Is Babylon 5 secretly the most influential TV show of the past 25 years? (2021)
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In that context, Babylon 5 felt to me like a bad parody, taking cheap shots at the political landscape in the US at the time. For example, their equivalent to the DHS was something like the Earth Alliance security division, and just like how US senators were wearing little "USA flag pins" on their lapels, the politician characters in the show started wearing similar little pins on their lapels.
"I get it, you watch the news, stop making it so obvious." was what was going on in my mind for every second scene. It felt almost obnoxious... until I realised the show was made in the 1993 – 1998 time frame, years before any of the things it was showing had happened!
Suddenly, it blew my mind how prescient it was, how it was showing a society's journey down the road to military fascism, and how half the world was following the same path.
Around the same time I read someone's "Ten steps to a fascist society." article (also pre-2001!), and I realised that the B5 TV show was at step 8, and the United States was at step 7 and eagerly beginning work on the next step.
Then, Obama won the election. Whew.
Those were long seasons, 22 episodes each. The total is basically an epic novel written for TV. Nobody gets to do that today. Even author-driven shows like "The Last of Us" feel truncated at only 8-9 episodes with no guarantee of renewal.
22 episodes of 42 minutes each used to be standard for a season. 24 episodes was also pretty common. Granted, not all written by one person, but JMS had been planning a 5-season series for a long time before any network picked it up.
A good read. Eco opens with how he know about fascism -- he was a kid in Italy when WW2 happened, and talked about how he won a child essay writing contest about the New Fascist Man, something he dwells on. But then he struggles to nail down what a New Fascist Man really is, and delves into his list.
Had to read it in college, worth the extra paragraphs.
The cult of tradition for example. If they really whorshipped traditions, facist movements wouldnt regularly destroy their whole environment and society, uprooting all that was before.
Take ISIS and Nazi Germany, they pretended to be pro Traditions, but at the same time destroyed all that had come before completely and utterly.
I found the "states regressing to tribal society und pressure while wielding a industrial economy" to be the better description of the problem.
Though in that criteria, ISIS was not that facist, as they never had the debt loaded industrial economy that defines a full scale non-local regression.
Side reference, but of course historian Eric Hobsbawm is the central name here, who wrote "the invention of traditions" about how this happens.
The Fascists of Italy were all about casting themselves as returning Italy to the glory of Ancient Rome, right down to the basic symbolism of the party.
People forget now, but department of homeland security - with all its B5 connotations was originally a Democratic Party idea, which Bush resisted until he started getting beat up politically for not doing more to unify the intelligence and security functions post 9/11.
As for the telepaths - well that’s a different story..
I see the use of the badges and uniforms, for example the NightWatch armbands as a thing that repeats itself in history. For example the Nightwatch armbands are clearly modelled on Nazi uniforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_symbolism has some other examples
By comparison, Sopranos for example had a narrative arc for each season, and the new Battlestar had a fairly continuous level of narrative tension throughout, with maybe three or four episodes from peak to peak. I don't think I've ever seen another show that did quite what B5 did.
I mean, Garibaldi? G'Kar? Londo?
These are not "Oh, that's cute, the character changed" few episode arcs. They're the sum of innumerable small events in most episodes, that result in complete (and believable!) overhauls of the characters.
You could also look at the arc of say Nog, or Jake Cisko, or Vir.
(Is he really an anti-hero? Well as Garak would probably say, "I'm not so sure, but there's hope for him yet.")
It's been a minute since I've done a watch-through of DS9, but from memory they have great episodes, but also get lost in the background for large chunks of seasons.
"and all it cost was the self-respect of one Starfleet officer."
I would say _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ did this as well.
And the definitive online reference to the show, The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, is still there, unchanged since the mid 90s: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/
In fact at this very moment, I am viewing "The Gambler III" with Kenny Rogers and Bruce Boxleitner (special appearance by Colm Meaney).
In a way, my life in those years sort of paralleled B5, with wild roller coasters of drama and enigmatic encounters in strange lands. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing!
that's genius
Two things stood out during the rewatch. At the end of the first season there were many different directions that the show could have gone and have been a completely different show. This gives me hope that the reboot/remake will strike fresh ground while still being recognizable as B5.
The second was how well the pivot at the beginning of season 2 is handled. The show basically reboots itself over the first 2 episodes, while also resolving the cliff hangers from the first season. JMS is an excellent and underrated writer, and I think some of the scripts should be studied by any prospective writer as examples of how it can and should be done. His book on writing is also worth a read.
