The other problem for new
B5 viewers, perhaps reduced now that there have been other long-running shows besides
Trek to compare it to, is the "frame of reference" problem. People forget that until
B5 no space-based SF show ever made it past season three that didn't have
Star Trek in the title. It got to the point where if a show did something that
Trek didn't, or did something in a different way, it was labelled "unrealistic" - as though
Trek were some kind of 24th century doucmentary. (JMS actually got gigged for the communicators on the hand bit because "everybody knows" that we'll wear them built into chest insignia.) People viewed
B5 through their "
Trek-goggles", saw everything different as being "wrong" and sometimes hated the show. Or at least had to watch enough of it for the goggles to dissolve and start judging the show on its own terms. The amount of time this change in perspective can vary considerably, and I suspect that some who have only been through the show once and find S2 a
vast improvement over S1 really just happened to take that long to lose their built-in
Trek bias and see
B5 "unfiltered".
I should add that I myself was
very resistant to
B5 initially. Like many others, I thought it was a "poor man's
Trek" and as an original fan of
TOS who had finally warmed up to
TNG, I just wasn't interested. I didn't see the
B5 pilot when it first aired, and caught only one or two episodes of S1 during the initial run, which did not impress me at all. My best friend, however, was totally hooked on the series. He kept writing me from New York about how good it was and I kept asking "are you sure we're talking about the same show?" Finally there was a block of reruns coming up and he said the magic words: "Watch four or five episodes straight. Don't judge the show. Don't try to figure it out. Don't decide after one that you don't like it or the sets are cheesey or the FX look funny. Just keep watching it until you've seen four or five in a row." I did just as he said, (reluctantly for the first couple of weeks as I still seeing everything through my
Trek goggles) but aroud the fourth or fifth episode I suddenly "got it" and was hooked. (Oddly enough I don't even remember which episode those were. My
B5 viewing remained spotty until mid-S2 because the local PTEN station kept playing musical time-slots with the show and even after that I missed the odd episode because of work - these were the dark days before TiVO and season passes
- but I never again
intentionally missed an episode.)
Also, as I discovered many years ago, the series is a very different experience depending on the time the elapses between episodes. During the first run there was always at least a week and sometimes a couple of months between new episodes. Time to forget small details. When the reruns started airing Monday through Friday on TNT and I was able to catch up with the entire first season in order I started noticing foreshadowing and links even between episodes I had seen that I'd never spotted before. At around the same time I had a job that sometimes had me travelling for a week or more at a time, and I set the VCR to record the show every day at the lowest quality to get the maximum number of episodes per tape. When I got back I'd sometimes plop down and watch six straight hours of the show (less commericials) to catch up - and watching this way was another eye opener.
One of the reason the "first generation" of fans often complained early on was the "where's this arc I keep hearing about" issue. When you waited a week or more between episodes, and had no way of knowing what in an episode was foreshadowing and what wasn't, the arc could be hard to spot. And the comments of those fans are still floating around on the 'web, and still influencing the perceptions of newer fans. But if you sit down on a rainy Saturday and watch 4 (or even 8) episodes of the series in a row you're going to have a very differnent experience of the series than a first time viewer.
Like much else about the show, this was no accident. JMS always knew that if the show was a success, if he made it to five years, that the show might eventually run forever in syndication, probably 5 nights a week. There was even a
chance that the show would join the small number of (mostly cult SF) TV series that got released on home video in the U.S., along with
The Outer Limits,
The Twilight Zone and the various
Treks. (He was thinking in terms of VHS and laserdisc, since DVD didn't exist. Prior to DVD the conventional wisdom in Hollywood - and the realities of the marketplace, to be fair to them - was that TV shows did not sell on home video in a country where every show was rerun on hundreds of independent TV stations and dozens of cable networks.
Except for a few shows that those SF weirdos just had to collect. That's why Warner Bros. released the series on TV in the U.K. - where was a much smaller syndication market and few shows were rerun - but not in the U.S. DVD changed all that.)
So JMS designed the show to work in a week to week schedule, but to work even
better when viewed every day in reurns on in great gulps on home video. And especially repeat viewing, which is why there are things planted throughout the first couple of seasons that
can't be understood or even noticed except in light of what we learn in S4 and S5. The technique was dubbed "holographic story-telling" by somebody, and it really is very effective. It makes
B5 the first and only TV series I'm aware of that really
has to be watched at least twice before you get the full effect of it.
Regards,
Joe
