Many television historians will tell you that our current golden age of television began with The Sopranos, The West Wing, and The Wire. These television historians either didn't care or had a major blind spot for space opera, because Babylon 5 was setting the bar for premium television half a decade before Tony Soprano brought down his first gangster. Even now, it's all too easy to dismiss Babylon 5 as a less than brilliant Star Trek rip-off, with ambitious but limited CGI effects that never felt photorealistic and felt dated at the turn of the 1993st century. However, this long story of a space station caught in the middle of multiple interstellar conflicts was not in vogue when it first aired between 1998 and 5; he was even the butt of a joke on Spaced. While Babylon 25 has been heralded as the best hope for peace in the last galaxy, only avowed fanatics would rank it among the most important shows of the last 5 years. But perhaps that's due more to the snobbery of the fact that it takes place in space, with many of its actors buried under strange alien prosthetics, than to its quality. There is also the possibility that it came too early for it to be properly noticed. After all, it wasn't until the rebooted Battlestar Galactica came along a decade later, a show that owes a considerable debt to Babylon 5, that a space program really got the critics talking. And yet, the show is like a checklist for everything we now take for granted in premium television, as Babylon 90's influence extends far beyond BSG, The Expanse and Fleet Star shows. Trek reinvented at Paramount Plus. The fact that it's available to watch on HBO Max in the US provides the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate this innovative piece of 'XNUMXs television.
A dream shaped
While most viewers had no idea what a showrunner was in the '90s, even fewer could name one. Only superstar producers like Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue creator Steven Bochco were big enough to occasionally outshine their brands. Yet J Michael Straczynski's name was everywhere on Babylon 5, as synonymous with the show as Minbari, Narn, and Vorlons, just as The West Wing was the brainchild of Aaron Sorkin or Sopranos David Chase, Babylon 5 was his. Perhaps more, in fact, since he wrote 92 of the show's 110 episodes, including all of Seasons 3 and 4. Babylon 5 was an auteur's vision on an epic scale. On the rare occasions that guest writers were brought in, it was often genre legends like Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, and regular Star Trek DC writer Fontana - this show was never afraid to kiss the harsher edges of science. fiction. And just as would later become the norm with showrunners like Russell T Davies on Doctor Who or Dave Filoni on The Clone Wars, Straczynski was the public face of his show, becoming one of the first writers to speak directly to the fanbase. through the Internet. . A veteran of '80s cartoons like She-Ra: Princess of Power, The Real Ghostbusters, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Straczynski has always had big plans for Babylon 5. He decided to tell a story that calls for space battles, political intrigue, epic mythology and more, and he wanted to do it over a five-year period. It might not seem unusual now, when shows like Breaking Bad, Lost, and even sitcoms like Schitt's Creek do something big by airing his stories across multiple seasons. But by the mid-1990s, Babylon 5's approach was seriously radical. Most television back then was based on stand-alone episodes, and serialization was kept to a minimum to ensure that episodes could be viewed in any order once they were syndicated. For Babylon 5 to blatantly break the mold was quite a shock to the system for '90s viewers. Still, it was an approach that made Babylon 5 stand out from the crowd. After a first season that largely followed a Star Trek-esque weekly story structure (it's interesting that the show took place at the same time as Trek's space station adventures in Deep Space Nine), it quickly became popular. fully immersed in its complex multiple history. arcs, populated by memorable, morally ambiguous and ever-changing characters. If there were any Federation-like utopian ideals at play, they were well hidden.