('Signs and Portents' from s1 is great example. It takes the A plot/B plot/C plot template but has the plots weave around each other before colliding at a single beat before then separating out again).
VCR started to change this; you could now record that episode when you had something else to do; in 1985 about a third of people owned a VCR, by 1990 about two thirds. Later DVD and streaming changed this even more; I remember reading about a bloke who had all of TNG on videotape; it occupied an entire wall and must have cost a small fortune: 89 tapes (2 episodes per tape) it must of cost about a thousand, give or take. With DVD you can but all seven seasons for an affordable price and your girlfriend won't hate you for taking up a wall, and with streaming it's even easier.
Star Trek has a somewhat interesting broadcast history; from 1966 to 1969 it was broadcast in the traditional way: a set timeslot on a particular day and by season. It had a dedicated set of fans during the original run, but was never a phenomenon like it is today. After the series ended some regional broadcasters got the rights and started airing it ever day during meal time. There's about two months worth of material, and after that it would just start over again. It's that format that made Star Trek truly popular, eventually leading to the films, TNG, and all the rest of it. Today it's a common way to air older shows.
In 1983 Babylon 5 would have been a non-starter, simply because few people would be able to watch all of it, and you do need to actually watch at least a significant portion of it. Even with multiple repeats it takes a lot of effort to consistently follow a show with traditional TV. I never watched Babylon 5 when it originally aired; I watched some episodes but I had missed many and I was generally just confused by it; it wasn't until some time in the early 2000s when I downloaded and watched it that I actually followed it.
I think there are a few shows in the 90s leading up to the Sopranos: Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Homicide: Life on the Street (1993), Babylon 5 (1993), Oz (1997), and The Sopranos (1999). Maybe some others I'm not familiar with.
I'm gonna take a guess that you are younger than 35-40 years old? Back in the days without any time-shifting technology, many, many people planned their schedule around what time a TV (or even older, a radio) program aired. Lots of shows in those days had multi episode arcs. My personal shows that were scheduled in my weekly life were Dr. Who (Tom Baker) and The Dukes of Hazard. My mom never missed The Barbara Mandrell show (although there was no story line there) and my grandma never missed her daytime soap operas (obviously lots of multi-episode stories there.)
Season 5 aired when I was working tech support at SGI in Mountain View.
The problem was that the time slot was at 3 pm? or was it 4pm? Either way... I was still at work.
One of the tools that existed at SGI was a program called "All hands" which was intended for doing broadcasts of all hands to the entire company without trying to stuff them all in one room. And it worked quite well.
The question is what do you do with it the other 256 days of the year when it's not doing the quarterly broadcasts? Well... most of the time someone in the AV department had set it to rebroadcast daytime TV.
A few of us were able to persuade the AV department to change the channel at the appropriate time so that B5 would be multicast out for us to watch on All Hands.
Because despite all that planning pretty much everyone missed a week here or there. Life happens, work emergencies happen, family or friends come to visit and can't do it another day. You go for holidays. Spouse have to work late so you have kids alone.
Once in a while, all of these happen.
> In 1983 Babylon 5 would have been a non-starter, simply because few people would be able to watch all of it
This is an incorrect assessment of 80s US culture. TV was more central to the populace, pre-VCR than you seem to imply. The majority of people religiously watched episodes of news broadcasts, game shows, and soaps (not just daytime), or whatever favorite content they engaged in. There was an arc to most shows, albeit sometimes more pronounced than others. The reasons B5 would not have succeeded would more likely be the limitations of technology, the niche interest in scifi[1], and the uncomfortable moral ambiguity at a prominent point in the cold war.
[1] Out of this world, Small Wonder, and Alf managed 4 seasons each, Greatest American Hero 3. These were all relatively small budget shows.
News has little rewatch-ability, and partially recaps what's going on, in case you're just joining. Game shows almost never have long-running arcs, and even if you had a repeat contestant, it's not necessary to watch a previous episode to enjoy their performance in the current one.
Soaps DO have long-running plot arcs, but are notably aired in the middle of the day, and aimed at housewives and retirees, who are MUCH better situated than the average person to follow a show regularly.
A better comparison would have been Twin Peaks, which also had long-running plots. People made a point to watch it, but it was much shorter and thus easier to commit to. It was also national water-cooler conversation because it was one of the most unusual things ever aired on TV before then.
