Our Thesis - Why We Think Babylon 5 Matters, Even in 2017

Why are you making a podcast about a show that's more than 20 years old? Particularly one that hasn't even been given a glossy (or gritty) remake yet? Chris and I asked ourselves that very question before we got to work and we came to the conclusion that without Babylon 5, you simply don't have the fundamental reinvention of science fiction television that came after it. You don't have Lost. You don't have the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica in all its glory. You don't have Firefly. You don't have the serialized science fiction, as evidenced by programs like Orphan Black, 3%, Sense8 or Stranger Things. Babylon 5 helped turn us into different kinds of science fiction television viewers by virtue of its long-running narrative arcs that required a commitment to follow. In short, what is it about this program that made this practice possible, how did it work, what did its creator do to sustain it and what were the themes that made the show effective?

Our objective is not to give a blow-by-blow recounting of each episode's events. Rather, through our conversation, we hope to better understand what made B5 one of the seminal programs in science fiction television history. It was great and dreadful, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes in the same episode. Usually programs this uneven don't get made. We hope over the course of this series to better understand B5 as a phenomenon, as a cultural relic of its time and despite its problems, worthy of its place in the canon of science fiction television. We're going to riff a lot as we take the show episode by episode. There will be regular features, like the most Straczynskiest line of the episode, and we'll certainly be making fun of some of the more over the top aspects of the show. But each episode will, we hope, take us with ever greater confidence into understanding the show, its influence and its context...now, join us in the year 2257, at the dawn of the third age of mankind, as we begin to decipher the legacy of this often great, sometimes dreadful but always intriguing television touchstone.

Cover image from: [http://io9.gizmodo.com/5985727/the-strange-secret-evolution-of-babylon-5]