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What do you think?

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Shadowdancer:
I met him (not to namedrop) in Florida during the fifth year of B5, and he seemed on the verge of exhaustion.
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I don't think that doing 2 B5 series at once would be too much for JMS. As he himself has said several time, he's awlays done multiple projects at the same time. Even without bringing Crusade back he'd still be doing 2, maybe 3 TV series, 3 comic books, the Rising Stars movie, and a novel. What would one more TV series be...

The reason he was so exausted at the end of B5 was that he'd been working on B5 almost non-stop for over 5 years, writing almost every single episode for the last 3 and 1/2 years of the series, fighting to keep the show on the air, and getting only about 3-4 hours of sleep a night.

JMS has had a couple of years off without a series so he is more rested, and he has said that he won't be writing more than 40-50% of the episodes for the new series, so he shouldn't get exhausted like he did with B5.

So I don't think that JMS being "tired" would keep Crusade from returning. We'll just have to keep our fingers crossed.

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"Vir, Intelligence has nothing to do with politics."
Point of No Return
 
JMS does not need to write every single episode for the entire season(s). There are Fiona Avery, Jeanne Cavelos, Peter David and several others thet can do at least a couple of episodes. I want two series. Why not? Star Trek is not , repeat, in not better than B5 and there is the series and the movies.

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"You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate, to be ruled by your genes. Humans can choose the type of life they want to live. The important is that you choose life... and then live".
 
Two B5 series at the same time....sounds fantastic! JMS has posted on a number of times that doing two shows at the same time is possible and often cites names like David E Kelly and Joss Whedon as people who have managed to produce and write two shows at the same time. As someone has already noted JMS often has a number of projects going at the same time with no problems so I'm sure if two series are given the green light at the same time he would be more then capable to handle both shows.



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"No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by the force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power governments, and tyrants, and armies can not stand. The Centauri learned this lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free."
-- G'Kar in Babylon 5:"The Long, Twilight Struggle"
 
There is no way that they would do Rangers for a couple of years and then replace it with Crusade. TV doesn't work like that. Each show is its own "package" and the idea it to get at least five years in the can so that the show is viable in syndication being aired M-F. (Less than 100 or so episodes and you have to recycle them too often, which leads to a drop in ratings.)
If Crusade were to come back at all it would be in addition to Rangers, not instead of it.

Beside, the timelines probably won't be that far apart. To Live and Die in Starlight takes place in 2265. Odds are it takes place later in the year, rather than earlier, because it is set after the Telepath War, which also happens in 2265. If JMS isn't going to include the Teep War in either the movie or the proposed series, chances are he's going to want to leave a gap of at least a few months between them in story terms so that it will be plausible when everybody isn't constantly talking about it.

If this is the case, the Rangers series may very well start in 2266. (Assuming it is a five year series and will run on the same year-per-season schedule as B5 did - none of which has been confirmed, but what the Hell, this is all speculation anyway.
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So Rangers would debut in the Fall of 2001 (or the Spring of 2002 if the season is delayed by strikes) in story year 2266.

Season two of Rangers would air in the Fall of 2002, story year 2267. By an odd coincidence, Fall 2002 is likely the earliest date a revived Crusade could make it onto on SFC's schedule.

But Freud said, "There are no coincidences." I'm not saying that Crusade is coming back, but I am saying that JMS is smart enough to allow for that possibility in planning Rangers. By sometime in 2002 the first season of Rangers should have finished shooting and the first year "shake-down", when the show-runner's attention is most needed, will be over. Sci-Fi will likely have some ratings data on the show to work with.

They could then put Crusade back in production if they chose, and have both shows ready to go forward in sync and with the possiblity of cross-over episodes to goose the ratings.

This is almost certainly a possiblity that JMS considered, and may even have figured as one option when Warner Bros., JMS and Sci-Fi were having their first discussions and "everything [was] on the table" according to Bonnie Hammer, who was interviewed while the talks were still going on. At the time she said they were leaning towards a new TV movie, but mentioned in the same interview that Sci-Fi was considering picking up the Crusade reruns, so obviously at least that much was a part of the conversation with Warner Bros. at the time.

Regards,

Joe

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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Joseph DeMartino:
So Rangers would debut in the Fall of 2001 (or the Spring of 2002 if the season is delayed by strikes) in story year 2266.[/B]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Rangers the movie will udoubtedly air in the fall. Rangers the series will wait until production is finished on TWCBN, as per the following message by jms: <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>To explain: we shoot the Rangers MOW May/June. The other (still TWCBN, alas) series would begin prep July/August, and (labor relations permitting) shoot right after Labor Day (I just realized how appropriate that is...that's damned funny).

Shooting the 20 hours involved in The Other Project will take us through January, maybe into early February. If Rangers goes as a series, we'd probably start shooting in February/March. We've even discussed having crew going from one project to the other, and just rotating between them.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
 
joe m. touched upon the reality of things when he mentioned the stockpiling of a certain number of episodes for later syndication (which is where a series makes up its cost and starts making profit).

artistic aspects and fan's wishes aside, i would not expect "rangers" to have its run cut short to jump to another series if the rangers series itself is earning the ratings it needs to continue.

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"what is it, you moon-faced assassin of joy?!?!!"
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Rangers the movie will udoubtedly air in the fall.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Actually the last thing I saw on this had SFC considering airdates as late as January 2002, in part depending on the labor situation and what a strike might do to viewing patterns. (And sorry, I don't remember where I read this - just that I didn't immediately write it off as just another rumor or regard the source as unreliable.)

And I had forgotten that JMS post - which screws up my specific time-line, but not necessarily the possible relationship between the shows. Whenever Rangers ultimately goes into production and gets on the air, Crusade could reasonably follow within a year, which is the main point I was trying to make. (Although I probably did manage to get sufficiently bogged-down in actual dates to obscure that fact.
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Regards,

Joe

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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
 
OK what they COULD do is a B5LR..CRusade flash back...where they explain something in the LR part...and explain Crusade...Star Trek did it all the time...mostly just used ONE LINERs to explain it all...hence, no actors to re bring back, no sets to go to..etc...

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The timing would also allow Rangers to establish itself in SciFi's eyes and allow them to get a feel for the market. After seeing how Rangers does Scifi would then have more information on whether there is enough demand to support two original b5 series at once. This is of course assuming Rangers becomes a series, which seems like a good possibility.

Bus

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