I definitely agree about the special effects; it looked much worse than Star Trek:tNG, which started airing 6 years earlier. I also agree that the moral ambiguity was discomfiting at the time, and that sci-fi faces hurdles to mass popularity. I personally think B5 also suffered from a slow first season, and a lack of top-tier actors (like say, Patrick Stewart or Edward James Olmos).
> at a prominent point in the cold war
The Cold War might have been an influence on Straczysnki's writing, but technically, it had been over for at least a year (USSR dissolved in Dec 1991) by the time B5 aired (Feb 1993).
Soap operas are designed so that stay at home mom can change the diapers, feed the kid or console it. They are designed so that receptionist or sales assistant can handle customer and return to watching without feeling a loss.
The discussion is around if B5 was broadcast during the 80s, which makes it relevant, imo.
True. And it's true that times have changed, but I really miss a good episodic Trek where you can simply tune in and out. Sure, we can stream episodes and guarantee that we've seen them all in order, but... my gosh I still have a life to lead, and I can't remember everything in your plot just for the sake of it. I'm hoping SNW is going that way, but I'm unsure.
They all get a boost from explicitly connecting to the existing characters, but some of the new characters have staying power. The animated format is really good for the Trek vision of a diverse galaxy.
Also, Picard Season 1 and 3 have been decent. (Seriously, skip season 2)
Season 3 feels like a return to characters speaking with internal consistency.
Seasons 4 and 5 probably would have been the same except due to fears of cancelation they took the primary plots of both seasons and stuffed them into just season 4.
240-minute tapes were available, so you could fit four and a half episodes on a tape. (Sometimes I made the mistake of forgetting to switch the tape and got the half episode — very sad since no reruns were scheduled.)
Took up a ton of room, yes, but entirely worth it.
See the Jan 1994 edition of "Video Toaster User" magazine:
There is an episode near the end of the series where we are seeing the equivalent of a TV talk show hundreds of years in the future after the events of the main arc. They "resurrect" the main characters of the series through holograms and AI models that mimic their memories and behaviors.
For some reason that I don't remember, the main characters consider the host and its nation a treat and decide to do something about it. Some of the characters distract the host while another hacks into a terminal and command some missiles from who-knows-where to be launched targeting their current position. It works and everything blows up!
Even in the future, what seems to be a harmless technology (holograms + LLM-like thing) may have unintended uses and security holes. What an amazing show!
They realize they're being used for propaganda explicitly counter to the beliefs they lived (and in some cases sacrificed) their lives for.
And they don't just command some missiles: the character in question gets their captor to admit his nation is planning a first strike (including against civilian population centers), then broadcast a recording of the plan to the other side.
Basically when they reached season 4, they got worried they wouldn't get renewed for the planned 5th season so secondary plots for both seasons were dropped and the primary plots for both were compressed into season 4, including the series finale. Then they got renewed for the 5th season and couldn't air that finale until the actual end of the series, so they used some budget from the 5th season to create the new 4th season finale. This is also why Ivanova is in the series finale even though the actress had left the show, it's the one that was filmed the previous year while she was still there.
I am looking through the list of 90s shows, sorted (more or less) by popularity, and the only other serial one I can see is Twin Peaks: https://reelgood.com/tv?filter-sort=8&filter-year_end=1999&f...
But there are some others off my radar, like Red Dwarf, and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Neon Genesis was an original script, but it follows most of the anime industry in having long-running plots. That's usually because they're are based off volumes and volumes of manga, where long-running plots are common.
That being said, the cast isn't quite as charasmatic as the best of DS9, but surpassing Garak is a tall order.
On rewatch b5 was definitely better than I remember it being, but it doesn't have episodes that straight up make me cry. DS9 has me crying from episode 1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acF2f3XLfCo
Babylon 5 is similar in that a lot of the scenes featuring Lando or G'kar were just mesmerizing. Garibaldi's hard boiled detective persona was a treat too.
I recall that Morn's costume/mask was made so that he could talk.
It's also interesting considering his key role in the war. - "I've know the courier for five years."
> laughing "Ohh yes, but I would much rather see you dead."
And yes it is always the aliens...
Rule 52 of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: Never ask when you can take.
Londo did have some bombastic moments.
In fact if I was to really boils down thee difference between the two I'd say B5 had better writing and DS9 had better actors.
That being said, I've tried to get into DS9, and I find that show's lead surprisingly similar.
