Babylon 5

The indication is that they're using the same transfer as iTunes/Prime.

Part of me is like "Ooh, I should get HBO for that!" and then another part of me is like "You dingus, you already own the DVD box sets."

It is me or does B5 have a bit of a Mainstream Obscurity problem?

I wouldn't be surprised, it's the kind of groundbreaking show everyone has heard of at some point, but are not interested in/haven't gotten around to watching yet.

I'd definitely say so. It also doesn't help that it uses serialized story-telling (now very popular, especially on online streaming services) combined with full-length 20+ episode seasons (not very popular now, especially on online streaming services). There's a reason that most newer TV shows have seasons short enough to burn through in a single weekend.

Also the ground-breaking early-90s SFX that can tend to show their age nowadays and the show's relatively slow start as it spend the first season finding its sea legs.

For the most part, I see B5 get brought up nowadays as a show that inspired many newer popular shows like the BSG reboot, Star Trek: Discovery, or The Expanse. Or vice-versa, used as a way to endorse those newer shows to older fans.

Yeah, it's telling when viewer guides advice to skip the pilot and most of the first half of season one.

Season 1 is just a lot less serialized, too.

Watch the show for Londo, G'Kar, and Ivanova, and the rest will fall into place, is what I tell people. Pay attention when they're on the screen and you'll end up getting sucked in eventually.

Season 1 ...took some time to come to a boil.

Keep in mind that 1992-1993 was when Star Trek was still on the air - Both TNG,Deep Space Nine and Voyager would be on the air.

There were at least 3-4 other SF tv thoses, one on PTEN at the time (Time Trax).

So there wasn't much Oxygen in the room at the time (so to speak).

VHS tapes had been entrenched as a home entertainment medium for years - just in time for anime to be imported into the US.

On college campuses you were either an anime geek, a trekkie, Star Wars geek or a fantasy/dnd geek. There was some overlap but most had a preference.

Enter Babylon 5 - the obscure tv show, in some markets (like NM) airing on UHF stations late at night. So unless you had a VCR, you caught an ep or two if you saw it at all.

Babylon 5 was always on the verge of cancellation until most of the other series died out. PTEN died but at least the show got to Channel Hop to TNT (YMMV on that one).

Flash forward to 2020/2021: between file sharing, DVD collections and streaming services, you'd have to out of your way NOT to see B5.

And yet Star Trek and Star Wars tends to be what most people think of when you say "sci-fi". If they don't mention the MCU or The Expanse....

Babylon 5 got overshadowed but it's not that obscure - among SF geeks at least.

Edited by TairaMai on Jan 15th 2021 at 2:16:35 PM

Farscape is the one that ended up more obscure. It has a pretty distinct fanbase, but it doesn't seem to grow at all.

One detail about Babylon 5 that I always found interesting is that the main reason the DV Ds have been consistently in print is that they consistently sell. Maybe not that great, but they sell enough to stay above the print run cancellation mark.

Farscape, on the other hand, is a lot harder to sell as a premise, it's a hell of a lot weirder as a show and it was well ahead of its time. Right now, it'd probably sell pretty well to fans of like, Legion and Doom Patrol and even Guardians of the Galaxy, but at the time, it was "that weird Australian show with muppets in it" and it got increasingly difficult to advertise as it got harder to get into.

Babylon 5, at least, is superficially standard enough for a space opera show that it's easier to sell. Farscape starts hitting you with the bizarre stuff really early on and it takes almost a full season to indicate that it isn't just a weirdass event of the week show. Babylon 5 makes it pretty clear something big's going on in the pilot and then halfway through the first season, it's hammered in really hard.

And I love both shows, to be clear. And I am so glad neither of them went the route of Andromeda.

Part of the problem that both B5 and Farscape has is that the easiest way to describe them succinctly is to compare them to later stuff. It's a pretty consistent sales pitch I've seen online that if you like The Expanse or the BSG reboot, you'd like Babylon 5 because it hit many of the same marks. Farscape similarly gets retroactively compared to Guardians of the Galaxy (if you really want to confuse someone, say it's Buck Rogers with Muppets).

