A mysterious new Babylon 5 project is coming sooner than you think
inverse.com
inverse.com
I'm currently on season 3, started watching it because of Casey Muratori's (video game programmer, author of "Handmade Hero" educational streams) series of interviews with Jonas Kyratzes (video game designer, writer of "Talos Principle"), where they discuss the show: [0]
The distinguishing point about the show is that it features a coherent world, where some small detail happening in one episode can come back 6 episodes later. It's also coherent in between seasons, since it was pre-planned as a 5-season show spanning exactly 5 years on the Babylon 5 station.
Also, it features early computer animated 3D art made on Amiga computers. It hasn't aged that well but gets the job done.
Unfortunately for the 5 year arc, they weren't sure they'd get a Season 5 so much of plot ends in Season 4 and Season 5 suffers for it.
Seasons 2 to through 4 are still some of my all-time favorite science fiction TV. The three-episode mini-arc of "Messages from Earth", "Point of No Return" and "Severed Dreams" (IIRC) is still incredibly intense.
The closest thing I can think of today is probably The Expanse. It has the same mix of human politics in the face of aliens we cannot comprehend. Of course, The Expanse has a higher budget and more consistent acting.
In a lot of ways, Babylon 5 is the first "streaming-style" show. There's a clear series arc, viewers are expected to know what happened in previous episodes, and there's plenty of foreshadowing for the attentive viewer. (The original online Babylon 5 fandom kept track of every tiny hint.) Buffy was also moving in that direction, and Star Trek quickly followed.
Probably my favorite moment of 90s TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv3t86imsDI. RIP Mira Furlan.
This was simply because it used all-digital effects in a time where the same budget would buy you twice the rendering time a year later.
I'll have to ask my wife, she hadn't seen either until adulthood.
If you read the JMS script books, it wasn't that they weren't sure if they would get an S5, it was that they were 100% sure they would NOT get an S5 and he was forced to wrap everything up in S4 or it would be gone forever.
S4/S5 would have been much better had the original plan stuck, but, that wasn't even the primary reason S5 had major issues. JMS was staying in a hotel at some con and a maid helpfully cleaned up his room including trashing 100s of post-it notes containing his outlines for S5. This was the same conference where Claudia Christian blew him off and lost the last opportunity to be on the show -- not entirely her fault as she did not got bad advice -- she talks about this in her book but she thought it was a negotiating ploy and she (and her agent) wanted to raise her quote for the final season especially since it was well known it was the final season and she would immediately be job hunting after S5 and it unfortunately ended up with her off the show.
It didn't help that they had killed off XXXXX (can I spoil a 20-year-old show? not going to find out...) and saved her character.
Keep in mind JMS had been show runner for 4 years at that point and had written most of S1, almost all of S2 and all of S3/S4, something unheard of at the time and even crazier considering that they are 20+ episode seasons each, then he lost two starring actors (in variously shitty ways), lost all his notes, I'm amazed we got an S5 at all and a lesser person would have just given up.
Ultimately the final season was just shot through with challenges, despite it all, I enjoy it. The telepath situation and the conclusion of that was a great arc.
The whole series ended up with a narrative arc like a novel. First season was setup. Things started to pick up in season 2, then 3 and 4 built to a huge peak, and season 5 wound it down, like Lord of the Rings after the ring is destroyed.
I can't think of any other show that has a single narrative arc like this across the whole series. At most you get an arc per season. Often not even that; e.g. the new Battlestar Galactica was a continuing story but the narrative tension was pretty even throughout, with a series of small arcs, each just a few episodes long.
Later shows went for a single narrative spread over a season — 24 pioneered that, but before that Buffy had championed the “big bad” each season, although with Buffy you didn’t have to watch every episode in order for it to make sense.
Even in the 2010s the new Star Trek series (Picard, Discovery), and especially the CW arrowverse are prime examples of how poor that structure is.
This type of TV was enabled by TiVo/DVRs. Before then, producers couldn’t rely on people not missing an episode, because if they did they’d be lost. (Not coincidentally, Lost was also enabled TiVos for the same reason).
VCRs!
By the time TiVo came out, VCRs had almost been relegated to nothing, as the rental markets had moved to DVDs, and media companies were perfectly happy with consumers using products that were read-only. The idea of recording TV to a hard drive was absolutely revolutionary, as it finally made it easy enough to use and reach the critical mass needed for continuous storylines.
I did. I had a fancy VCR that would automatically skip commercials "Commercial Advance", and I setup a VCR+ program on my computer so I could quickly and easily program the VCR.
When I missed a show (it was rare) I found online review sites that would recap the episode, sometimes they even had screenshots. Or I would stock up recordings and wait for the rerun, and then continue.
Back then TV stations were pretty good about having reruns relatively soon after an episode, specifically for people who missed the original broadcast. They would often do them late at night.
I later automated it with electronic listings with just the shows I was interested in, that fed directly into the VCR+ program and gave me a quick list I could enter.