Anyway, with Season 2, the cast really came together and the experience felt more smooth. But I still find a lot to love in that first season.
It’s hard to put yourself back in an era before pervasive web culture hooking into every fandom. At the time it was very much, “Hey, a darker, grittier Trek on a space station, cool!” And then an episode like B^2 airs: “Holy shit, this show is not what I thought at all.”
Which, granted, B5 still has as well, but far fewer.
It's indicative that later seasons of DS9 (93-99) were structured a lot more like B5 (94-98) than TNG.
B5 does not, for example, have an equivalent of the moment where sisko walks back into the punishment box in an act of pure defiance.
Bring enough contempt to the table, and anything at all sounds stupid. But the problem there isn't with the thing.
My issue is how jarringly out-of-place it feels. In the midst of a futuristic space opera, they shoehorn in a notorious serial killer from the Victorian era. JMS meant it to be cool, but instead I found it laughable. B5 wasn't Doctor Who, where mashups like that happen once a month.
Why does Jack, of all people, attract the Vorlons' attention? Why do they choose him as their tool? Why didn't the Vorlons interrogate Delenn themselves, or make a more recent interrogator? We're told he's uniquely-suited to his task, but nothing about his character convinced me that's true.
Why even were the Vorlons in doubt about Delenn and Sheridan? (I don't remember if there was anything leading up to the episode, but I admit it's been long time, so maybe there was something. I just vaguely recall it felt a bit out of the blue, but I could be wrong there.)
Regardless, there's really nothing about Sebastian or the episode that was improved by making him Jack the Ripper. It's my personal worst B5 episode.
For me there's something akin to a "twist budget," maybe; a show that does it too often or by too much of a leap starts to look overly pleased with its own cleverness. This doesn't reach that threshold with me, and indeed I thought the twist here actually did a lot to add depth and pathos to the character of Sebastian. For him merely to have been a sneering villain would probably have worked, set against Furlan's and Boxleitner's performances, and given after all this was a story about Delenn and Sheridan. Making him a repentant monster, with a unique perspective on their values and choices drawn from the horrific miscarriage of his own, turned what could have been just a sneering villain into something almost as pitiable as frightening, and shed new light not only on Alexander's performance but, in a narrative sense, on the depth and extent of the Vorlons' involvement in human history - a topic on which the story would later have much more to say, and putting in some work to help set that up here would help those later occasions likewise avoid tipping over into the "too clever by half" sort of twist.
That said, the specific questions you ask here have been asked before, and JMS has answered them. Those answers are collected on the Lurker's Guide page for this episode [1], and I think are worth your review; even if you find they fail to persuade, they'll at least still yield insight into why the story was written as it was.
I'm badly wanting an AI upscaled version made by someone. I've read articles about someone even recreating the CGI and remastering it themselves, something crazy like that.
That's how I want to finally one day watch this show. Not the granny 280p or whatever.
Edit: or pay for one month of streaming for like 10% of that cost if it’s about the money. This is why there isn’t (and won’t be) an upscaled DS9.
A friend of mine gave me that same heads up after encouraging me to watch it, circa 2010. I just can't remember if he said it's one or more seasons that you have to sort of slog through before getting to the good stuff.
If I had to choose between watching again DS9 in its entirety or B5, I'd probably go with B5, but I found both enjoyable. If a third option was BSG (2004-2009), that would be my choice in a heartbeat.
Actors and writers seem to need about a season to marinate. Straczynski knew what he wanted, and even he still took a season to dial stuff in.
The thing is you can safely skip those and pretend those episodes don't exist. There's actually episode guides for this [1][2] and I used this when I watched the show with my girlfriend a few years back. You could argue a bit about which episodes should or shouldn't be included, but reducing the entire show to about a quarter of "the good parts" is entirely feasible.
With Babylon 5 that'll be a lot harder. Not saying you can't trim any of it, but substantially less. Note that for TNG it includes just 3 episodes for the first season; I'm pretty sure you can't reduce Babylon 5's first season to just 3 episodes without losing the plot.
[1]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-the-next-g...
[2]: https://scribe.rip/maxistentialism-blog/star-trek-deep-space...
Lot of homerun episodes... but there were also a lot of episodes per season. And some of them were pretty painful. The good far outshines the bad, but it wasn't 100% homeruns for sure.
My understanding is that they split the difference: you needed to do most of your principle photography in the first half of the year, and then post-prod earlier episodes to account for delays.
