The CW cancels plans for a Babylon 5 reboot… for now
The CW apparently still wants a new Babylon 5, but maybe not until next year
Aux News Babylon 5
The CW, always a reliable home for fan-favorite genre shows, was apparently working on a reboot of cult classic sci-fi series Babylon 5 recently—with the key word there being “was,” because it is no longer working on it. But, it may someday continue working on it in the future!
Apologies for that space-rollercoaster, but that is what’s happening here. As reported by Deadline, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski said on his Patreon recently that The CW’s work on a pilot for a “from-the-ground-up reboot” of the ‘90s series has stalled. However, while he notes that “99.999% of the time, that’s the end of the road for the project,” CW CEO Mark Pedowitz is apparently so happy with the pilot’s “damned fine script” that he’s going to hold onto the project and bump it to next year to potentially be redeveloped.
Straczynski also claims that Pedowitz and the network are waiting until “the dust settles” on the potential sale of The CW, which could definitely shake up everything at the network (which has really enjoyed the licensing freedom afforded by its joint ownership of Warner Bros. and Viacom/Paramount).
The original series is about the eponymous space station and the intergalactic drama and intrigue that unfolds both inside and outside its confines, with complex ongoing story arcs unfolding over multiple episodes and seasons. The new show sounds like it would be pretty similar, with Deadline saying it would focus on John Sheridan, “an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background” played by Bruce Boxleitner in the original series.
All in all, Straczynski says this delay doesn’t mean much, just that “yesterday, Babylon 5 was in active development at The CW and Warner Bros. for fall 2022. Today, Babylon 5 is in active development at The CW and Warner Bros. for fall 2023.”
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… this news is almost three weeks old. And already reported on as such by Giz.https://gizmodo.com/star-wars-andor-season-2-obi-wan-may-premiere-rumors-1848489353I mean, that’s some timely war reporting there!
Funny what happens when you force out most of your actual staff and become a zombie site. 🙁
And thus ends another chapter in the history of the Most Cursed Franchise in scifi tv history. Hands up everyone who didn’t see this coming? Everyone with their hand up is held back a grade.
What do you mean by cursed? Five seasons plus a number of standalone movies seems like a good run. Also an ok but not great spin-off.Or did you mean because a large majority of the supporting cast has since passed away? If so then yea, kinda.
IIRC, B5 had a hell of time just to get to production stage, and then it was threatened with cancellation such that they rushed the story to fit into four seasons instead of the originally planned five.
With 20/20 hindsight it probably doesn’t look that bad, but it couldn’t have been easy at the time.
It’s mostly a reference to the gobsmacking death rate among the primary cast, but also the general production chaos that just dogged the show while it was being shot and even afterwards: part of the reason that we’ll never see a proper HD remaster is even though all of the live action shots were shot in HD and matted for widescreen, when Netter Digital went out of business they lost the hard drives with the original CGI models on them and that was basically par for the course for the show.
Honestly JMS got a lot of tries to make a B5 follow up. Five TV movies, Crusade and Legend of the Rangers. All were inferior to the original show.
No lies detected. And god knows “developed for.. the CW!” was not exactly confidence-inspiring.
The tv movies were made while the show was still going. They were in addition to season 5, not after it.
Execs didn’t like Crusade and ordered it restructured and aired out of order… and it was cancelled before it had even aired… and Legend of the Rangers was aired in a terrible timeslot against some big event. Yeah, on paper he had some extra shots, but in practice they were dead before they had any chance with an actual audience because the networks didn’t actually put any support behind them. It’s not like the shows got to season 3 then died early.
Pfft. What we REALLY need rebooted is this:
At this point, they should just make Babylon 6.
No, what they should do is go back and do a total overhaul on all the shitty special effects on the original show.
I have a memory they did that with the pilot and it didn’t really improve it.
B5’s strength was always serial storytelling anyway.
I mean the effects weren’t the biggest problem with the pilot…
That’s not what I meant.
It pretty much invented it. Prior to B5 TV showd had a reset button; all episodes were self-contained stories that had no impact on anything else.
Pretty much for modern serial TV shows, though even JMS acknowledges Twin Peaks as being an influence. But otherwise there has always been serial soaps like Days of Our Lives, Young and the Restless, Coronation Street, Neighbours, etc.