Mostly I think Farscape trips folks up because it's from the people who brought you the Muppet Show, and why is there so much BDSM stuff in this show?

And then there's Lexx. I don't even know where to start with that one. I'd tune in to the occasional episode as a teen hoping that maybe this would be the show where Sci-Fi Channel would show some skin. It's the weird horny sci-fi show that was weird and horny when compared to Farscape.

I describe LEXX as what you get when you ask a bunch of Canadians and Germans to do a reverse Star Trek. It sounds bizarre and it'll turn off a bunch of people, but it's surprisingly accurate (at least to the first half of the show) and it's interesting enough as an idea that a few people might be interested.

I will say though, if Farscape and Babylon 5 fall into true obscurity, it would be a bad thing, as both shows are excellent. LEXX will probably fall into true obscurity because it's an incredibly hard sell.

Can't wait for Andromeda to be forgotten though. It didn't start off that bad but it got really bad as it went on. And Kevin Sorbo is just a bad actor and a shitty person overall.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 16th 2021 at 11:49:15 AM

Andromeda was crap the moment I caught an episode and Kevin Sorbo had a scene where his character is fighting the Magog with his fists. And then he proceeds to launch into a convo with another character that is pretty much the same as his Hercules character.

Babylon 5 did stand the test of time - JMS knew what he was doing, even if TNT meddled with Crusade.

It's telling that B5 is the go-to for this Sci-fi while Legend of the Rangers and Crusade are pretty much forgotten.

Crusade just never really "gelled" - the actors hit their marks but the performances were...meh. LOTR was too "try-hardy" and required viewers to have a passing knowledge of the parent series (that had ended years prior) so most skipped it. Plus the risible spaceship fighting sequence didn't do it any favors.

Don't get me started on Crusade's music - the composer's IMDB page is a ghost town. Even Hollywood couldn't stand him.

Crusade is like...Visitors From Down the Street is pretty good and if it had been allowed to continue, it probably would have gotten a lot better. The executive meddling was just irritating though and most of what we got was pretty bleh.

I mean, imagine if Babylon 5 had only gotten 12 episodes. It would have been remembered as this weird, kind of ropey Star Trek inspired thing with some real dud episodes that never really went anywhere.

Crusade's music was just terrible though, yeah. Even in the prequel TV movie thing, Call to Arms, it sounded really janky and weird. I think the main thing Crusade has going for it is that it gives us a better idea of what B5 was actually supposed to look like, since it didn't get the horrible CGI upscaling treatment B5 did.

Hi, it's me, the one guy who liked the music in Crusade.

I think for the most part Crusade just didn't get a chance to find its feet like Babylon 5 did. It also didn't help that, if JMS's allegations are true, TNT was actively sabotaging the production of the first season, leading to stuff like the second pilot produced midway into the series.

Edited by AFP on Jan 17th 2021 at 2:46:41 AM

It was cancelled before it even aired. That doesn't really leave much room for anything but the network deliberately screwing with it.

Combine that with how TNT refused to let Scifi get the show by demanding an exorbitant price for the rights to the whole franchise and refusing to let them just buy Crusade.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 17th 2021 at 7:35:09 AM

Do people not mention DS 9 when trying to describe B5?

Edited by MFLuder on Jan 18th 2021 at 6:02:36 AM

That does indeed sound like a good comparison, though I haven't seen DS 9 yet, and I don't know how well known that show is. It is telling that most Star Trek movies draw from the TOS or TNG shows.

Deep Space 9 also sort of fell off the radar. It's less obscure than Babylon 5 by virtue of being an actual Star Trek series, but it's kind of the the least well known of the live action Star Trek shows. Like, TNG was a full on phenomenon and Voyager was advertised super heavily by UPN, but DS 9 was a syndicated show without a specific home network and a lot of markets preempted it a lot. It's also got the arc show problem where, unlike the other pre-CBS All Access shows, a lot of the best episodes are integral parts of the main story arc and are a bit difficult to parse if you aren't already familiar with it. You can watch the best TNG/Voyager/Enterprise episodes without really knowing exactly what's going on, you can't do that for chunks of DS 9.

