Re: Babylon 5: TMOS - What I Don\'t Want To See...
I suppose what worries me the most is that B5 seemed to always have a loyal, but limited, audience on television.
But we have to understand
why it had a "loyal but limited" audience on television, and then decide if the reasons thatproduced that result in one medium are likely to do the same in another.
B5 had a much smaller audience than something like
Trek for four main reasons: 1) For its entire run it was never available to 100% of U.S. households, and it probably had similar problems in other countries. 2) For all but its final year it had changing and
lousy timeslots, which further limited its potential audience. 3) It had a complex continuing storyline. This is one of the glories of the series, but also one of its liabilities. I still haven't watched a single season of
24 "live" because it was too inconvenient to keep up with it week to week, and too annoying to miss an episode. So I've watched on DVD, where I'm still a season behind. Some people just don't like to "come in on the middle" of a story, and resisted watching the show for that reasons. 4) There was an active anti-
B5 propaganda campaign against the show in the fan community, and too many people believed the
Trek party-line that the show was a low-budget
DS9 knock-off and never bothered to watch it.
The question assumes two things:
1) There is something inherent in the kind of story
B5, rather than the circumstances in which it was made and the nature of arc vs. non-arc TV, that limits its audience.
2) To make it more appealing to more people the show would have to change.
I think we've dealt with (1) And if (1) isn't true, there's no reason to believe that (2) is. The only thing necessary to get a bigger audience for
B5 on the big screen is to
put it in front of a bigger audience.
Trek was never a big hit by the standards of network television in the mid to late 60s. It was a marginal show always on the edge of cancellation. Yet the films based on it did very well at the box office - and without abandoning the core of the show. Arguably the reverse was true. The further they strayed from the feel and spirit of the original - as in all the odd-numbered movies - the worse they did, while the closer they came to the sheer
fun and enthusiasm of the original - most notably
Khan and
The Voyage Home for
TOS (
First Contact for
Next Gen) - the better they did. The truer
Trek was to itself, the more accessible it became to non-fans. Interesting paradox,
non?
Again, we're navel-gazing about the size of the TV audience, when this is almost certainly going to be
completely irrelevant to the box office success of the film.
Regards,
Joe
