Babylon 5 orbiting Epsilon III. The station was described as "a combination of building the United Nations and Times Square on an intergalactic scale" by actor Bruce Boxleitner.

G'Kar (left) of the Narn Regime and Londo Mollari of the Centauri Republic. Backdrop: The League of Non-Aligned Worlds.

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Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is an epic American science fiction television series created, produced and largely written by J. Michael Straczynski. The show centers on the Babylon 5 space station: a focal point for politics, diplomacy, and conflict in the late 2250s and early 2260s. more...

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With its prominent use of pre-planned story arcs, the series was often described as a "novel for television."

The pilot movie premiered on February 22, 1993. The regular series aired from January 26, 1994 and ran for five full seasons, winning two Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation and two Emmy awards - for makeup and visual effects. The show spawned six television movies and a spin-off series, Crusade, which aired in 1999 and ran for thirteen episodes. A straight-to-DVD movie about selected characters from the series was released on July 31, 2007.

Concept

Having worked on a number of television science fiction shows which had regularly gone over-budget, creator J. Michael Straczynski concluded that a lack of long-term planning was to blame, and set about looking at ways in which a series could be done responsibly. Taking note of the lessons of mainstream television, which brought stories to a centralised location such as a hospital, police station, or law office, he decided that instead of " in search of new worlds, building them anew each week," a fixed space station setting would keep costs at a reasonable level. A fan of sagas such as the Foundation series, Childhood's End, The Lord of the Rings, and Dune, Straczynski wondered why no one had done a television series with the same epic sweep, and concurrently with the first idea started developing the concept for a vastly-ambitious epic covering massive battles and other universe-changing events. Realizing that both could be done in a single series, he began to sketch the initial outline of what would become Babylon 5.

Straczynski set five goals for Babylon 5. He said that the show "would have to be good science fiction" as well as good television ("rarely are shows both good and good TV; generally one or the other"); it would have to do for science fiction television what Hill Street Blues had done for police dramas, by taking an adult approach to the subject; it would have to be reasonably budgeted, and "it would have to look unlike anything ever seen before on TV, presenting individual stories against a much broader canvas." He further stressed that his approach was "to take seriously, to build characters for grown-ups (not a Wesley in the bunch), to incorporate real science but keep the characters at the center of the story." Some of the staples of television science fiction were also out of the question (the show would have "no kids or cute robots"). The idea was not to present a utopian future, but one with greed and homelessness; one where characters grow, develop, live, and die; one where not everything was the same at the end of the day's events. Citing Mark Twain as an influence, Straczynski said he wanted the show to be a mirror to the real world and to covertly teach.