what a waste of a Robert Englund appearance. I'd rather of seen him as the captain of a ship or a teep instead of the usual weird part.
Well with Season 2 you got episodes by a variety of write r's, bu then I think the last five were written solely by JMS, which leads into both Seasons 3 and 4 which were completely written by JMS as well. But, just on a slight OT note, another great Sci-Fi series to watch (and which unfortunately only has 2 of 3 seasons on DVD) along with B5 is seaQuest DSV (third season was renamed seaQuest 2032). "seaQuest" originally ran from 1993-96.
SeaQuest?! You may as well hold up the 1970s Logan's Run series as great TV sci fi, then. Well, to each his own.
It should be noted that SeaQuest was also created by Rockne S. O'Bannon, personally I liked the first and third seasons.
I think Babylon-5 while slower is written far more intelligently, but Farscape, its got lovely sets, great actors, beautiful CGI, but its really far away in the cosmos and escapism with that gothic, edgy, sexy, slick, funny feel to it. Don't get me wrong I love both shows but for different reasons, I just thought the plot and subtle story arcs in Babylon-5 were better structured. B5 might visually look a little dated but you got to give JMS credit, he wrote the whole thing himself, it was the only flagship program to challenge Trek when Trek was in its prime and JMS wrote over 18 episodes per season by himself...something totally unheard of today
Don't forget he also wrote all of Seasons 3 & 4 and a few episodes at the beginning of Season 5 for a straight run of about 56 episodes.
So did they even have a writing staff for those seasons, or was it all just him in an office somewhere by himself?
A lot of British shows seem to be. Of the 29 episode of Misfits that have been produced so far, only 5 of them have been written by someone other than Howard Overman and 4 of those were by Jon Brown.
Pretty much. The only other writing staff that there'd been at all was Larry DiTillio, the story editor (who also wrote 7 episodes) for the first two seasons. Once it was cleared with the studio that JMS would be writing all of season 3, he was released. The breakdown of JMS-written episodes was S1 - 12 S2 - 15 S3 - 22 S4 - 22 S5 - 21 Jan
Aaron Sorkin wrote or co-wrote almost all the episodes of West Wing until he was fired/quit after season 4. That's 88 episodes. He rote all the episodes in the first season of Sports Night. So it's not unheard of.
He wrote all of the TV movies. Of the produced and aired Crusade epiesodes, JMS wrote 10 of the 13. Two more JMS scripts were completed but not produced. Fiona Avery wrote two of the three produced scripts by other writers with Peter David writing the third. There were three scripts assigned to other writers but production was halted before most of them were finished. A spec script written by Peter Woodward would have been made in the second season. For those interested in the unproduced scripts, you might want to check out the 'Crusade: Other Voices' books which are still available here. Volume 1 features the Peter Woodward script and Volume 2 has early drafts of the Avery scripts as well as a draft of one of the assigned scripts by Richard Mueller. (Full disclosure: I'm part of the team that puts out these books but I don't have any financial stake in them. I just think that the history is important) Eventually, the two unproduced JMS scripts will be published in the rest of the 'Crusade: What the Hell Happened' books. Jan
Harlan Ellison was there too for all five seasons as the "conceptual consultant." From what I gather from both Joe and Harlan's interviews here and there, they would meet all the time to discuss stuff, although Joe did all the writing.