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> ...you couldn't really rely that everyone had seen all the episodes; who can always be at home at a given date and time? People got lives to lead.

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.)

> 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.

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.

No, I'm old enough to have done that. But there's a real limit to what you can plan around for many people. And there's lots of "casual fans"; there's many shows I enjoy, but not enough to stay home for them.

Yes. And even with all of that planning, the overarching super important arc would broke the story.

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.

> ...you couldn't really rely that everyone had seen all the episodes; who can always be at home at a given date and time? People got lives to lead.

> 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.

Of the show categories you mentioned, they don't exactly support your argument.

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).

Notably, soap operas are designed so that missed episode does not matter. The events happen slowly. Every important plot point is discussed by characters again and again and again, so that if catch up easily.

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 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).

The discussion is around if B5 was broadcast during the 80s, which makes it relevant, imo.

Ahh, I see what you're saying. My bad.

> I feel a lot has to do with the technology that's available; in 1966 when Star Trek aired you couldn't really rely that everyone had seen all the episodes; who can always be at home at a given date and time? People got lives to lead.

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.

I'd also like to see a "short story collection" again; which is really what the episodic format is. But realistically, I'm not holding out much hope for "Star Trek" in general. One of the great things The Next Generation did was jump ahead 75 years or so to, well, the next generation. This means you have the freedom to do your own thing while still building on what came before. In the last decade it's been going over the same characters again and again and again.

It's a busy franchise. They're doing a lot of reboot, but also a lot of new stuff. Lower Decks is actually excellent Star Trek. Prodigy and Discovery are also new directions for the franchise.

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.

Lower Decks is hands down my favorite of the new Star Trek shows. As for the episodic collection, Strange New Worlds is somewhat trying to return to it. As was The Orville!

+1 on Lower Decks.

Also, Picard Season 1 and 3 have been decent. (Seriously, skip season 2)

I like all three, but each is a kind of long movie, not episodic TV. SNW and LD are doing episodic well (LD, obviously, with a somewhat unusual tone for Trek; SNW more classic.)

I just finished season 2, and I liked it better than s1. S1 would often make me angry. Anyway, all three seasons are very different.

I made it to Episode 4 of Season 2 and then literally couldn't watch more. The dialog was so disconnected from the characters.

Season 3 feels like a return to characters speaking with internal consistency.

Babylon 5 accounted for this in the first three seasons by making them start out episodic and switch to serialized over the course of the season, since by that time most would have settled into routines and watch the same shows each week.

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.

the "regional broadcasters getting the rights" was part of the business plan for all the shows of that time: re-runs in syndication. Those would regularly not be in order, and the TV stations would schedule more popular episodes to run more often. So it's not just that people couldn't record/watch later what they missed; the shows were actively made to be run out of order, so they had to be standalone for the business model to work.

As a kid I had maybe 90-95% of TNG on video tape, recorded myself from TV broadcasts in Finland.

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.)

I had these Star Trek tapes! Well, my dad did, but yep, seven seasons of TNG in grey boxes. We used to get them in the mail once a month I think? I didn’t realize at the time, being a child, how great this was compared to trying to catch it on tv every week.

Took up a ton of room, yes, but entirely worth it.