Babylon 5 | |
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Created by | J. Michael Straczynski |
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Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 5 |
No. of episodes | 110 (+ 6 TV films) (list of episodes) |
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Running time | 43-44 minutes [1] |
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Release | February 22, 1993 November 25, 1998 | –
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Babylon 5 is an American space opera television series created by writer and producer J. Michael Straczynski, under the Babylonian Productions label, in association with Straczynski's Synthetic Worlds Ltd. and Warner Bros. Domestic Television. After the successful airing of a test pilot movie on February 22, 1993, Babylon 5: The Gathering, Warner Bros. commissioned the series for production in May 1993 as part of its Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN).[2] The show premiered in the US on January 26, 1994, and ran for five 22-episode seasons.
The series follows the human military staff and alien diplomats stationed on a space station, Babylon 5, built in the aftermath of several major inter-species wars as a neutral ground for galactic diplomacy and trade. Major plotlines included intra-race intrigue and upheaval, inter-race wars and their aftermaths, and embroilment in a millennial cyclic conflict between ancient races. The human characters, in particular, become pivotal to the resistance against Earth's descent into totalitarianism.
Many episodes focused on the effect of wider events on individual characters, with episodes containing themes such as personal change, loss, oppression, corruption and redemption.
Unusual for American broadcast television at the time of its airing, Babylon 5 was conceived as a "novel for television" with a pre-planned five-year story arc, each episode envisioned as a "chapter".[3] Whereas contemporaneous television shows tended to maintain the overall status quo, confining conflicts to individual episodes, Babylon 5 featured story arcs which spanned multiple episodes and even seasons, effecting permanent changes to the series universe.[4][5] Tie-in novels, comic books, and short stories were also developed to play a significant canonical part in the overall story.[6]
Straczynski announced plans for a reboot of the series in September 2021 in conjunction with Warner Bros. Television. An animated feature-length, direct-to-video film, Babylon 5: The Road Home, was released in August 2023.
One final note: B5 has always been conceived as, fundamentally, a five year story, a novel for television, which makes it very different as well.
in the Nineties it was still exceedingly rare for a TV show to have episodes directly lead into each other. Two-part episodes were a big deal, and season long story arcs (with the obvious exception of daytime soap operas) were unheard of. But, Babylon 5 changed all that.
My theory is that *in general* the novels and comics tend to be canon, but the details may not always be, mainly because it's virtually impossible to ride herd on every single line of all this the way I do the show. It physically can't be done. But where possible, we keep it as close to cointinuity [sic] as possible.