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Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

Huge B5 fan here as well, watched them all (multiple times) as they came out.

Honest question: does anyone know of any TV series that had a firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years before any filming began?

Babylon 5 got funded when JMS described, in detail, the last scene of the last episode in the last season.

There were flash forward scenes in season 2 that took place in season 4. Two years later, they meshed together perfectly.

Has any other show been like that? I'd love to know. (:

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> firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years

If you read the books, you'll learn the truth is much more interesting than that. While JMS absolutely had a large number of ideas, and an overall arc, it was far from firm. Every character had trapdoors built in in the event that the actor left the show (e.g. Andrea Thompson/Michael O'Hare).

I have the, perhaps somewhat unpopular, opinion that this the concept has ruined most TV.

It wasn't Babylon 5 that sparked the trend, but in 2004 Lost, Battlestar Galactica and then later on a few following shows like Prison Break came along and were very successful with the long story arc.

The concept of the seasons-long story arc is now basically endemic in modern TV. I think it's a situation where the highs are higher, but the average is much worse across all TV.

The issue I think is that the writers can't experiment like they could in the past with the more monster-of-the-week type formula.

A bad idea in a modern show is baggage you have to deal with for the rest of the show. In old school TV, the end of the episode came around and erased all sins. It also forces the writers tell a complete story each episode.

Consider Star Trek: TNG. There are a whole pile of really terrible episodes of that show, but there are also amazing ones. I don't think it's possible for a show like Star Trek: Discovery to ever reach the heights of TNG given the baggage it has signed itself up to deal with.

Lost and the new BSG are the two prime examples of How Not To Do a long story arc. Both started with the promise of a coherent overarching story, but in reality the writers only had the vaguest idea of where they were going beyond the basic premise. They are the exact opposite of B5. Frak, the very Arc Words of BSG were "…and [the Cylons] have a plan". Well, turns out the writers didn't! They totally made it up as they went along. So perhaps bad execution of long story arcs has ruined TV. But the concept itself certainly hasn't.

Anyway, even B5 had a plenty of "monster of the week" filler episodes as well. They were generally of much lower quality than the plot episodes.

Talking about filler episodes, that’s what ruins DS9 for me. I love the story arc in that (albeit I hate the final episode) but the filler episodes are just too painful to watch. Generally speaking at least, there are some really notable exceptions.

I’d be really interested if they did an abridged version of DS9 in HD. Sadly it’s the fillers that are putting me off from rewatching it.

I hated Lost because they kept alluding to some epic story arc when it was painfully obvious the punchline was just “everyone is dead” and the rest of the show was mearly filler that they were making up as they want along.

Battlestar Galactica was a great show but Unfortunately I ruined it a little for myself when I watched a “how it’s made” style show midway though the second to last series and they commented about some of the writing decisions they made. That’s when I realised they were just making it up as they went along as well (previously I thought the same as you in that they had a pre-defined arc). Battlestar Galactica did still have some amazing writing though, even if I was a little saddened by my realisation.

Maybe an obvious answer, but Game of Thrones and The Expanse are both adaptations of an existing novel series and hence implicitly had multi-year arcs set out for them. I'm told GoT has outrun the novels by now so they're in the same mess as everyone else, but at least in part, they had pre-planned arcs.

> I'm told GoT has outrun the novels by now so they're in the same mess as everyone else

Not exactly, I don't think; from what I understand GRRM has provided outlines that go beyond where the novels, so while there is more to flesh out (even before changes made for the TV medium), they aren't flying as blind as a show that's working completely season to season.

The “they” I’m mostly referring to is GRRM himself, but I suppose they have as much headroom via the outlines as any other show would.

Didn't Firefly have story arcs planned out, I don't know if there were five years worth.

Ouch, Joss Whedon tried to cram it into the film Serenity when Firefly got cancelled, I daresay there's far more detail I am not versed in.

Meh. Firefly was a decent show, but I didn't feel much arc going on, although it's possible that it would have been amazing with 5 seasons. I felt it was more cowboys in dystopian outer space than B5 which was about politics, military strategy, philosophy, love, hatred, revenge, technology, society, war, and thus grand space opera.

Firefly had some good ideas, but its whole "space western" (or more accurately, "space American Civil War") motif was in my (admittedly unpopular) opinion slapdash and awkwardly executed. I cannot take a show seriously that expects us to believe, in the far flung future, in an entirely different solar system, anyone will actually utter the phrase "twixt my nethers" in common parlance.

I mean... that's just stupid.

Compare it to the anime Cowboy Bebop, which in my opinion did it correctly, blending the themes of the Western genre without forcing in the tropes and idioms in ways that threaten to break immersion.

> Firefly had some good ideas, but its whole "space western" (or more accurately, "space American Civil War")

“Space Western” is more accurate; except for a couple of flashbacks, the Civil War analog was past-and-background, just as is the case with the Civil War itself traditionally in the Western genre.

