Battlestar Galactica really isn't applicable to this discussion
because 1) the "arena" under discussion has always been Earth in its future
with humanity as a spacefaring civilization, which comprises 95% of all
written SF, but had not been done on TV since Trek, and 2) Battlestar
was really more of a Star Wars "homage" (he said politely), that has
nothing to do with ST in *any* event.

jms

You may want to convey to these individuals that Stewart also invited
Doug to tea, something he wouldn't have done if he were just fibbing about
his opinion to avoid a faux pas.

In point of fact, we have had generally good relations with MANY
of the actors involved with ST in one form or another. Rene Auberjenois
(I know I just misspelled that, but it's late, nearly 1 a.m., and I'm
too tired to go into the other room to get the right spelling) told both
Mira Furlan, myself, her husband, and just about anyone else in sight
that he's seen B5 and enjoys it immensely. We have had several actors
involved with ST come by the B5 stages to look at the facilities and say
hello. The actor who plays Quark (my apologies to the actor, but his name
has just fallen out of my head) invited Peter Jurasik to a party at his
place to comment on how much he enjoys the show.

There is a small, vocal minority of Star Trek fans who hate B5 because
it commits the ultimate crime for a show in Earth's future in space: it's
not Star Trek. In some ways, I find it kind of amusing, along the lines
of those in the 60s who said you could be a Beatles fan, or a Monkees fan,
but not both. These are people who talk about Infinite Diversity in
Infinite Combinations, but choose not to practice it. They are the same
sorts of people who were Lost in Space fans, and derided and insulted Star
Trek because they considered it a cheap knock-off of LiS. (And yes, there
were loads of critics and viewers who said this, and wrote reviews that
said this, and wrote to fan publications saying it.) They are people who
applaud ST because it was the work of one man with a vision, in its
beginnings...and deride B5 which is a different vision.

What the actors, and the writers involved with Star Trek understand,
that this small, vocal minority of ST fans do not, is that COMPETITION
LEADS TO IMPROVEMENT. These are people who want to see their characters
stretched to new areas, given more to do...writers who want to take
chances in their scripts and be bold...who have for much of the run of ST
been held back by the corporate types who don't *want* changes, who don't
want to take chances...and that's why you have a situation where Riker
stays first officer for *seven years*, which fans complain about, and which
would be the end of ANY officer's career in the real military.

Where I come from, science fiction is the literature of open
mindedness. It *welcomes* new ideas, and new approaches, and different
views of our past, present and future. Are they so insecure with Star
Trek that they must attack Babylon 5?

If they are truly Star Trek fans, then they must know and appreciate
the work done by people like Harlan Ellison and David Gerrold and Dorothy
Fontana and Walter Koenig and, lately, Peter David...people who have not
been well treated by Star Trek of late. We have given them the respect
that is due them, allowing the writers the chance they often did not have,
to experiment and to grow. When Walter Koenig did his first Babylon 5
episode, whenever he came to the table at lunch, those in the cast at the
table would stand until he sat...common when junior officers are being
joined by a senior officer.

Dorothy, and David, and Walter, and Harlan, and others who were
involved with the original Star Trek who have visited the set have said
that they have only seen the atmosphere and warmth of this set on one
other set in nearly thirty years...on the original Star Trek.

Mark Hammil has come by the studio to pay his regards for the show;
Leslie Stevens, co-creator/producer for The Outer Limits made a similar
pilgrimage to say how much he enjoys the show, and how he feels that this
is the future of where SF should be going in television.

When we won the Emmy for Best Visual Effects for the first year in
which we were eligible, it was the *first time* in six years that Star
Trek had lost out. Now with a second Emmy, a Hugo nomination, an award
from the Space Frontier Foundation for Best Vision of the Future, another
award from the Cult TV convention in England (beating out NYPD Blue and
DS9 for best new series)...we are being noticed. Even some reviewers who
at first had the same disdain because we weren't Star Trek have begun to
come around, and see us for what we ARE, not complain about what we are
NOT. (Some complained in the beinning that we were just a rip-off of Star
Trek: DS9, which since we were around in development for 5 years prior to
DS9 is nonsense...and then when they tuned in, and saw that we weren't a
ripoff, turned their noses up because we weren't doing things like they
were done in Star Trek. I received mail and email from people complaining
that we used hand-links when everyone KNEW that the REALITY of it was that
in 200 years we'd be using the chest-pin communicators in Star Trek, "and
every time I see you use this other thing, it breaks the illusion for me."

Long story made short...we're *not* going away. We are telling a
story, and we're going to tell that story until it's finished. If a few
wish to be like the Lost in Space fans who refused to watch Star Trek
when it came on, that's their right. Anyone who finds specific fault in
an episode, and it IS a fault, not "Star Trek wouldn't have done it this
way," that's also terrific. To not like a show simply because it isn't
Star Trek is simple bigotry...and to them I can only say that Roddenberry
would be *disgraced* by that attitude in people claiming to be fans of
hsi work.

jms

To Laurie Antoniou: many thanks.

jms

Thanks for reminding me; quite correct, Michael O'Hare was invited to
take (and did take) a tour of the set for one of the Star Trek movies; I
guess it would've been Generations. He went, and was well received, and
Shatner said he liked the show. (Though *there*, I suspect, it may have
been more politeness, given the reaction as it was expressed to me. But
I could be wrong.)

jms

My point sustains; getting a science fiction series on the air at
all is mind-bogglingly difficult. Getting it past one season is damned
near impossible. Of the series you named as examples of how SF has a
market in TV -- Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, V, Salvage, Matthew
Star, Flash, Greatest American Hero -- how many of those made it to or
past a second season? Though I'm kinda fuzzy on Buck (my brain has
mercifully excised most memories pertaining to that one), and Battlestar
had a *revised* show as another season...insofar as I can recall, those
are ALL one-season wonders.