> But the feature to skip commercials sounds pretty sweet.
In some ways it better than what they have now - it would fast forward through the commercial, so you could see if it made a mistake, or if there was a preview, or a special ad that was also partly the show (yah they did weird things like that then).
Though the 5th season is weak, because the show was threatened with cancellation. IIRC, each season had an "major plot" and a "minor plot." To adapt to the cancellation threat, they crammed the season 4 and 5 "major plots" into season 4 (IIRC defeat the Shadows, liberate Earth), leaving season 5 with two "minor plots." The season 5 finale was originally shot as part of season 4, but delayed when the show was renewed.
Is this just me, or do others feel similar?
Also: "All of the main cast still around participated" makes me feel sad. Andreas Katsulas is a hard act to follow.
Personally as a fan of the original supermarination Thunderbirds, I loved the CGI reboot too.
SNW wasn’t release in the U.K. so I only saw the first episode. My understanding is it’s much more episodic, unlike Picard and Discovery which are a single 10 hour episode each season.
I enjoyed Arrow and early seasons of Flash despite being well well past their target demographic but I’m not sure how well this show will in if it sticks to the CW formula.
Same feeling here, but in my case I'm blaming it on me getting slightly older (passed the 40-year mark recently).
I'm also looking at past TV series that I definitely liked back in the day (and which I still do) with different eyes. For example, when watching The Office (the US version) I've started to take Dwight's side more and more, while hating on almost any common action taken by Jim and Pam. Also, the more I re-watch Seinfeld the more I feel as one with George Costanza, and even with his dad (played by Jerry Stiller).
Also I'd like to see something new in one of my beloved sci-fi franchises for once, instead of all of them just trying to feed me member-berries.
For those who don't know. The original B5 was shot on film for maximum definition, but the CGI (which was used heavily for a show of that era) was only rendered at NTSC resolutions to save money. The thought was they could just re-render at a higher resolution later. However the special effects company that did it went out of business, and all the CGI assets were lost. IIRC, they've never had the money re-do the CGI, so the best they've been able to do to re-release it is upscale the NTSC (which is far from ideal).
My understanding is that the quality of 16mm film was low enough that viewers could tell even over broadcast NTSC.
And the next affordable step up (the same 32mm film and cameras used for most feature films) just so happened to have high enough quality that we can now do 4k remasters.
But what a disappointment -- some actors can act well without direction, some can't, and B5 really shows you with stunning clarity which side of the line the actors are on. On top of frequently stilted dialogue (a JMS soft spot -- his screenwriting book is great but his dialogue examples are terrible) and missed opportunities for humor -- and with those aliens and that dialogue, you'd better take those opportunities if you don't want the audience to take them for you.
The production values have also aged spectacularly poorly, but they probably looked decent on broadcast standard-def TV at the time and it's really not the primary issue.
Which is to say, they can't really do worse than the original with JMS himself showrunning it again. Maybe it'll be a lot better since they have more money/support this time.
For me, that's because it tells a long-tail story really well. From the very beginning of the show they knew exactly what was going to happen later on, allowing everything to tie together really seamlessly.
Watching that all unfold and your understanding of it grow is just fantastic.
My only complaint is the whole S4/S5 debacle, because they got told it was being canceled so they had to wrap up quicker than expected, then got another season and had to re-open all the threads they just closed. Somewhat awkward.
As for the actors, I think they did a fantastic job. They're part of the reason I don't think a newer version of the show could work - you just couldn't have a convincing Delenn, Mollari, G'kar, or Sheridan like they did in the original.
And sure, the visuals of the show aren't fantastic. But who cares? A good show's merits aren't in its visuals, so long as they're sufficient to tell the story.
People say the Sopranos ushered in the 'golden age of TV' and I woudlnt deny it had larger mass appeal, but shows like B5 did it first.
Writing this makes me sad about how may of the above are no longer with us.
Please change my mind, have they made anything remotely watchable recently? How are they in business?
No.
Lore: https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Babylon_Project#The_Babylon...
In particular the Babylon 4 episodes are just mind blowing. I can’t say anymore other than the pay off as well worth it to get through, as others have mentioned, the end of season four which is really the main plot arc fully realized, and it’s quite impressive.
It’s tricky. Part of the appeal of SG1 was it was based in todays world, with contemporary relatable characters playing on a galactic stage. the credibility of that got stretched as it went on, especially once they started doing things like building spaceships. I worry some of the original appeal is lost with a continuation, but a straight reboot of the concept would be very hard to replace the chemistry
Excellent soundtrack though.
Stargate has 19 seasons and 2 movies, spread across SG1, Atlantis, Universe, Origins & Infinity. Rebooting that would be... dropping a tactical nuke on the franchise. Plus they've always left that universe "open" (look at Unending, the ending of SG1, they step back into the gate like its just another day), feels like there is so much more to explore.