JMS, the creator of this show, was way ahead of his time, and did some amazing tricks to get this show produced.
He drew heavily from technology culture, and found innovative ways to save money on production.
He was able to get consultation from the NASA JPL (and credited them), and he pioneered early CGI; season 1 supposedly built a rendering cluster out of 486 computers.
Another way this show was trailblazing was that it was the first network television show shot in 16:9.
You can read more about it on the Lurker's Guide[1] (That is a usenet reference), which contains excerpts from the newsgroups where he gave feedback to fans after each episode.
They contain all of the original scripts for every episode (in some cases multiple versions) as well as commentary written by JMS about both what is going on on-screen and off-screen. They have some really detailed information on the challenges he faced running this show in an exceedingly raw and real fashion. Sadly, they are only available in print and are very expensive.
http://jmsnews.com has complete archives of all of JMS's usenet postings, which span the entire period the show was on the air (as well as many years before/after). Again, some of this is very raw, like where he discusses the feature film due to be announced "in a few days" about the telepath war (which we never got :().
Anyway, revealed myself to be a huge B5 nerd here, but, I do believe it was in a number of ways one of the most visionary TV shows on air at the time, highly serialized plots 5 years before the sopranos and computer VFX that movies couldn't touch at the time.
I've recently been re-watching the show, and it stands up pretty well, especially the VFX. The two weaknesses I've noticed are the look (which is often dated to the '90s) and (ahem) JMS' writing. The plots are good, and stand against ST-TOS as actual science fiction, unlike many other SF shows, but the actual writing...well, yeah.
Speaking of ST-TOS, B5 doesn't look too bad compared to the remastered (!) ST on Netflix.
The first season's acting was also very daytime soap opera... don't get me wrong, I loved the show as a whole, I just found the first season in particular sometimes hard to watch.
Would LOVE to see a well crafted remaster, with some of the techniques that can improve images based on neighboring frames, and maybe a rework of all the CGI for higher detail. I'm have surprised there hasn't been a fan effort considering how far even desktop gaming tech has come since the series.
The dialogue in B5 seems like a dated screenwriting style because it is. Most of what's dated is the humor--the gags and character wisecracks fall into a set of 90's humorous screenwriting formulas, just as the wisecracks and gags in say, "Star Trek: Discovery" fall within today's set of humorous screenwriting formulas. (There are some humorous bits in B5 that are still funny, like the line where Londo calls Vir a "moon-faced assassin of joy", but most of these work because they sound like something the character would actually say and not just a cheap screenwriter joke formula.)
I actually generally enjoyed the writing. As stated elsewhere, most of the episodes in season 1 were weak. A minority of the episodes in season 2 were weak, and it just got better from there.
If I may ask: what specifically didn't you like about the writing?
> 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.
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.)
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?
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.
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).
"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!"
More than just being the first shot in 16:9, it was the first network show shot targeting HD television, before the networks fully agreed on what HD would be. It just never got the final HD treatment that it should have.
It's still a huge shame that Warner Brothers supposedly lost all the digital originals for the special effects shots, because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease. Some alternate universe has amazing Babylon 5 remasters today on Blu-Ray versus the letterboxed no-worse-than-SD DVD copies ours is left with.
(Another weird twist to the story here is that one tale has it that Warner Brothers blames French company Vivendi for losing the digital SFX archives, which WB loaned to Vivendi for a B5 game under development under the old Sierra games brand that was eventually cancelled. Which also isn't the only property that WB seems to have "lost" to Vivendi, as WB should probably be the owner of the No One Lives Forever videogame IP, by way of buying developer Monolith into WB Games, but Vivendi lost the publishing contract somewhere and no one seems to know in this timeline if WB actually does own it or not.)
>You’ve possibly read or been told all the original CGI files were lost . . . . Well, no, they haven’t – though some may be lost by this point while others are buried pretty deep - plenty do still exist. For the best part of 10 years I’ve been sitting on a whole pile of Lightwave 3D models and scene files which someone who will remain nameless arranged for me to receive. Those are frame for frame renders of the original shots - using the original models and textures which haven't been updated in any way other than rendered out at 1920x1080.
Wait, you said "digital". That means super easy to copy. The only way Vivendi could have "lost all the digital originals" is if only one physical copy existed (no backups??) and Warner simply handed that over to them instead of making them a copy. There is absolutely no way Vivendi can be blamed for that level of WTF negligence from Warner. It would be completely reasonable for anyone at Vivendi to simply assume that any media they got from Warner was just one copy of many, and had no intrinsic value.
Yup, all part of the fascinating mystique of the story. At the end of the day any stupidity is 100% WB's fault, but how many mistakes they made in the process seems to be a fascinating tale.
Ehh... this was back in the 90s. It was different. Even now it's hard. Besides, even if they DID have the files, it's not always easy to upscale old content. Look up what Pixar had to with Toy Story to get it to HD.
> because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease.
IIRC, that was the actual plan from the beginning: render for SD TV in the 90s, then re-render when HD TV became common and computer power increased enough for it to be practical to render at those definitions.
Indeed. Which is a shame. Contrast it on the one side to DS9/Voyager as well which weren't even filmed on film and intentionally had no plans to preserve SFX work and will likely never see Blu-Ray releases. Contrast it on the other side to Star Trek TOS and TNG which were shot on film, and had a big enough audience to warrant rebuilding SFX almost from scratch to get a Blu-Ray release. B5 was primed to be right in the middle there and if not for the unfortunate losses of data, could have had a strong Blu-Ray release at a huge fraction of the cost CBS put into TOS and TNG remasters.
I thought they didn't go with 16:9 for the remaster because all the shots had to be framed for 4:3 for TV, and it was awkward having a bunch of "empty space" around the wider frame. But hey if 4:3 is good enough for The Maltese Falcon, it's good enough for me.
Even airing on television it was always "cinematic" 16:9 letterboxed to a 4:3 frame. (It really was interestingly ahead of its time on that.) Almost all of the shots were framed for 16:9. The DVDs that we did get releases of are proper 16:9, but because of the compositing for the 4:3 letterbox on TV the final resolution quality (which I call "no-worse-than-SD") on DVD is lower than the "low HD" potential of DVD in 480p/720p (as you might see in a film DVD). If they had the original SFX data they should have been able to simply recomposite at true 720p (or 1080p+ for Blu-Ray), and it is a shame that never happened per the original plan for the show.
He drew heavily from technology culture, and found innovative ways to save money on production.
He was able to get consultation from the NASA JPL (and credited them), and he pioneered early CGI; season 1 supposedly built a rendering cluster out of 486 computers.
Another way this show was trailblazing was that it was the first network television show shot in 16:9.
You can read more about it on the Lurker's Guide[1] (That is a usenet reference), which contains excerpts from the newsgroups where he gave feedback to fans after each episode.
[1]: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/