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Andrew Katsulas (May 18, 1946 – February 13, 2006), known professionally as Andreas Katsulas, was an American film and television actor, most recognized for portrayals of G'Kar on American science fiction television series Babylon 5. Peter Jurasik. Peter Jurasik ( JOOR-ə-sik; born April 25, 1950) is an American actor known for his television ...
Babylon 5 is a show only for those with more than one brain cell and the ability to let a story build. ... It is a very good allegory for what happens when cultural exchanges fail and wars result ...
- (10)
- Michael O'hare
- Janet Greek
- January 24, 1994
May 15, 2014 · Loved or hated by sci-fi fans, Babylon 5 is the oddest of accomplishments: It's writing, acting, and directing is all jarringly terrible. And yet on a meta-level, it is the most brilliantly conceived science-fiction television show of all time. Whether you love it or hate it depends greatly upon which kind of sci-fi fan you are.
—J. Michael Straczynski, 1995 Straczynski set five goals for Babylon 5. He said that the show "would have to be good science fiction". It would also have to be good television, "and 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 ...
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By Richard Edwards
published 25 April 2021
How the epic space opera laid down the blueprint for TV’s golden age
Babylon 5 was Game of Thrones with spaceships – before Game of Thrones even existed. (Image credit: Warner Bros)
Many TV historians will tell you that our current golden age of television began with The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Wire. Those TV historians either weren’t paying attention, or have a large blind spot for space opera – because Babylon 5 was laying down the prestige TV blueprint half a decade before Tony Soprano whacked his first mobster.
If most TV viewers had no idea what a showrunner was back in the ’90s, even fewer could name one. Only superstar producers such as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue creator Steven Bochco were big enough to occasionally eclipse their brands. However, the name of J Michael Straczynski was all over Babylon 5, as synonymous with the show as Minbari, Narn and Vorlons – just as much as The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin’s creation or The Sopranos David Chase’s, Babylon 5 was his. Arguably more so, in fact, seeing as he wrote 92 of the show’s 110 episodes, including the entirety of seasons 3 and 4.
Babylon 5 was an auteur’s vision on an epic scale. On the rare occasions guest writers were brought in, they were often genre legends such as Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison and regular Star Trek writer DC Fontana – this show was never scared to embrace the harder edges of science fiction. And just as would later become the norm with showrunners such as 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 talk directly to the fanbase via the internet.
A veteran of ’80s cartoons such as She-Ra: Princess of Power, The Real Ghostbusters, and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Straczynski always had big plans for Babylon 5. He set out to tell a story taking in space battles, political intrigue, epic mythology and more, and wanted to do it over the course of five years.
That may not feel unusual now, when shows such as Breaking Bad, Lost and even comedies such as Schitt’s Creek make a big thing of spreading their stories over multiple seasons. But in the mid-’90s, the Babylon 5 approach was seriously radical. Most of the TV of the era was built on standalone episodes, with serialization kept to a minimum to ensure episodes could be watched in any order once they ended up in syndication. That Babylon 5 should so brazenly break the mould was a big shock to the system for ’90s viewers
Much like Game of Thrones more than a decade later, Babylon 5 was never content to tell just one story. The show often devoted a run of episodes to dealing with a particular subject, tying a (temporary) bow around it, and then moving onto something else – although you always knew that a dangling plot thread wouldn’t stay unresolved forever. So over the course of a season you might see mini-arcs about Mars’s bid for independence from Earth, the Centauri invading the Narn homeworld, and the all-encompassing war between the Shadows and the Vorlons, before they were revisited the following year – or later. It was ‘Westeros in space’ before George RR Martin had even published his first A Song of Ice and Fire novel, a show that rewarded viewers who tuned in for every installment. Babylon 5 was a show purpose-built for streaming and binge-viewing, trapped in the era of broadcast and cable.
In fact, Babylon 5’s seasons were so intricately plotted, when – with the show threatened with cancellation – season 4 was crammed with conclusions to ongoing arcs, season 5 was left seriously short of material. It felt more like an overstretched postscript than a bona fide season.
But by then Babylon 5 had already laid down the formula that most of the biggest TV shows of the 21st century would follow. If The Sopranos was the catalyst that made the world realize that TV could be just as relevant as movies, Babylon 5 deserves credit for being the test pilot that carried the medium into new frontiers. It’s only taken a couple of decades of hindsight to show how influential it was.
You can watch the entirety of Babylon 5 (remastered) on HBO Max.
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Jan 26, 2024 · The Most Pivotal Sci-Fi Show of All Time Was Almost Murdered by Star Trek. The first, best hope for sci-fi serialization had a tough road to the screen. In the beginning, Babylon 5 was almost ...
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Jul 22, 2019 · RELATED: Babylon 5: The 10 Fastest Ships In The Universe, Ranked. Whenever this show really hits the pedal to the metal, it consistently proves to distinguish itself from other science-fiction. This show had more than its fair share of filler, so the breakneck pace of this story was even more impressive by contrast.
