SF on TV

J Michael Straczynski has confirmed that plans for a Babylon 5 feature film are officially dead in the water. Truth to tell, I don’t know that a standalone movie would have worked very well anyway - JMS’s strengths lie in spinning out a big, complex story with several threads running in parallel, so if he were to return to the B5 universe at all I’d rather he got the chance to tell the story in 22-episode chunks, the way he did first time round. Unfortunately, with the show having been off the air for several years the latter option probably isn’t open to him unless a rabid B5 fan finds themselves running one of the US networks, so I can understand why JMS would take whatever opportunity he could get financing for rather than hold out for another multi-season commitment.

Perhaps what we need to do is wait for 25 years and see what a new generation of SF programme makers can do with the B5 concept. This approach seems to have worked pretty well for Battlestar Galactica, the remake of which has been getting much better reviews than the original series ever did. The show hasn’t appeared on terrestrial TV over here yet, but broadband users who want to see what the remake is like and aren’t comfortable with downloading copies via BitTorrent can watch the first episode of the first season via a RealVideo stream put out by the Sci Fi Channel. Having spent the past forty-five minutes watching the episode, I’m very impressed. I was never a fan of the original, which was so obviously a cheap Star Wars rip-off, but this new take on the basic concept show is not remotely cheesy. If it shows up on terrestrial TV, I’ll certainly watch it. (Or rather, I’ll video it: the chances of it showing up in a pre-midnight timeslot - or rather, of it retaining such a timeslot for more than six episodes - are pretty slim in the current climate for SF on UK terrestrial TV.)

[B5 movie story via Slashdot, BG story via MetaFilter]