Nowadays, the flagship shows are either based on extensive literary works like Game of Thrones and Expanse which depend on the consistency of the writing and how easy it is to adapt, or they're concept shows like Altered Carbon that barely have an idea about what they're going to do with a full eight hour season when they shoot the pilot, let alone what to do for season two. The latter tend to work out really badly if they can't hang on to their writing staff
See for example the 2011-2016 show Person of Interest that went from a mediocre if interest crime-of-the-week to possibly one of the best serialized science fiction TV shows about two AIs fighting it out (I'm rewatching it now due to the relevance)
Spoilers: ..........in the book, the Envoys are the governmental elite special forces unit. In the show, the Envoys are now terrorists? Switches the allegiances of so many characters. Also weird manipulation of the historical timeline, seemingly just to bring a character into the plot.
It seems very clear that the B5 directors didn’t direct the actors, so they were left to their own devices. Clearly, the actors who played Londo and G’kar did not need direction — I’d put Girabaldi in this category, too. Most of the others needed a lot more than they got. Or maybe the directors told all the rest of them to move and talk as stiffly and unnaturally as possible, but that would be odd.
The DS9 special effects were state of the art. The B5 special effects were done on some Amigas on the cheap. It probably didn’t show as much on the low-res TV’s of the day, but wow the difference is stark now.
B5 also badly needed a dialogue coach. I’m sorry, but JMS’s dialogue was terrible. His story, his plotting wass brilliant. His screenwriting book is excellent, but his dialogue is stilted and boring in the examples there, too. I have to admit to some bafflement on this, because Harlan Ellison could surely have helped with this aspect of things.
There’s more, but I think most of it comes from a very ambitious vision and complete lack of money to realize it.
Also - the B4 sub-story arc is some of the most incredible TV moments ever created.
Zathras can never have nice things.
And Zathras did have nice things. It was Zathras who did not have nice things.
Sometimes all the stars align just right to make something really great for a while and it's hard to recapture that later on.
The bad luck part has always been my biggest concern for the current reboot. They started that at The CW just as The CW entered into "will they or won't they sell/break up/destroy The CW" drama.
Also because of that meddling, episodes aired completely out of order, so a lot of things made no sense. For example, using the nanotech shield before it was invented.
I just searched my HBO Max and it isn't available for me (US based). ?
https://click.justwatch.com/a?r=https://www.justwatch.com/us...
Justwatch claims HD is on Roku and SD is on Tubi, but I didn't confirm that.
First episode B5: January 26, 1994 First episode STNG: September 28, 1987
Roddenberry was a Showrunner before Showrunners were in daipers.
I remember many complaints about B5 being incomprehensible because broadcasters were airing episodes randomly.
Hard to believe now, but at the time shows that embraced multi-episode character arcs and season-long plots ran a risk of being tarred as soap operas.
But it isn't about ideas or ethical debates like the first 5 Trek series were. So while I'm happy to see so many characters come back, I definitely miss the old concept of self-contained episodes.
Or if you don't like sitcoms, how is Babylon 5 more influential than Game of Thrones.
Granted, in the '90s you also have Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine which also shared in many of these trends, but TFA is still worth reading.
> A commenter named Steven Hopstaken left the following comment in the io9 article:
> I was working at Warner Bros. in the publicity department when Warner Bros. and Paramount were preparing to launch a joint [emphasis mine] network. Warner Bros. already decided to buy Babylon 5 for their adhoc PTEN network (a group of independent stations that agreed to show Warner Bros. shows in prime time.)
> Paramount and Warner Bros. both agreed that Deepspace 9 would be the show that would launch the new network and there wouldn’t be room for two “space” shows on the network. I was told they purposely took what they liked from the B5 script and put it in the DS9 script. In fact, there was talk of leaving the B5 script in tact and just setting it the Star Trek universe. I had to keep rewriting press release drafts while they were trying to make the final decision.
https://www.tor.com/2013/02/26/is-this-the-smoking-gun-provi...
While both shows were conceived independently, elements might have made their way from B5 to DS9 due to the studio suits.
You are talking quantity of viewers when this article is talking about quality, or at least quantity of qualities. You're also responding facilely to an article's title without actually engaging in its substance.
- One of the first, if not the first series where a single author wrote most episodes (and the ones JMS didn't were penned by legends such as Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and DC Fontana).
- A five-season story arc, with episodes you should watch in order.