I highly recommend you do. The universe is so vast, and there is a payoff for pretty much everything, even the smallest details from season 1. Think of B5 as a television novel... JMS wrote about 98 of the 110 episodes. He literally had the entire thing planned from beginning to end.
Why Didn't DS9 Have as Many Viewers as TNG?
- Thread starter VulcanMindBlown
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I highly recommend you do. The universe is so vast, and there is a payoff for pretty much everything, even the smallest details from season 1. Think of B5 as a television novel... JMS wrote about 98 of the 110 episodes. He literally had the entire thing planned from beginning to end.
Except I was talking about DS9
Never had much desire to watch Babylon 5, but maybe I should. It's gotta be better than 75% of the "My show has to be edgier and depict uglier violent things than the previous show" garbage that's on TV today
Bare in mind if you do decide to watch B5 the first season isn't exactly the best with a fair bit of it being setup for events later in the series.
To be fair, it's questionable just how involved Roddenberry really was in early TNG, as he was getting old and sick and letting his lawyer Leonard Maizlish exert a lot of creative control over the show, by some accounts without evidence of any direct input from Roddenberry himself.
A lawyer.
Kor
A lawyer.
Kor
The same lawyer who called (openly-gay) David Gerrold,To be fair, it's questionable just how involved Roddenberry really was in early TNG, as he was getting old and sick and letting his lawyer Leonard Maizlish exert a lot of creative control over the show, by some accounts without evidence of any direct input from Roddenberry himself.
A lawyer.
Kor
an "AIDS-infected cocksucker. A fucking faggot."
Why weren't Rhoda or Lou Grant as widely-watched as the Mary Tyler Moore Show? Why didn't AfterMASH fly?
Spinoffs are sometimes successful. They're very rarely as successful as their precursors. There's not a reason in the world that Trek in the 90s should have been an exception to the rule.
Spinoffs are sometimes successful. They're very rarely as successful as their precursors. There's not a reason in the world that Trek in the 90s should have been an exception to the rule.
Not every can be Frazier Crane.
Gene Roddenberry was a self-made Man who left his mark on entertainment and pop culture on a global, multi-generational scale. And STAR TREK: The Next Generation was the very foundation of DS9 -- note how Sir Patrick Stewart was even called upon to pass the torch, as it were. I almost feel like Admiral Satie did, defending her father from Picard on the witness stand, in "The Drumhead ..."It seems I hit a nerve. Sorry, but that's how I feel.
As i am sure you loath to remember, the genesis of DS9 was Brandon Tartikoff asking Rick Berman to create a show about a man and his son in space. He didn't care if it was Star Trek or not.
Again, I'm sorry, but this 'Saint Gene Roddenberry' bullcaca has to stop. Gene got lucky at creating Star Trek and getting the writers on staff to flesh out the rest of the universe in Star Trek: TOS; without Coon, Fontana, Gerrold, Sohl, Matheson, Ellison, Wincellberg, etc., he wouldn't have a show.
Gene was the idea guy, and he did come up with a great basic idea, plus he was able to write some good scripts and help fix problems in stories that needed fixing by suggesting different things to the scriptwriter as the showrunner, but he wasn't the complete be-all, end-all of Star Trek, and this was even more apparent on The Next Generation, where he needed Fontana, Gerrold, and a few new others to write the scripts and help flesh out things for him as before on the original series; as Fontana put it rightly: 'If you look at the development of the scripts along the way, you see all of the elements that were contributed by other writers. The base was there, the bones were there, the skeleton was there, maybe even the flesh. All the rest, the laying on of the weight and the muscle, was done by others.'
Roddenberry was able to do it right the first time, but the second time, he couldn't, and so we saw what happened as mentioned in the documentary Chaos On The Bridge (plus what was mentioned in Gene Roddenberry: The Myth And The Man Behind Star Trek, as well as what was mentioned in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. ) Roddenberry was self-made, all right; he made himself into different things depending on what he needed to advance himself.
It's time to stop this sainthood jazz, and see the truth.
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DS9 just didn't capture the public's imagination the way TNG did. What becomes popular and why never made much sense to me.
There was a lot of strife going on BTS in TOS also. I heard a story about Gene bringing a new writer on in Season 2, and as he was giving him a tour and introducing him to everyone, Shatner came walking along. When he looked up and saw Gene walking towards him, he did an about face and walked away.
I'm not sure his vision for ST ever really changed. The Cage, Phase II/The Motion Picture, and TNG all share a similar philosophy. He was unhappy with military themes in TOS, Wrath of Khan, and TNG, etc.
I'm not sure his vision for ST ever really changed. The Cage, Phase II/The Motion Picture, and TNG all share a similar philosophy. He was unhappy with military themes in TOS, Wrath of Khan, and TNG, etc.
It's funny you mention After MASH. Have you seen this "gem"? I watched about half of it and that was more than enough
It's funny you mention After MASH. Have you seen this "gem"? I watched about half of it and that was more than enough
Thanks for posting that link. I've heard of WALTER and always wondered what it was like. They really needed a good writer.
I think they needed a superior premise. Yeah, let's take Radar from MASH and remove pretty much all aspects of that character that made him appealing and turn him into something else. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some changes but why a complete makeover? Doesn't surprise me at all that this pilot never got picked up.
I didn´t watch DS9 on first run here in Germany. "To much politics stuff"...was my reason back then. (I was about 14 or 15 years old). Plus...our local cable carrier always switched to a local news show half way thru the episodes. So the only way to actually see a complete episode would have been to record the late night rerun which was full of commercials for bad porn (ripe women over 60 will give it to you.....)..
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