The effects were great for their time, with some superbly choreographed set-pieces. But yeah I would love to see the Shadows, Nancy G’Quan ships, Star Furies, and cityscapes, etc with modern CGI.
Yup. Do what they did with the original Star Trek series- just redo the FX and we’re good. Babylon 5 without Londo & G’Kar’s original actors ain’t Babylon 5.
The “shitty special effects” were beyond state of the art when the show was made. The effects you’re getting on modern SF shows are the nth evolution of what was born on Babylon 5.
Yeah but they look like crap now
Nah they tried a bunch of spin offs that all sucked. Even the made for TV moved were mostly bad. I love Babylon 5 but I feel like the story has been told and they are never going to find a cast as good as the original for the reboot. Now the show they need to do a revival of is Farscape
Depends. Are Ben Browder and Claudia Black still hot as hell?[googles]Yeah I’m on board.
I actually never watched it (it was Trek or nothing for me back then), but yeah, I always got the vibe through osmosis that the followups were dire. My vote for a revival would be Mann & Machine. May not be a “crew in a ship” sci-fi show, but dammit, it’s 2022 and it’s Mann & Machine’s time to shine!
So, so much. The thing with Farscape is that it never stops making plot sense to have a revival. No matter how old the characters are, or where in the universe they’re living – no matter whether you want to do a straight continuation of the same plot or some sort of next-generation spinoff – that universe is so baroque and unstable that you can always create a plot for a new story there, and a credible way to tie it in to the existing characters and their histories. And without it undoing the previous ending, which never felt like ‘the end’ for that universe, just for that particular big plot arc.[I know one major character is dead, but that hasn’t stopped them before. Either resurrecting him or just replacing him and moving on would both feel in keeping with the show’s history]I think the biggest problem is the puppetry and practical effects – any network today would want everything to be done in terrible CGI instead, which would be awful (and very expensive).
I’ve been catching some episodes on one of those crappy rerun channels, and it’s amazing how well it holds up. Some of the CGI shots of the ships are showing their age, but the aliens look damn good.
That’s the thing about practical effects: they may not look perfect when they’re made, but they continue looking just as good/bad forever. You just have to get past the initial “is that a puppet!?” reflex and then it’s all good. Whereas with CGI, state-of-the-art one day looks agonisingly bad the next. Farscape started airing only four months after Babylon 5 ended, but to me it looks so much better – and the worst parts, as you say, are the rare bits of outright CGI.
They already did, the last few seasons of SG-1.
This sounds an awful lot like Deep Space 9.
Don’t start.
The difference is it only took Babylon 5 one shitty season to do a major cast change and get exponentially better. It took DS9 until season 4 to vastly improve with a hot Worf injection.
B5’s story would have changed gear in S2 regardless. They dedicated the entire S1 to build the story’s foundation, but hid from the studio that it was a continuous story. What was NOT expected was the original lead actor’s serious illness. Treatment would have taken time and risked cancellation. So the character was pushed into the background and the lead got changed between seasons. Sinclair’s character arc was finished when the actor got fit enough to return. His illness was kept secret until his death.
This reboot is going to disappear and reappear mysteriously years later? Are we sure it’s not about Babylon 4?
Maybe it’s now traveling back in time where it will be the scripts for the original Babylon 5
Everyone said I was daft to build a station on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show
them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into
the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank
into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.
At least there is symmetry.
Renew Legends of Tomorrow, you cowards!
i have no idea how things work in “hollyweird” but in theatre, when something gets pushed off the “now” pile into the “next year/season” pile, it’s dead. it’s the equivalent of mom’s “we’ll see.”
Oh, it’s 100% dead. Straczynski just needs to keep the hope alive to keep people subscribed to his Patreon.
Pedowitz is an … unfortunate name.
“Babylon 5 on the CW” would have been terrible. If HBO (or any network willing to give it a proper budget) were making it, that would have been exciting.
I think a reboot is generally on a hiding to nothing anyway. Any time it tries a big plot twist, it’s going to be compared to the original, plus the show was strongly anti-fascist so can you imagine all the cries of being ‘woke’ it will get? I’d love to see JMS given a shot at doing another original series, maybe even one that deals with some of the same issues, but I find reboots end up making brands/franchises feel confused. I’m more than tired of the endless ret-conning of comic book characters which are done for the same reason, it’s just easier to sell more of something that has come before than to find an audience for something new