Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is an epic American science fiction television series created, produced, and largely written by J. Michael Straczynski. The show centers on the Babylon 5 space station, a focal point for politics, diplomacy, and wars in the late 2250s and early 2260s. more...

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The series is noted for its heavy reliance on pre-planned story arcs over its five-year run, sometimes being described as a "novel for television."

The pilot movie, The Gathering, aired on February 22, 1993, and the regular series initially aired from January 26, 1994 through November 25, 1998, first in syndication on the short-lived Prime Time Entertainment Network, then on cable network TNT. The show aired every week in the United Kingdom on Channel 4 without a break; as a result the last four or five episodes of the early seasons were shown in the UK before the U.S.

The series won many awards, including two Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation and two Emmy awards - for makeup and visual effects.

A straight-to-DVD movie about selected characters from the series was released on July 31, 2007.

Production

Concept

In a 1991 post to to the GEnie service, J. Michael Straczynski set five goals for the Babylon 5 series. He said that the show "would have to be good science fiction" as well as good television ("rarely are SF shows both good SF and good TV; there're (sic) generally one or the other"); it would have to do for science fiction television what Hill Street Blues had done for police dramas, by taking an adult approach to the subject; it would have to be reasonably budgeted, and "it would have to look unlike anything ever seen before on TV, presenting individual stories against a much broader canvas."

He further stressed that his approach was "to take SF seriously, to build characters for grown-ups (not a Wesley in the bunch), to incorporate real science but keep the characters at the center of the story." Some of the staples of television SF were also out of the question (the show would have "no kids or cute robots"). He started out with ideas for two different shows, one a vastly-ambitious epic covering massive battles and other universe-changing events, and the other set aboard a single space station, before realizing both could be done in a single series. The idea was not to present a utopian future, but one with greed and homelessness; one where characters grow, develop, live, and die; one where not everything was the same at the end of the day's events. Straczynski wanted the show to be a mirror to the real world and to covertly teach (an idea influenced by Mark Twain).

Read more at Wikipedia.org