If someone is a massive fan of Deep Space 9, they've probably heard at least something about Babylon 5 already as well. There's a ton of overlap in the fanbases.

I do think DS 9 is probably the best of that era of Star Trek, helped by one of the main writers being Ronald D. Moore, who went on to do the BSG reboot and other stuff like For All Mankind and Outlander.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 18th 2021 at 9:31:12 AM

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was in syndication. TNG went syndicated as a kind of revenge on the Network (NBC). At it's height TNG was beating network programs (including CBS Football and of course NBC's) on the days it aired.

So DS9 was syndicated, unlike Star Trek: Voyager. Voyager was going to be the crown jewel of UPN.

The problem was that when TNG bowed, many stations didn't know what to do with DS 9 - many just re-ran TNG. My local NBC affiliate continued to run TNG in the afternoons. I'd watch it just as I got out of class and then would catch DS9 or B5 at night when they were on.

DS9 fell into similar black hole that B5 did:

• Obscure due to Continuity Lockout - unless you had some familiarity with the TNG era, you would have to wait for the character to explain things.
  • B5 had straight up Continuity Lockout, the casual vewier either couldn't or didn't want stick it out - this was the era before "binge watching" was a thing.
• Airing on UHF stations - like B5, DS9 aired on stations that were on the upper part of the dial and could already be crowded. The station that aired both B5 and DS9 had a crowded evening schedule, with poor B5 pushed to 1:00 AM in the morning as the 4th season closed out.
• 'Cause binge watching was still 10-20 years away, most viewers just weren't into arcs.
• Star Wars got re-released (with all them changes!) and sucked the pop-culture oxygen out of the room. The '90s would see Jar Jar Binks and the return of "Wookiee Hooky"^note People calling in sick to see Star Wars

The result was that sci-fi fans and Trekkies may have flocked to the series but TOS, TNG and Star Wars ruled the roost.

Edited by TairaMai on Jan 19th 2021 at 10:04:06 AM

In a way I think DS 9 suffers because it's Trek, which means it sort of gets subsumed into the collective identity (there are, if I didn't miscount, nine different Star Trek TV shows, if you count "Short Treks" as a part of Star Trek: Discovery, plus thirteen films, Star Trek is freaking huge). Babylon 5 meanwhile gets the underdog reputation of being the other popular sci-fi TV series in the mid-90s.

Also, tonally, DS 9 can be kind of controversial within the Trek fandom due to being the Darker and Edgier Star Trek. So when Trekkies try to get folks into the franchise, it's not always the first place they send the new fans.

Another thing I wonder is how serious the "DS 9 ripped off B5 controversy" is now. In his memoir a couple years ago, JMS at one point suggested that the DS 9 showrunners knew the show was derived from his B5 pitch.

I don't consider "derived from the same pitch" to be a serious ripoff on its own. You can still go very different directions from that.

There also wasn't much actual bad blood, as evidenced by Majel Roddenberry having a really important guest spot on Babylon 5 and JMS being offered an appearance on DS 9 (which he turned down because it wouldn't mean anything to most people). It sounds like JMS had no problems with Ronald D. Moore and the other people running DS 9, instead being annoyed at the execs who heard the B5 pitch to begin with. Which is honestly really fair.

The reason I found the allegation in the memoir noteworthy was it was based on a comment made by a former WB employee in 2013:

https://www.tor.com/2013/02/26/is-this-the-smoking-gun-proving-deep-space-nine-ripped-off-babylon-5/

So JMS may not have had a problem with the DS 9 people back in the '90s, but I wonder if he still feels the same way towards them now.

Ultimately the two shows went in very different directions even if B5 was first pitched to Paramount and they decided to create their own space station show.