2/excitement of the actors who were so optimistic about their hopes for a series pick-up and laboring on a low-budget sci-fi alternative to #StarTrek for the now defunct PTEN syndication network. I can’t imagine how heartbroken Johnny Sekka, Patricia Tallman & Tamilyn Tomita. 3/

3/ were when they were replaced for the series, it’s never easy to tell an actor they’ve been canned and I heard stories neither took it particularly well at the time although both Richard Biggs and Claudia Christian were marked improvements. 4/

4/ Babylon 5 was a remarkable achievement back then, like the Babylon stations themselves, it was a dream of one man, J. Michael Straczynski who had a vision of a five year novel for television long before such things were rigeur on TV. With long 24 episode seasons, 5/

5/it had its share of misfires, but when it worked, it was pretty spectacular even with a budget that paled in comparison to other shows of the era. Anyone who was on those sets, and I was many times, had a sense they were putting on a really great high school play. 6/

6/ They didn’t have money, they didn’t have time, but they had moxie, they had chutzpah. Two warehouses nestled in Santa Clarita housed the massive sets that would carry it through five seasons (and barely a fifth thanks to the largesse of TNT at the time) 7/

7/ Sure, even now, it looks like you wouldn’t want to lean on the wall of the staton for fear they would topple over, but they got the job done and the smallness of the budget never undermined the bigness of the ideas. Although the show struggled through its first season to 8/

8/ find itself leaning on standalone stories over the serialized storytelling which was its bete noir, by second season the show hit its stride and by the third and fourth were among the better seasons of genre television ever producedv 9/

9/ even if it looked like a stiff wind could cripple most of the station. The addition of Bruce Boxleitner who replaced a troubled Michael O’Hare was a perfect addition. Avuncular, charming and graceful, Boxleitner was a true captain, on and off set. 10/

10/ I was surprised re-watching it on #HBOMax after all these years how much more I appreciated the original pilot movie, its deliberate pace, its world-building, its charming ensemble of alien ambassadors from the late, great Andreas Katuslas to the delightfully goofy 11/

11/Peter Jurasik and the regal Mira Furlan who sadly passed away this week and who was such a discovery by the producers in this show. The prosthetics by the late John Vulich are spectacular, there’s some really great ideas percolating among some of the more mcclunky exposition

12/ and fanboy humor and the late Ron Thornton and Foundation’s VFX were state-of-the-art and only evolved more through the next half a decade. I had nothing to do with the show, but I remember even then as a young journalist, rooting for these rebels who were fighting the 13/

13/ the good fight in the shadow of the much bigger Empire (ne: Star Trek and this is from someone who loved and still loves Deep Space Nine) and I’m glad to see with this dust-off (I won’t call it a real remaster as the show’s VFX were only up-rezzed a la Farscape, nothing 14/

14/ like the ambitiousness of the TNG remaster) the show can be re-discovered and a new generation can share in the joys of an elegant series of a more civilized age when it wasn’t about the money on screen, but the ideas — and that was more than enough. #Babylon5