The most influential TV show of the last 25 years?
-
Many TV historians will tell you that our current golden age of television began with The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Wire. Those TV historians either weren’t paying attention, or have a large blind spot for space opera – because Babylon 5 was laying down the prestige TV blueprint half a decade before Tony Soprano whacked his first mobster.
Even now, it’s too easy to dismiss Babylon 5 as a less-glossy Star Trek rip-off, with ambitious but limited CG effects that never looked photo-real, and felt dated by the turn of the 21st century. However, this long-running story of a space station caught in the middle of multiple interstellar conflicts wasn’t fashionable when it first aired from 1993 to 1998 – it was even the butt of a joke in Spaced.
While Babylon 5 proclaimed itself the last galaxy’s best hope for peace, only self-confessed geeks would rank it among the most important shows of the past 25 years. But that may owe more to snobbishness about the fact it’s set in outer space – with many of its actors buried under weird alien prosthetics – than its quality. There’s also a chance it came too early to be properly noticed. After all, it wasn’t until the rebooted Battlestar Galactica appeared a decade later – a show that owes a considerable debt to Babylon 5 – that a space-set show really got critics talking.
And yet the show is like a checklist for everything we now take for granted in prestige television, because Babylon 5’s influence stretches way beyond the likes of BSG, The Expanse and the reinvented fleet of Star Trek shows on Paramount Plus. The fact it's available to watch on HBO Max in the US offers the perfect opportunity to reassess this groundbreaking piece of ’90s TV.
That may not feel unusual now, when shows such as Breaking Bad, Lost and even comedies such as Schitt’s Creek make a big thing of spreading their stories over multiple seasons. But in the mid-’90s, the Babylon 5 approach was seriously radical. Most of the TV of the era was built on standalone episodes, with serialization kept to a minimum to ensure episodes could be watched in any order once they ended up in syndication. That Babylon 5 should so brazenly break the mould was a big shock to the system for ’90s viewers
Yet it’s an approach that made Babylon 5 stand out from the crowd. After a first season that largely followed a Star Trek-style story-of-the week structure – it’s interesting to note that the show ran concurrently with Trek’s own space station adventures on Deep Space Nine – it was soon diving headlong into its multiple complex narrative arcs, populated with memorable, morally ambiguous characters who were constantly evolving. If there were any Federation-style utopian ideals at play, they were kept well hidden.
In fact, Babylon 5’s seasons were so intricately plotted, when – with the show threatened with cancellation – season 4 was crammed with conclusions to ongoing arcs, season 5 was left seriously short of material. It felt more like an overstretched postscript than a bona fide season.
But by then Babylon 5 had already laid down the formula that most of the biggest TV shows of the 21st century would follow. If The Sopranos was the catalyst that made the world realize that TV could be just as relevant as movies, Babylon 5 deserves credit for being the test pilot that carried the medium into new frontiers. It’s only taken a couple of decades of hindsight to show how influential it was.
