but solid dialog and story really made the show and it didn't matter in the end. It was just good stuff to watch each week, and the show rewarded long time viewers in the end.
B5 was as brilliant as it is, mainly because the entire story was written by one of the most gifted in the business;
Joseph Michael Straczynski (aka: JMS), who began by creating the entire five-year story arc to define the enormous scope of the story.
JMS wrote 92 out of the 110
Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season. He also wrote the four
Babylon 5 TV movies produced alongside the series. Of the episodes which JMS did not himself write, he did all the final editing of the script prior to filming, as well as insisting on he alone being the
showrunner during the entire five year arc.
Earlier in this thread, someone mentioned EE "Doc" Smith's
Lensman series. In June 2008,
Daily Variety named Straczynski one of the top Ten Screenwriters to Watch. They also announced that Straczynski was writing
Lensman for
Ron Howard (to whom he had also sold an original screenplay entitled
The Flickering Light), that he was selling another spec,
Proving Ground, to
Tom Cruise and
United Artists.
I haven't been able to locate any update on what -if any- progress has been made on the
Lensman project.
Years ago I was a very active participant in the
Rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated newsgroup, and had the enormous privilege of exchanging ideas and comments with JMS directly. :ernae:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Michael_Straczynski