We're still talking apples and oranges. The common question, the
real killer, is "Is the market big enough to sustain two SF shows, and is
there a market for SF at ALL?" *Getting* a show doesn't prove that there
is a market for SF; it only proves that somebody's going to try it again
to find out. If a show doesn't last, dies quickly, then that proves
the market's dead.

This is one of the blind spots in TV logic which pertains mainly to
the two groups you mention, SF and westerns. If a cop show goes on and
flops, nobody says there's no market for cop shows; *that* show failed.
If an SF series fails, the interpretation is that there's no market for
SF. Also, in general, hollywood perceives all SF as more or less the
same; it doesn't take into consideration, if an SF series dies, if it was
a GOOD SF series or a BAD SF series.

Nowhere was this more true than with the V series (not the mini, the
Kenneth Johnson stuff, which was great), where one of the producers told
me, "As long as we have aliens and space ships and ray guns, we'll get
the SF audience GUARANTEED; it's the mainstream we have to work at."

To understand this whole area, you have to stop thinking like a
viewer and start thinking like a network programming exec. (Start by
lowering your IQ about 15 points.) If a series runs only 1-2 years and
fails, everybody loses; the studio and network will never recoup the
expenses of production because these days you generally need 80-100
episodes of a series to syndicate it. Except for bargain-basement stuff
like minimal fees for SciFi Channel reruns, you're dead. You're out
MILLIONS of dollars.

*NO AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION SERIES OTHER THAN STAR TREK HAS GONE
ON FOR MORE THAN FIVE YEARS SINCE LOST IN SPACE*. We're talking here
twenty-four YEARS of failure (from a network/studio financial point of
view). This does not exactly encourage them to think there's much of a
market. Throw Logan's Run and Amazing Stories and the new Twilight Zone
into the mix.

By entering its 2nd year, Babylon 5 has already beaten the odds. If
we get year three (oh, yeah, and Time Trax also didn't make it), then as
far as I know, we'll be the first nominally-hard SF series other than
Trek to do it in nearly a quarter-century. (I'm excluding X-Files from
this only because I don't quite think it fits as science fiction; I'm not
quite sure what to classify it as other than Really Weird Shit, and a
truly *nifty* TV series. I love it.)

There are an *awful* lot of studio and network people watching us
very closely; if we can be the first to break the curse, proving that
there is a market for SF outside Star Trek that can sustain long enough
for the studio to make back its money, I think you'll finally begin to see
a lot more of it...and frankly, I can't wait; the more competition, the
more SF, the better.

jms

Just a note of clarification on the notice that TV frigntened the
movie studios (that should be "frightened")...yes and no. In the beginning
it mainly just frightened radio; Fred Allen (famous for the quote "TV is
called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done") used to sport
a button stating Stamp Out TV. The studios *loved* TV in the beginning;
at the time when TV began to come out, the studios were suffering their
worst years since the Great Depression. Universal Studios and Warner
Bros. practically shut down altogether. The number of films being made
was virtually nil. But they still had all these actors and writers and
directors under contract, chewing up vast amounts of money at a time when
the studios had zip coming in. So they quickly turned many of these
people over toward making TV shows; this is one reason why so many of the
early TV anthology programs had big-name actors...the studios were burning
off expensive contractual obligations.

Also, I'd suggest that serious SF was done prior to Forbidden Planet,
including but not limited to Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, The Day the
Earth Stood Still (still one of the finest such films ever made) and many
others.

jms

The attribution to Ernie Kovacs of the "TV is a medium" line is
incorrect. Ernie loved TV. Fred Allen hated it with a passion.

jms

This to Frank Springall...we weren't *talking* about shows from
other countries. We were addressing American-produced shows. Yes, we
could drag Dr. Who in here, but that's not really the *point*. Doesn't
mean that nothing produced outside the US is "interesting." Obviously it
is. But that's simply not relevant to our discussion of the American
television series, and how studios and networks *here* view the genre.

jms

Actually, there are a lot of resonances between the process of getting
B5 on the air and getting the original Trek on. Both did considerable
recasting after their pilots; both saw the series a full year after the
first pilot (we kinda considered ep 1 of year 1 our second pilot); Trek
ran into difficulty getting sold because of Lost in Space, and we had a
hard time getting sold because of ST; when it went on the air, Star Trek
was slammed by critics as being low-rent, cheesy, suited for saturday
morning kiddie shows and nothing more than an attempt to cash in on Lost
in Space, just as we got nailed by critics and charged with trying to cash
in on ST; Trek was Roddenberry's singular vision, and B5 is another very
singular vision, neither show a "committee" operation. There are more,
but I think the point is there.

jms