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I read the following sentence:
Indeed, it was precisely because of its futuristic storyline that Star Trek was able to address many of the contemporary social problems that other programs shunned.
I am aware of the emphatic structure, "it is .... that..." and I think this structure "it was because of ... that" sort of resemble the "emphatic structure." Nevertheless, I still figure there are differences.
Could anyone explain why it is constructed this way?
It is indeed a cleft sentence.
The direct form would be
Indeed, Star Trek was able to address many of the contemporary social problems that other programs shunned precisely because of its futuristic storyline
The subordinate clause precisely because of its futuristic storyline could be emphasised by simply fronting it:
Indeed, precisely because of its futuristic storyline, Star Trek was able to address many of the contemporary social problems that other programs
but the cleft structure makes that clause even more prominent by making it the subject of the sentence (strictly, the subject complement - the syntactic subject is the dummy "it").
The basic underlying sentence is something like
We can transform it in these two ways:
These transformations are analogous to:
And so you can see the example as behaving like regular cleft sentences.
