JMS On B5 Legend Of The Rangers

Subject: Re: ATTN JMS B5 - still interesting?
Date: 02 Apr 2002 04:22:26 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated

>I have been on this board for a little while now, and notice that you don't
>seem as enthusiastic about B5 as you once were.

>Has it become an albatross for you now?

>do you sigh when you see all the B5 related threads? or are you proud of
>the legacy you've created?

>and of the 5 years which bits make you cringe and which bits give you that
>all-round nice glow?

>Would love to know....

Have I grown tired of B5? Is it an albatross around my neck? No, not at all.

In 18 years of writing and, later, producing television, I have worked on a dozen series and written well over 200 produced episodes of TV (not counting 8 TV movies). They include such high-visibility shows as the Twilight Zone, Murder She Wrote, Walker Texas Ranger and others.

But for me, Babylon 5 always stands a head higher than the rest of them, because of the sheer amount of work, commitment and time that went into it, and the overall quality that resulted. Sometimes I look back at it all and I'm just astonished that we were actually able to pull off something of that magnitude. Sure, it was uneven in places, often breathtakingly so, but no one in American TV had ever even tried to pull off something on that scale, it had never been done before, so we were inventing the form as we went along.

And the show has persevered. From the time it went on, it has been running continuously, year after year, on one network or another, for about eight years now. It's still running in over 120 countries around the world, including the most recent addition, Japan, which started showing B5 about a month ago and where it is rapidly becoming a hit with SF fans there all over again. Every few days there's a new wave of email from people just discovering the show for the first time.

I'm unspeakably proud of what we did with that series.

If you're detecting fatigue in my posts of late, it's because we're coming to the tail end of production on Jeremiah, which though not as story-complex as B5, has been a far more complicated and heinous production on a physical level, beating anything I've worked on before by several orders of magnitude. Each time I do a full season of a TV series, I start breaking down physically toward the end of it, the extent of that determined by how difficult the show is. In this case, for over two months recently I was down with the Martian Death Flu
(disguised as Panama A Influenza), which led to pharyngitis and a fairly awful ear infection, and the *day* I finally got over that I fell and fractured/dislocated stuff...it's going to take long physical therapy to get this hand back to where it needs to be (assuming that's possible, the
dislocation was pretty grotesque)...so I'm just plain tuckered.

I'm going on at length here about this only because it's important to me to make the distinction above. When you think Rod Serling, who did a lot of shows, you think "creator of The Twilight Zone"...when you think Roddenberry, who did a lot of shows, you think "creator of Star Trek." Each was the high-water mark of their career. I've done a lot of shows, but when the game is finally called on account of darkness, the obit will read "...creator of Babylon 5."

And I won't mind a bit.

jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Subject: Re: SciFi Announces New Programs But No Mention of Rangers
Date: 04 Apr 2002 22:34:20 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated

The SciFi Channel has indicated that it's moving away from space shows, with all the hardware/alien stuff that goes with it. (This as per its recent announcement about upcoming shows.)

So it looks like Rangers isn't going to go ahead. They haven't said it
directly, but networks never do.

jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Subject: Re: And what did they pick to save instead?
Date: 07 Apr 2002 08:55:54 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated

Regarding Battlestar Galactica...you have to remember that this is something that had been originally in development for one of the networks and went down. Lots of development money had been spent by the studio, down to building sets. And SciFi is owned by Universal/USA Studios, which also owns Battlestar Galactica. Waste not, want not....

jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Note: See SciFi Press Release #3

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Subject: Re: Dissappointed
Date: 07 Apr 2002 22:34:04 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated

>We thought we had Crusade but we didn't.
>We thought we had Rangers but we didn't.

>We don't even have another telemovie.

>So JMS. What do we have but soured memories?

The five year Babylon 5 story that I set out to tell in the first place.

