Crusade

Well, while waiting for my next paycheck so I can purchase the 5th and final season of B5, I finished watching all of Crusade this weekend.

I must say, I did enjoy the show and saw much potential in just 13 episdoes. Why exactly was it cancelled? Were it's ratings poor?

Also, have any of Crusade's lingering story threads ever been resovled? I know there are B5 comics & novels, but I haven't read any of them.

I must say, once I finish season 5, I will probably be pretty sad that my new favorite show is over with no real future in sight! I still will need to catch Legend of the Rangers, but that will be it. I guess I'll just have to watch the show from the beginning, all over again...

Well, as far as I know, TNT wanted JMS to fill Crusade with sex and violence and he refused, so they pulled the plug on it.

Crusade didn't add to TNT's viewer base. While Crusade was in production but before any of it had been broadcast, TNT did a study of their programming and their viewer's viewing habbits. They learned that with the fifth season of Babylon 5 that people who tuned into watch B5 on TNT didn't stay around for any other TNT programs, and that those who normally watched TNT's other programs didn't stay around for Babylon 5. So, the brains at TNT decided to kill Crusade before it was even broadcast. They devised a plan to make as many stupid demands as possible (i.e. more sex, more violence, "The captain should arrange for the alien woman, who looks too alien so change that and make her look more human, to be raped by some bureaucrat" type "suggestions") so that they could then turn around and say that they weren't getting the show that they wanted and cancel Crusade.

This is information that jms wanted to tell on his commentaries on the Crusade DVDs, and it was a condition that he made to Warner Bros for doing the commentaries, they agreed to get him to do the commentaries, and then they edited it out. Which he's since confronted them over and any future pressings of the Crusade set will now not include jms's commentaries. This information is also something that jms relayed at the Hawthorne High School Comic Convention (transcript available here, information specific to this post is about halfway down the page).

vacantlook has pretty well summed it up there, but there are just a couple of interesting sidenotes to add.

Firstly the show was cancelled before any episode had ever aired, so it was nothing whatsoever to do with ratings, simply the audience issues vl outlined above. I am still not sure whether the earlier of the notes given to JMS by TNT were actually out of a desire to change Crusade into a show more like the other stuff they put out, or were always out to kill it. Guess we'll never know for sure.

Second, Sci-Fi Channel were keen to pick up the rights co Crusade, but had already spent their programming budget for the year and the price TNT wanted them to pay in order to get them was over the odds, so they just couldn't make it work. The general feeling is that TNT didn't want someone else to buy it, and make a success of it, because that would make them look a bit stupid.

Just to be clear about the issue of viewers of the shows around B5 on the schedule leaving for B5 and vice versa:

S5 of B5 was generally being shown right after pro wrestling (with the exceptions of when they had an NBA game on that night). I don't know why needed to see the results of their big study to figure out that there was fairly little overlap between those two audiances. I took that as a given from the start.

On the other hand, IIRC, the orginal plan back when TNT was first picking up Crusade (before any casting or anything had even been done), was to launch Crusade and Witchblade at the same time as a block of programming. I think that might have been a pairing that could have worked, with each show bringing the other some extra viewers.

However, that became a moot point on two separate counts. First Witchblade ran into problems very early in pre-production and ended up not premiering until at least a year later than originally planned (long after Crusade had come and gone). Secoondly, of coarse, was TNT getting the results of the viewer pattern study and deciding to dump Crusade long before any of it aired.

I just don't understand the claim that they sabotaged the show as "reason" to cancel it. If they wanted to cancel, why not just cancel it?

I am still not sure whether the earlier of the notes given to JMS by TNT were actually out of a desire to change Crusade into a show more like the other stuff they put out, or were always out to kill it. Guess we'll never know for sure.

Click to expand...

We know a little bit. The first five episodes shot were done without notes/interference. Those, of course, were the last ones shown because of the uniform change and TNT mandating that the black uniform episodes be shown first.

Jan

I just don't understand the claim that they sabotaged the show as "reason" to cancel it. If they wanted to cancel, why not just cancel it?

Click to expand...

That would have been a blatant breach of contract. They had to have a reason and the one that they came up with was to make it impossible for the show to comply with their demands so they could go to WB and say "We're not getting the show we want, you deal with it."

Jan

Slightly of topic:

Apparantly the three unfilmed film scripts were online many moons ago. Does anyone happen to know where I can find them? I've searched all over the web but can't find them.

They aren't available on line, but, Jan might be able to tell you how to get the Fiona Avery one(s) in a legitimate way.

