Babylon 5 Could Have Been The Next Big Sci-Fi Franchise If Not For J. Michael Straczynski

Babylon 5 has been in a constant state of crisis ever since the show was on the air in the 1990s. J. Michael Straczynski always blames the network heads for their incompetence in being unable to turn Babylon 5 into a lasting franchise, but the pattern of problems and failures seems to point to Straczynski himself as being a large cause of the issues.

Babylon 5 began with Straczynski pitching to networks. He claims he pitched to Paramount early on, and though he never explicitly says it, it’s clear he believes that Star Trek: Deep Space 9 is a result of someone taking his pitch and filing the serial numbers to turn it into Star Trek. B5, meanwhile, went into development at about the same time, premiering with its pilot “The Gathering” and having a tumultuous run.

As the show went along, it kept being a question mark as to whether it would be picked up for another year. This came to a head during season 4 when it looked clear that his five-year plan for the show would not be coming to fruition. Actors took other jobs for the following year, most of the plotline was wrapped up, and the network eventually didn’t renew the show.

Straczynski moved Babylon 5 to the TNT network for the final season, with major plotlines having ended early and an eon-spanning endcap episode already filmed that followed the plotline of the novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, it seemed like there wasn’t much to do.

The Fifth Season, while holding some good episodes, falls flat for a lot of fans because the main conflict has already been resolved. It still left a lot of open questions as B5 went to TV Movies to continue yet not continue the story.

Straczynski started a spinoff called Crusade, following a starship, Excalibur, that was going through space and trying to find a cure to a plague that was threatening all of the inhabitants of Earth. The first several episodes were a bit of a jumbled mess making for a difficult watch even for the hardcore fans. It was canceled after just 13 episodes.

Straczynski blamed TNT for its ratings failure leading to its cancelation. Some of the episodes were aired out of order, they had copious notes for him which he didn’t appreciate artistically, though the over-reliance on CGI, odd characters that were unlikeable, and musical score in hindsight, were much more problems than the episode order, of which there wasn’t much of a building plot that it would have mattered.