Remember the good ole weeknights when TNT aired B5 reruns at 7:PM?

And now?

Nobody shows B5 in reruns.

Of course I'm going back many moons ago now. TNT aired B5 reruns weeknights@7:00pm in the fall of 1997 & spring of 1998.

You'd think SPIKE would acquire & air B5 reruns, back to back weeknights with their DS9 reruns?

I wonder if SPIKE even has DS9 anymore while we're on the subject

Anyway, if SPIKE doesn't have DS9 anymore, whoever acquires it should also acquire BABYLON 5, & show'em back to back like see.

I ain't in no mood to be shellin' out bags of shells for dvd sets see.

And diggin' for'em on u-tube can be a killjoy. Git me? OK pal!

 

Those TNT showings were particularly special to me since that's the way I saw the first 3.5 seasons for the first time. Sci-Fi Channel also aired B5 for a year or two after TNT stopped. But B5 is such a cult niche show I don't think it'd be worth it for anyone to start airing it again.

 

Yup, that was my introduction to the show.

 

I hate that genre shows get slapped with the 'cult niche' tag. What made B5 reruns special is that they were a ratings success, leading TNT to order 5 movies and a spinoff. And they treated it as a success, not dismissing it's audience as outside the mainstream, as genre shows are typecast now-in spite of how good their ratings are. Look at the push TNT gave when they started airing it...
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue60b5/index.html
http://www.ntua.gr/lurk/misc/tntletter.html

Here's an old article I found while trying to search for cable ratings info on B5's run on TNT. I wanted to pin down just how well it did before posting the numbers my memory recalls reading about..didn't find what I wanted, but this story, which doesn't focus on hard numbers, is an informative read on how well it performed back in the day...

http://www.post-gazette.com/tv/19990606crusadea4.asp

 

You'd think Skiffy would air it, get some viewers and introduce a new generation to classic scifi like Babylon-5. Surely a B-5 marathon would pull better ratings than Ripleys Believe it or Not and Wrestling reruns.

 

I don't understand why the Scifi network does not step in and actively pursue broadcast rights to all the major genre series. Shows like Star Trek, B5, etc. provide rather good syndication ratings.

 

^ Because they're incredibly expensive.

Spike is dropping Trek from their schedules. TNG left last year, DS9 has ended, and Voyager is on its last legs (airs at 3:00 am three nights a week and is normally preempted).

B5 is available on AOL TV. I think they have exclusive rights to it.

 

They do cost, but you got to spend money to make it sometimes. Spike had Trek but buried in late night oblivion. These shows need to run at a better time to hit the target audience.

 

And Sci Fi picked it up. They replaced ENT Mondays with it during mid summer before they slotted Lost reruns there in the fall, now TNG appears to be replacing it-the network Feb schedule has it every Monday, with Lost bumped to 2 hrs on Tuesdays.
Maybe with Spike's contract (possibly?) expired, they can pick up DS9 too.

But they'd probably treat it as shabbily as they treat most everything else we love, and give us even more to whine about.

 

^ But they don't appear to be keeping TNG with its return to syndication.

 

For me the "good ole days" were from 1995-1997, when B5 and DS9 were both in first run syndication (that was B5's 3rd and 4th season and DS9's 4th and 5th).

Those were also my freshman and sophomore years of college. I was away at college in Minneapolis, and the local affiliate there showed DS9 on Thursday night at 7pm, followed by B5 at 8pm. This was up against NBC's Thursday night lineup, which featured shows such as Friends and Seinfeld. The bulk of the TV viewers in the dorm I lived in wanted to watch NBC. But there were multiple TV lounges, and a group of us sci-fi geeks would squat at one of the TV lounges at least 20 minutes beforehand, and claim that one as our own, then settle in for two hours of sci-fi goodness.

Man, that was an awesome time for SF TV.

 

[LEFT]I remember when Babylon 5 was reduced to the wee hours of the morning time slot, and I, being an unemployed insomniac at the time, would watch the damn show.[/LEFT]

[LEFT]Those were the days. [/LEFT]

[LEFT]I remember a Houston UPN station showing the first run DS9 episodes right after Voyager. IT WAS TREK-TACULAR.[/LEFT]

 

Yeah! I think it was 6:am in my TV market Something ludicrous like that. TNT

That was some serious horsehockey

 

TNT did move it to 6am at one point, but that was when they were showing it in reruns a couple of years after the series had ended its original run. And that was the nationwide timeslot, not a market-by-market thing.

What MJP *might* be referring to is the crazy scheduling that took place during the show's original run, before the TNT days. In B5's first run, the show was only picked up by TNT in the 5th season. Seasons 1-4 were in first run syndication, same situation as TNG and DS9 had. First run syndication means that individual TV stations around the country buy the broadcast rights to the show, and show it in whatever timeslot they like.

Like I said before, during Seasons 3-4, I was lucky enough to be living in Minneapolis, where the show was on Thursday nights at 8pm, a very reasonable hour. But lots of other markets had the show on at completely crazy times. I was living in Milwaukee during Seasons 1-2, and I think for most of that time, it was on at like 11:30pm on Saturday night, or something like that.

The worst was the Final Four episodes of Season 4, which had been held for months after the rest of Season 4 aired, but months before Season 5 was to start up on TNT. Stations were dumping those eps at crazy times like 1am. Some stations dropped the show completely, and people living in those markets had no way of watching those four episodes. Must have royally sucked for them.

 

I started watching B5 halfway through the fourth season (unfortunately after the good stuff had already happened). It aired Saturday nights prime-time. But when the final four of S4 came around, it was airing at 5am on a Monday or something like that! I actually missed the S4 finale because they only aired it once and never reran it like they normally did, I had to wait a year or so for it to come around on the TNT strip.

 

If it hadn't been for those TNT daily strips I never would have seen B5..

 

You know what still bugs me? One of the first B5 episodes I ever saw was, probably, "The Long Night". At any rate it ended with a bit fleet on the move, and I'm fairly sure the "next time on" promo was for "Into the Fire".

But what's really strange is that I *clearly* recall that fleet on the move entering a massive hyperspace jumppoint. Which of course isn't in the episode.....?

 

Not too strange. It's highly possible that the scene was rendered and then cut for time. It's also possible that it was from another episode, too. TNT tended to do that a fair amount. I notice that in the TNT promo for "The Long Night" there's a shot of lots and lots of White Stars emerging from a jump point. Could that have been it?

Jan

 

the only episode i ever saw on broadcast (this must have been 1997...) was 2x22 The Fall of Night. i distinctly remember thinking, what is this show? hmmm, maybe i'll catch an ep, see what it's like. is it anything like star trek?

and then i saw it, and thought: what the fuck is this shit? turned it off, and didn't look back... for 4 and a half years!

didn't watch the show again until it had ended

 

I watched the show on sci-fi when I was 12 starting with Za'ha'dum. I wasn't sure what was going on but I did know that I loved every freaking second of it! I looked forward to coming home from school everyday and watching the previous night's episode which I had taped.