> Compare it to the anime Cowboy Bebop,

I'd rather not, since (despite the Western genre being an influence on both), they are so radically thematically different that there is really no point in comparison.

You’re also forgetting that it was supposed to all take place in one solar system, was it something like 80 planets?

I liked the idea of a Chinese culture, was this in parallel?

The western idea was a bit too TV friendly.

True the arcs weren’t that perceptible I realised them as Serenity rushed through them all; I did like the Han Solo angle of not independent of a huge state enterprise. Although a bit about what a “confederate” vibe implies

If Firefly counts, Babylon 5's attempted successor Crusade counts more so. It supposedly had 5 years planned, and was also cruelly cancelled after a lot of network notes and drama including airing some episodes out-of-order/at weird times.

JMS at least didn't try to cram the remaining plot into a single film. Some of the plot is out there as unfilmed scripts and some made its way into book series, and most of it we may just never know at this point because WB doesn't care about Babylon 5.

As far as the planning goes: The treatment that he gave an actor (Michael O'Hare I think?) was leaked at one point and IIRC it diverged in many ways from the direction the show took, particularly from season 3.

Partly because Michael O'Hare needed to be swapped out at the end of season 1, but also partly because what ended up being the story of seasons 1-4 was supposed to be spread out over an entire franchise of series with two 5-year arcs each.

JMS supposedly had contingency plans for losing any of the actors, but O'Hare in particular was difficult because his character was supposed to be the central mythic figure. (This is why he shows up again later on as a guest star; one specific aspect of the character was already set up to the point that they couldn't work their way out of it easily.) Unfortunately, O'Hare had to leave the show for health reasons after the first season.

He mentioned that somewhere. It might have been in the script books, and possibly the usenet archives.

You can see that in similarities with various characters -- Lyta Alexander/Talia Winters, Jeffrey Sinclair/John Sheridan, Catherine Sakai/Anna Sheridan. (Note that the former encountered First Ones in a season 1 episode, setting up the possibility of her encountering the Shadows between season 1 and 2.)

Compare it with Lost.... :-)

I just did some very fast research about that, and apparently both Lost and Battlestar Galactica attributed their coherent story arcs to Babylon 5.

I never watched Lost though.

If I may ask, assuming you watched the show: did they ever film scenes from years in the future, seamlessly connecting them in the present and then later on?

Thanks for your reference.

> Lost [...] coherent story arcs

No. Those things cannot be used together that way.

And I'm pretty sure that's the comparison the grandparent was suggesting.

BSG borrowed the idea of having a coherent story arc, but they didn't plan it out ahead of time. Ronald D. Moore had a podcast of commentary tracks for each episode and openly admitted they were winging it the whole time. What BSG did right was to get all the small things right--get a bunch of really, really good actors, make everything look as naturalistic as possible, and let characterization rather than plotting or abstract concepts drive most of the storytelling.

I didn't watch it, but I had many friends who did and were very upset about the ending and lack of closure on story lines.

Seconded! Those episodes totally floored me when I first saw them, made me fall in love with the series.

In fact at the time they made me think if I ever wrote a Sci Fi arc that I’d plan the whole thing out like that in painstaking detail.

Turns out the YA Sci Fi novel draft I’m working on now (my first novel) was primarily pantsed and not plotted. Go figure :-)

> does anyone know of any TV series that had a firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years before any filming began?

Game of Thrones, though adaptations where the source material is spread out over multiple seasons are probably cheating a bit.

It is more common now. The parent post is probably referring to the 90's where this was ground breaking. I was in kindergarten while this was on the air and a friend of my parents would tape it for us. My parents would allow me to stay up to watch these episodes. My first true science fiction love along with Star trek TNG. Babylon 5 has a lot of concepts that have stuck with me over the years.

Season 1 is slow and terrible in some places. Particularly the CRT monitors look very dated along with the clothing which is supposed to be futuristic but screams 80's. The rest is good from the plot to many of the actors (Garabaldi, G'kar, Londo, and Delenn) come to mind, but many others were also great.

I think Delenn sells a female powerhouse role so much better than any other actress I've seen in science fiction. She is intelligent, thoughtful, funny, a master politician, and even a little scary at times even though on the whole the character reflects serenity. Her arc is great too. There are so many good Delenn scenes that depict her character's wit and badassery that it is hard to choose a favorite (dealing with G'kar early in season 1, defending the station on a Minbari battle cruiser, challenging a military dictator on her homeworld).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UYloWBP79ro

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qC1nW9D1_OM

"Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari Fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else!"

It's the "Why not?" that precedes that that makes that particular line.

Yes! The delivery of that line is just too good.

And the Earth ships then turn around and flee lol

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