and only one had a prominent role, that comment is quite on topic, even if it’s not about a TV show.
† Going by memory here, so I may have missed one or two.
Well I got it 
It’s actually a South Park reference, I believe. South Park has a black character that for decades was called Token but a few years ago they discovered his name was actually Tolkien.
Oh. I don’t watch that show. For that matter, I don’t watch much TV at all anymore.
Chekov joined the cast in the second season. He was first seen in “Amok Time,” which opened it, but without the Brit-pop wig he wore in other episodes that were filmed earlier and aired later.
According to 1968’s The Making of Star Trek, approximately one-third of the Enterprise’s 430-member crew was female.
So far as I know, all of the “Featured Players” like Walter Koenig were guaranteed six or seven episodes out of every thirteen.
“The Menagerie” was a recycling of the footage from the first pilot episode for Star Trek (“The Cage”), which did not sell, but NBC and Desilu allowed Gene Roddenberry to create a second pilot.
One of the reasons why “The Cage” was rejected was that it did have a prominent female character: the first officer was a woman who went by “Number One.” NBC felt that viewers were not ready for a woman in a leadership role in a television series…and also were not thrilled that the married Roddenberry had cast his mistress (Majel Barrett) in a main role.
So, in the second pilot, Number One was gone, with Spock assuming the first-officer role; Roddenberry put the dark-haired Barrett in a blonde wig, and gave her the supporting role of Nurse Christine Chapel.
The most obvious example of this is in “The Trouble with Tribbles,” where Chekov (and not Sulu, whose hobby is botany) correctly identifies the grains of quadrotriticale the Enterprise has been ordered to protect.
Which he thought would fool the clueless network execs, but apparently it did not. They just rolled their eyes and then rolled with the show as she didn’t appear until episode four and she only ended up appearing in 25 of 79 episodes as a contract player.
… At least that’s what Roddenberry told everyone when Majel didn’t get the part. Those in the know said he was actually relieved.
She was eventually given the role of Nurse Christine Chapel, however, and disguised with a blonde wig in the hope that NBC executives wouldn’t notice.
EDIT: As was noted above.
I couldn’t read this (well-made) list without mentally editing #5:
5 America’s Funniest Home Videos (though “characters hit in crotch” were predominately male)
I would quibble with this. Kevin’s mom and Winnie Cooper were about the only female characters. I believe he had a sister who was almost never shown. But considering it’s about a boy’s childhood, I would expect that he hung out with other boys.
And they fail Bechdel.
Slight quibble: in the book two women had important roles:Galadriel and Eowyn. And one was actually an elf. But your point stands.
I love Tolkien to the point that I once spoke Elvish in a conference call but he did not write women well. Most of the female characters in The Silmarillion were cringeworthy.
For the 8, I counted any female character, no matter her race. Two of them were hobbits, for example.
Meaningless and useless test. Lots of WW2 films with only a token female for a love angle, and the men talk nothing but the war.
Both critical and Galadriel was possibly the most powerful outside Sauron. But you forget Arwen.
Two at least, and IMHO three. And I count one dozen major male characters.