To be honest I found season 1 a bit clunky in parts and I'm enjoying season 2 a whole lot more, there's a lot to like about this show. Also was this one of the few early shows to be broadcast in widescreen 16:9 format? I find it strange sometimes realizing this was a 90s show yet it's done in widescreen where a lot of other shows of the same period were not.
Well, funny story.
The HD standard was established by the very early '90s, so people knew that 16x9 TV was coming eventually. Babylon 5 was done in 4x3 for the entire run, but aside from the pilot, everything was shot to be "safe" for 16x9 (both framings don't use the entire area of a frame of 35 mm film, they're just cropped differently, the 4x3 version typically has a tiny bit more stuff vertically than the 16x9 version, even though the 16x9 version has a lot more picture horizontally). So, no, it wasn't broadcast 16x9, at least not for the first- and second-runs in the '90s.
In the early 2000s, the Sci-Fi Channel (or SyFy Channel, today) got the rerun rights for Babylon 5, and since widescreen TVs were actually starting to come on the market, and letterboxing had become more acceptable over the course of the '90s, they remastered the show for widescreen (but still standard definition), and that's the version that was used for the DVDs. The visual effects, however, had all been done in 4x3, so those shots had to be cropped. The loss of resolution is a bit visible on the space-shots, but it's really noticeable in live-action, when the framing zooms in and the screen gets blurry whenever there's a PPG blast, or a CG creature, or a translation like a cross-fade, or a scene from a previous episode, or sometimes just for the hell of it, probably because some blemish or stain on an actor or costume was painted out in post production.
Legend has it that the post-production department back in 1994 requested a 16x9 SD monitor so they could master a version of the show in native widescreen as well as in 4x3 (which Stargate SG-1, for example did from day one when it started in 1997), but Doug Netter was penny wise and pound foolish and didn't approve the purchase, which shot JMS's grand future-proofing plan for Babylon 5 in the foot. It turned out a few years ago, there had actually been conformed film-edits made of every episode for international distribution in countries where they didn't have fancy tape systems and satellite downlinks, and that's the basis for the current HD release. That's in 4x3, so even though the visual effects are still lower resolution than the pure live-action shots, the cropping doesn't make them stick out quite so badly (from what I hear, I've never watched that version myself).
Interestingly enough, on the Star Trek side, most of DS9 and all of VGR were shot 16x9 safe, so if they were ever remastered in HD the way TNG was, they could be produced in native, uncropped widescreen. The DS9 documentary from a few years ago was able to remaster most of their clips from the original film negatives, there are comparisons online where you can see the difference.
