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‘Babylon 5’ Reboot in the Works at The CW
Original series creator J. Michael Straczynski will pen the script for the update.
The CW is heading to space.
The younger-skewing broadcaster is teaming with original series creator J. Michael Straczynski for a reboot of Babylon 5.
Described as a “from-the-ground-up reboot” of the original, Straczynski will pen the script for a new potential version of the former syndicated drama from Warner Bros. TV. The new take revolves around John Sheridan (originally played by Bruce Boxleitner), an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, who is assigned to Babylon 5, a five-mile-long space station in neutral space, a port of call for travelers, smugglers, corporate explorers and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war. His arrival triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilization a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race.
From Gizmodo:
Babylon 5 Is Getting Rebooted, With J. Michael Straczynski at the Helm
Variety reports that Warner Bros. has ordered a reboot of Babylon 5, produced and written by Straczynski as part of a deal between Warner Bros. TV and Straczynski’s Studio JMS. The series is not a continuation of the show, but a “from the ground up” reboot of the cult classic 1993 series, which ran across five seasons and seven made-for-TV movies until 1998.
[....] The series was beloved for its dark sci-fi plots and its approach to a massive, intertwined narrative over the course of its seasons and movies [...]
If only we could see the original vision of B5 as it would have been if no actors would have had to leave the show.
The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. -- Emperor Turhan
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:19AM (8 children)
It's kind of their thing, from what I've seen: they get the rights to something and use it as the foundation of something new, to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it's an old TV show that's restarted and only uses the original idea as a starting point that goes in a new direction, and sometimes it's a comic IP that they'll follow loosely.
Like I said in my other comment, from what I've seen they're usually good with casting good actors and most other aspects of production, but don't do the best job with some of the writing. Having JMS on board might avoid that problem, which gives a B5 reboot a better chance than I'd give it on the network without him. I don't think their writers could manage the kind of long-term plot investment that the series was known for without him around.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday September 28 2021, @11:25AM (6 children)
Lets hope for the best then really. As you note perhaps the long term story (and plot) lines won't make it. That said Supernatural at least had seasonal arcs didn't it? That was on the same network. After all not a lot of shows get that many seasons these days it seems. The networks are fast on the chopping block when things don't instantly get the numbers or retain them.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 28 2021, @03:17PM (4 children)
Blarg, there I go posting before reading all the comments again.
Yeah, Supes had season-long arcs, although they started getting a bit lazy with them towards the end. I want to say there were a few seasons where it was halfway through when the writers seemed to wake up and say "oh shit, we need a big bad guy".
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday September 28 2021, @03:23PM (3 children)
Not all of them was great so to speak. I think I preferred the one of the early seasons, when it was more monster hunting and such. Then it was somewhat cheesy fun. When it evolved into the whole "we are going to save the whole world (parallel worlds and later the whole universe)" things somewhat went down hill. Still it's interesting that it lasted as long as it did. Not a lot of shows today get as many seasons as they did. Now it's the axe if it doesn't instantly perform masterfully out of the gate and keep that up for season after season.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 28 2021, @04:40PM (2 children)
While the first couple seasons were a bit too much on the bloody side for me, yeah, I'd broadly agree. The season with the Leviathans was where it started to fall apart IMO.
Did you actually finish the show? When it just kept going and going, at a certain point I told myself I'd just have to see it through :) Working on the final season now and it's not bad so far.
It's got to be trippy when your job when you were 23-38/27-42 wraps up and you're looking at the future.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday September 28 2021, @06:09PM
Yes. Sort of. While I liked it at the beginning and usually watched those the longer the show went on I guess the more episodes I started to miss here and there. But I did watch the final once. I just didn't really get into the stories in the end. You sort of just watched cause you knew it was the end and you wanted to see how it ended.
That can only carry the show for so long or so many seasons.
It's kind of weird when you think about it that you have sort of watched it then for more or less 15 years. One wonders what that does for the actors. Some of them appear to apparently like it, it's a steady gig for a long time. Some are probably now type-cast forever. They know it's coming to an end so I guess they sort of try their best to sort of go out strong, compared to other shows that sort of just get cancelled and then things just end very abruptly. Here I guess they could tie it all, or a lot of it, together. No matter how far fetched some story arcs was.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday September 28 2021, @09:32PM
[I'm going to reply to both of you (tango and looorg) in this one comment just to avoid duplication]
It did, and they try it with some of their other shows to varying degrees of success, usually due to writing quality issues. For example, having a season-long plot doesn't work well if you ignore it too much early on in favour of filler, then scramble to wrap everything up in the last few episodes of the season, leaving it feeling disjointed and incoherent.
That's the thing about the writing on CW shows: when it's good, it's really good, but when it's bad, it's really bad.
