Farscape or Babylon 5?

[flavaflav]

Sindatur wrote:

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Fast forward through the Jeremiah parts

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.

[Jan]

Is it really necessary to discuss a third season episode before Kirk55555 even starts season 2?

Jan

[tomswift2002]

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.

[Forbin]

SeaQuest?! You may as well hold up the 1970s Logan's Run series as great TV sci fi, then.

Well, to each his own.

[RandyS]

Forbin wrote:

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SeaQuest?! You may as well hold up the 1970s Logan's Run series as great TV sci fi, then.

Well, to each his own.

Nah, SeaQuest is MUCH better than Logan's Run.

Well, okay, a little better.....

[DWF]

It should be noted that SeaQuest was also created by Rockne S. O'Bannon, personally I liked the first and third seasons.

[TheMasterOfOrion]

Yoda wrote:

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You should buy one, then the other when you can afford it. I don't think you can make a bad choice, but I'll lean slightly towards Farscape. Along with being dramatic, epic, compelling, and all that, it's also funny.

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

[tomswift2002]

TheMasterOfOrion wrote:

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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.

[JD]

So did they even have a writing staff for those seasons, or was it all just him in an office somewhere by himself?

[Greg Cox]

TheMasterOfOrion wrote:

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JMS wrote over 18 episodes per season by himself...something totally unheard of today

Isn't Downton Abbey largely written by one guy?

[JD]

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.

[Harvey]

Greg Cox wrote:

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Isn't Downton Abbey largely written by one guy?

I believe so, although it has shorter seasons.

[Jan]

JD wrote:

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So did they even have a writing staff for those seasons, or was it all just him in an office somewhere by himself?

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

[tomswift2002]

JMS even wrote about 60% of "Crusade", and I believe most of the movies were written by JMS.

[bigdaddy]

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.