I said it before: that was my main goal going into this, to get B5 on the air
and tell that story. Everything else is lagniappe.
jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Subject: Re: SFC management
Date: 10 Apr 2002 00:54:02 GMT

>It looks like TLaDiS suffered from a lack of time to develop a script, a
>lack of resources (the B5/Crusade CGI files), and lack of time to re-develop
>the CGI that was lost. They were under time pressure to produce something
>before it could be affected by the looming strikes.

Not true.

The script worked fine, the CGI worked fine, the time constraints were not an
issue.

What killed us was the football playoffs. That is a matter of record.

They were hoping the show would do a 2.7 or 2.6 to get picked up. In *every
market* where we weren't up against the highest-rasted football game in ten
years, we pulled those numbers or better, in some places hitting a 3.1, which
is just about unheard of for SFC. Those numbers came in because the show
*worked*.

But we lost the east coast and most of the midwest to the game. When you
averaged it all out, we got a 1.7 or thereabouts. The SFC knows why, we know
why, it's not like that's an issue, and we *gained viewers* as the show went
along, which only happens if the show -- script, CGI, performances -- works.
But in TV, the overall number is the overall number, and it's hard for a
network to get past that, especially in dealing with advertisers.

If we'd aired on any other night of the week, there would be a LoTR series in
prep right now.

jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Subject: Re: What now - And What Went Wrong?
Date: 10 Apr 2002 04:51:35 GMT

>So JMS, what's next for the world of B5?

Dunno.

>I do hope you haven't given up.

Given up what?

>By the way - what went wrong?

Dunno...did something go wrong? Did the master tapes of B5 get degaussed or something?

Not to make light, but you have to look at this from my side...as I said, the main thing was the five years. We got them. Anything else is a bonus. The finished eps are there, and will be for as long as images are transmitted. It's there, on the shelf.

Will something else happen with B5 down the road someday? The universe being
as cyclical as it is, almost certainly. But if nothing ever does, *I'm okay with that*.

I was at a convention a while ago -- one of the last I attended, and you can put a cause and effect thing there if you want -- and there were all these actors and people campaigning for their shows to come back, from V to Battlestar to Lost in Space, you name it...and people kept coming up to me and saying, with great gentility and real affection, "I hope you get your show back on again."

And I kept trying to tell them...I ain't here for that. I'm not trying to get it back on. If that were the case I wouldn't have chosen to end it after five years in the first place. I was there to celebrate that we'd *done* it, not that it should come back or that I wanted people to campaign for it. Which is why I haven't urged writing campaigns or anything else.

I set out to tell the story I wanted to tell, and I told it. If something else in the B5 universe comes along, terrific, I'm there...but if not, that's okay too. It's like Zack said in Sleeping in Light, which was meant as a sorta coda to the production of the show...everything we set out to do, we did, and nobody can ever take that away.

jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Subject: Re: What now - And What Went Wrong?
Date: 10 Apr 2002 22:20:21 GMT

>Hoping I'm not too far off base, JMS.

No, that's just about right.

The other thing that needs to be emphasized, in terms of fan letter campaigns,
is that the currency of the fan campaign is that it's been in large measure
devalued by over-use, at least in terms of how the studios see it (having been
told this straight up). These days *any* show that is nominally SF or fantasy,
when its time ends, gets a writing camapign to get it back or keep it on the
air. Good show, bad show, indifferent...the campaigns come regardless. So it
doesn't really carry the same weight it did once.

And I think they've always been of limited impact anyway...it did have some
impact on S3 of the original Trek, and if a show is "on the bubble" as they
say, bordering between renewal and cancellation...but beyond that, it really
doesn't have an impact.

The first ST feature wasn't commissioned because of fan mail, it came because
Star Wars came out and did huge bucks and somebody in the Paramount brain trust
said, literally, "waitaminnit, don't WE have one of those?" and rushed ST
forward.

It's not passivity on my part as much as just trusting to the forces of
history. Sooner or later, what goes around, comes around. My job is to make
sure it's done right when it happens.

jms

b5, b 5, Babylon 5, five, b5lr, brlotr, lotr, B5 Lend Of The Rangers, To Live and Die In Starlight