And of course there is always borrowing from a friend who got them in illegitimate ways, if you might know someone who got ahold of them.

They aren't available on line, but, Jan might be able to tell you how to get the Fiona Avery one(s) in a legitimate way.

Click to expand...

Wish I did. I understand that she sells the Bester one (Value Judgments) at conventions sometimes but she doesn't seem to sell it online anymore. I don't know that the second one she did was ever completed. I tried asking her for it back when she was selling it online but she didn't respond. Perhaps there's a way to contact her through her website? It's been a long time since I was there.

As for the others, there're synopses at Worlds of JMS but they're no longer availble online legitimately.

Jan

I just don't understand the claim that they sabotaged the show as "reason" to cancel it. If they wanted to cancel, why not just cancel it?

Click to expand...

As Jan noted, it was a matter of contractual obligation. They had actually signed up for 22 episodes of Crusade. Once they analyzed the B5 viewing patterns and decided they didn't want Crusade it was too late to back out of the deal. They were on the hook for the better part of 30 million dollars.

So they tried to make things so intolerable that JMS would be the one to pull the plug, and give them an out, taking oversight of the show away from TNT Productions in Los Angeles (on a very flimsy pretext) and trying to call the shots from Atlanta. and making JMS's life a living hell.

I now suspect that the infamous "Atlanta Memo" was deliberately leaked to Aint-it-Cool News (a site already largely hostile to JMS and B5) in an early bid to piss him off and make him walk off the show. Which is more-or-less the way things turned out, although he did return for a time. After the whole thing was over Warner Bros. brieflly considered suing TNT for roughly 1.3 million per that they still owed for the final 9 of S1. (WB's position was that TNT had the right to offer notes, but that JMS was not obligated to carry them out to the letter or in all cases. His show-runner contract gave him a large degree of creative control within limits set by the studio, not the network.) In the end Time-Warner Corporate scotched the legal proceedings on the gorunds that ultimately the stockholders would be paying the lawers on both sides.) TNT's willingness to fork over post-production money to complete editing sound, and FX on the last batch of five episodes to go through the process was supposedly their quid pro quo for WB's dropping the suit. (TNT had originally refused to pay for post production on the first five episodes shot - the "grey uniform" shows that they never wanted to air at all.)

Ratings certainly had nothing to do with it, as production shut down in February of 1999 and post-production wrapped and the stages and offices were vacated by April, but the first episode didn't air until July. All the decisions had long since been made and ever spectacular ratings would not have saved the show.

Regards,

Joe

I just don't understand the claim that they sabotaged the show as "reason" to cancel it. If they wanted to cancel, why not just cancel it?

Click to expand...

I think it was that they wanted to cancel it AND get out of paying for it, so they could use those funds for L&O reruns, a mainstream show that their core audience would like.

I now suspect that the infamous "Atlanta Memo" was deliberately leaked to Aint-it-Cool News (a site already largely hostile to JMS and B5) in an early bid to piss him off and make him walk off the show. Which is more-or-less the way things turned out, although he did return for a time.

Click to expand...

You know...that makes a whole lotta sense and I'll bet you're right. I looked back at that story a few months ago and it seemed awfully odd that they'd go along with it based on somebody's brother seeing something with no coroboration at all. Gods, what a business!

Jan

Ratings certainly had nothing to do with it, as production shut down in February of 1999 and post-production wrapped and the stages and offices were vacated by April, but the first episode didn't air until July.

Click to expand...

June. June 9, 1999.

TNT had originally refused to pay for post production on the first five episodes shot - the "grey uniform" shows that they never wanted to air at all.

Click to expand...

Which is kind of ironic really considering that those 5 are certainly among the best episodes IMO.

TNT had originally refused to pay for post production on the first five episodes shot - the "grey uniform" shows that they never wanted to air at all.

Click to expand...

Which is kind of ironic really considering that those 5 are certainly among the best episodes IMO.

Click to expand...

And there are those who would argue that is *exactly* why they never wanted them to be seen. They didn't the possibility of "proof" of how much their notes etc. actually screwed up the show. They preferred the deniability of being able to say: "Yeah, it wasn't that good of a show, but it wasn't our fault. Once we took a more active part, it got markedly better. You should see what they were turning out when left on their own."

CRUSADE SCRIPTS

The Crusade sourcebook from Mongoose Publishing for their D20 game contains the 3 unpublished Crusade scripts. They are told as a detailed story, not as a blueprint of the script.