I actually mentioned Supernatural in a different comment! I got into it via Netflix, along with a couple other CW things. It definitely dragged toward the end, but it makes sense why, with some context about the show's production and history. (More on that in a moment)
These are both because Supernatural was only supposed to run for five seasons. It had a definitive beginning, middle, and end, with the Heaven v. Hell apocalypse arc of season 5 being the show's climax. For those five seasons, the show's creator, Eric Kripke, was the showrunner and managed everything with a specific endgame in mind.
Except the show was too popular to end. After his story was done, Kripke stepped down as showrunner and someone else took over, looking for a way to keep things going. I just checked and that person, Sera Gamble, handled seasons 6 and 7 (the Leviathan arc), and then they had a couple other changes after that. So Supernataural as it was originally intended was those first five seasons, and after that other people tried to find a way to keep it going.
Something else that happened to the show was fan pandering, which seemed to affect the direction of the show over time. It ended up really popular with a younger female demographic despite the early, more gruesome content; a demographic that was really vocal on sites like tumblr, and very strongly into "shipping" the main characters.
The earliest example I can think of is a prominent character from season...3 I think? Bela Talbot. She was supposed to be recurring, but there was a huge backlash over the character because she was a jerk to the Winchesters, and the vocal fans reacted very poorly to it, so they wrote her off the show permaturely. That sort of thing kept happening, with strong negative reactions especially to female characters and potential love interests. I guess the vocal fans didn't like "competition", because about the only female character that had a decent run on the show was the one prominently shown as lesbian, which meant she wasn't a threat to people's Dean/Castiel romance headcanons.
The point here is that, especially after Kripke stepped down, they seemed to be really sensitive to appealing to and appeasing the vocal tumblr fanbase specifically, which led to some weirdness as the show went on.
This has happened with some other CW shows as well. Their first DC comics show, Arrow (aka "we wanted to write Batman but only had access to the rights to Green Arrow") had a strong start, but leaned hard into pandering to a subset of the fanbase that was shipping the main character with the showrunner's attractive-nerdy-hacker-girl original character. It started out fine, the character was great, but over time they started modifying or neglecting other aspects of the show to make rom for more shipping-bait, and it hurt.
The insane fan shipping thing is a common theme with these shows; with Flash, which started as a stealth pilot on Arrow, the shipping fans went from "vocal" to "hostile" there from what I understand, with cast members getting insults, threats, and even attempts to get them removed from the show by rabid shipper fans, all because they made the mistake of being female and potentially competition for someone's preferred ship.
They also got a guy fired off the show by dredging up dumb, cringe-worthy "edgy comedian" tweets he made years before getting cast for the show. Entire plotlines shredded and thrown away in an abrupt dismissal, which didn't do any favours for the writing of that show.
Ah yes, the Fox style of television management. RIP Firefly.
Anyway, CW's actually pretty good about not abruptly canceling shows. They seem to actually pay attention to online streaming views as well as live watching, and a lot of their shows do well as streaming offerings from what I understand. They seem to go for 3-5 seasons pretty reliably, sometimes more, as a result, often with a set beginning/middle/end plan.
If they get the writing right (and with JMS, maybe) there's some hope, I think. Like I said, they seem to build at least some of their shows as a long-form, multi-season story, at least initially. That's the kind of format that B5 followed, so it seems like a good fit
Though, like Supernatural, sometimes those concrete story plans turn into a show that lasts far longer than originally intended.
Finally, if either of you are interested in a sort of spiritual successor to Supernatural, check out CW's "Nancy Drew" show. Yes, that Nancy Drew, from the kids' mystery books. No, that's not a joke. I watched a couple episodes out of a sense of morbid "stare at the train wreck" curiosity, and it ended up being legitimately good. In a way it fills the same niche that early Supernatural did, but with more suspense/horror and less gore.
Spoiler-free explanation is that it's set years after the things that happened in the books, Nancy's an adult, kind of a smug know-it-all, and it ends up biting her in the ass because there's some truth to some of the supernatural stuff, so her Scooby Doo "debunk the ghost, solve hte mystery" thing sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.
The idea of Nancy Drew with horror elements sounds fucking insane, but it works, and makes the character less of a Mary Sue.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 28 2021, @09:34PM
Heads up so you know I didn't ignore you: I didn't want to duplicate a lot of the same content, so I responded to both you and tango in this comment [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 28 2021, @03:11PM
That, and Supernatural, which somehow dragged itself across the finish line of season 15 and they finally called it quits last year, LOL.
Which is not to say I'm down on the show, but it's been clear it's been old and tired for like the last 5 seasons. Just now finally watching the last season, which seems to have gotten a little pep injected into it once they decided to end things.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"