Best 1990s Sci-fi show?

Have you *tried* watching TNG lately?

That show did *not* age well. Each episode feels like a corny gospel story or pantomime in pajamas or something, tight to the point of ridiculous, mechanical and predictable. You can *see* the actors acting.

It's still my fave on the list though, for what it contributed to culture. I loved it to bits at the time. Gospel stories aren't a bad thing, but they're certainly not high literature.

B5 was experimental and quite low-budget. It more than once had to deal with looming cancellation stress which was revoked mid-season, leading to some real challenges in story pacing. The writing was apparently sometimes last minute; I met a guy who worked on set and he told me that one time he watched J. Michael Straczynski due to some sort of unexpected deadline pressure have to come up with a script in a couple of hours on the day shooting for that episode had to start. And did it. The guy wrote more 90% of all the episodes. That's pretty unique in sci-fi. You don't often get such an undiluted vision.

It was also on the vanguard of attempts at telling a very long story with a highly involved time line. Watching out of order makes it a much lesser experience, almost pointless. TNG did have an evolving story world, and DS9 more so, particularly near the end of its run, but by comparison, B5 was far more intricate and deliberate in its story objectives, and it met all of them.

B5's actors were a mixed bag of awful and wooden, and competent and engaging. They were all archetypes though, which worked perfectly for that kind of story. (In Greek myths, you don't bitch about the acting; you care about who did what to whom. And there was vastly more opportunity for character development granted to them than most Star Trek characters could ever hope to see due to the constraints of the production system. -With a few notable exceptions, if you were serving on the Enterprise, your range of personal challenges had to be completely buttoned up in 45 minutes or less, (realistically, in only about 10 minutes since TNG often worked in groups of 2 or 3 mini-stories told concurrently.)

In the end, the same thing that allowed TNG to be amazing comes into play with B5. -You just need a pinch more of it. And that's the ability to slip into the world and allow it to become 'real' to your mind.

When it comes down to it, even the best produced Sci-Fi is unbelievably childish and cheesy if you look at it without being in the 'zone'. Even Star Wars had storm troopers banging their heads and plenty of other dumb stuff which nobody noticed for the first 20 years.

B5 takes more deliberate zen to click with, but when you do, it's actually very smart; sort of a Lord of the Rings in space. It's self-contained and doesn't violate its own physics and internal rule systems the way a contract written, chopped up story world like TNG did every few episodes.

I'm not trying to convince you to watch it, but saying "It sucks" is just silly and self-limiting. All sci-fi pretty much sucks if you go in grumpy enough.

The thing that prevents me from watching a sci-fi series, so long as the production values are within the competent range, comes down to how intelligent the script writer/s are. J.M.S. was no dummy, not by a long shot, and he'd probably be a fun guy to chat with.

I'm glad he got a chance to put such a big story all the way through production, and despite its warts, I thought it was a remarkably rewarding ride.