I’m ignoring any BS that could distract or indicate otherwise, the gist is:
This. Would. Be. Incredible.
Joe is by no means perfect and neither is Babylon 5, but this would be amazing. Indeed, perhaps he could get Gaiman back out to write another.
I think they should let him:
Then, he can leave and let someone else have a shot.
JMS being considered as Doctor Who showrunner
WTH? Doctor Who has had non-Brits as character roles, as well as play character roles. Story arcs took place in America. JMS wouldn’t inject Americanness into Doctor Who. If anything, he’d make it more Russian.
I’m talking about the showrunner, not the characters or settings. Though I also wasn’t thrilled by the episodes they made in America, and the 90s TV movie was atrocious.
I don’t have HBO but I do have Prime and I looked and they do have Babylon 5 but they want $30 a season for it. I can wait until I find it cheaper or free somewhere else.
JMS’s episodic writing was all over the place and his exposition could be clunky as hell, but as long character and story arcs go he was one of the best - I defy you to find ones to match the G’Kar/Londo intertwined arcs, for example.
Doctor Who has also tended to be all over the place on individual episodes, from the abymsal to the amazing (sometimes both joined as a two-part storyline), but its long-term story arcs have tended to be clumsily executed. If the show would be willing to commit to a proper multi-season arc, JMS’s involvement could really improve the show as long as he doesn’t feel the need to write all the episodes.
I bought the entire boxset (including the films and Crusade) on sale at Amazon for about £28 a few years ago. DVDs for the win!
Babylon 5’s special effects are primitive now, but one thing that sets them apart is that they’re fairly thoughtful. Compare it to star trek of a similar time period - they had double or more the budget, so their space battles and such were more polished… but star trek battles are nonsense. They are not well choreographed at all. The manuevers the ships make make no sense given their capabilities. And of course they act like they’re naval ships fighting in water, or airplanes fighting in air depending on the scene - sort of like star wars. None of them actually functioned like space ships.
In comparison, Babylon 5 put a lot of thought into the special effects. Species that did not have some sort of artificial gravity based drives like the Earth forces used thrusters and reaction engines that worked in a way that you would expect space to work. Inertia was a thing. They were in space, not on the water or in the air. Other species had artificial gravity and based their propulsion on it, but then, too, their designs make sense for their capabilities. They had a mix of things like missiles, point defense systems, energy beam weapons, fighters and fighter carriers, etc. There are fights that take place beyond visual range.
Really, you don’t get space sci-fi on TV that cares about how it presents itself and isn’t total nonsense again until The Expanse. So I enjoyed it, even though it was technically primitive, because it actually makes sense in a way very little sci-fi on TV does.
As for the show - you have to patience when you go through it. It is unique in that it is essentially the story and depth of a novel that the showrunner made up and then tried to translate to a five year show. At the time, that sort of continuity was unheard of, and today it’s still pretty rare. Knowing where he was going, there are moments in the pilot episode that pay off after 4 or 5 years. The story is extremely ambitious and does succeed and pays off a lot.
On the other hand, the writing and dialogue can be sort of … theatrical, unrealistic. The acting ranges from fantastic to pretty bad. A lot of the season one episodes that were more standalone episodes before the continuing story dominated the show are quite bad, like, star trek TNG season 1 type bad, and a lot of them are stacked right at the beginning of the show’s run, so you have to be patient to work through them before things start to get going.
But if you can forgive all that, it’s pretty much the most ambitious TV show ever made in terms of telling a long form story and was remarkable for its time. Really, I think it was pioneering and paved the way for a lot of TV shows that have a continuing storyline rather than hitting the reset button at the end of every episode.
Everyone here is talking about B5, but you’re all ignoring the fact that JMS, along with the Wachowski sisters, also made the deeply weird and wonderful Sense8. If you haven’t seen the show, imagine Matrix-level action combined with Frank Capra-level sentiment and plenty of softcore porn. I want to see that JMS make Doctor Who.
I defer to what a certain former poster on this board said about ten years ago as to whether or not B5 has aged well;