Battlestar:Galactica is now reimagined (radically I say) outside the control and influence of its creator Glen A.Larson.
Thank Heaven. Glen A. Larceny didn't so much "create"
BG as cobble it together from bits and pieces of other people's superior work. (Which has pretty much always been his standard operating procedure.)
Given that the original Babylon 5 was alot more successful than the original Battlestar:Galactica...
B5 wasn't 1/10th as successful as the first season of
BG, so your permise isn't a "given", it is incorrect. JMS would have killed for the kind of ratings that show got. The problem is it cost a fortune to produce. Larson pulled the then-typical space show shell-game: Submit a grossly understated budget "estimate" to the studio, run up huge deficits producing the first season, assume that rather than cut its losses the studio will finance subsequent seasons in order to hit the magic number 5 and have enough to sell into syndication and eventually make a profit. ABC called his bluff. They wre ready to pull the show, which is why the Earth-based "reimagined" disaster called
Galactica 1980 was created. This show was cheaper than
BG but still on the pricey side since it used more FX than the typical contemporary drama, and it wasn't drawing nearly the audience of the original series, so it was axed. (But it was still probably seen by 2 or 3 times as many people in the U.S. at the time it was cancelled as
B5 was at its ratings peak on PTEN.)
...its not hard to see the series being continued or revived in some way years down the road without the input of JMS.
WB owns the property, so of course they
could do it. They could have done season 6 of
B5, which TNT expressed an interest in, they could have taken
Crusade away from JMS and brought in a new producer who would have been more acommodating to TNT (since at that point nobody knew that TNT was determined to kill the show regardless of what happened.) Instead when JMS refused to accept TNT's interference and halted production on the show himself, the studio stood by him and at the loss of millions of dollars in fees it was unable to collect from TNT.
B5 has never been the kind of franchise property that a
Star Trek turned into the minute it went into syndication. Even with the profits from that, it was only the unexpected success of the first
Star Wars film that got Paramount (and all the other studios) to start looking through their archives for any space-based movies or series that they might have the rights to. That's where the idea of building the new network they were then considering around a revived
Trek series came from, and when the network foundered the series was converted to
ST:TMP.
Similarly Universal didn't start to think about
BG because it was some kind of on-going profit center. (Was it even in reruns anywhere in the U.S.?) They did so first because Bryan Singer, then "the" hot director in Hollywood, got to talking to another childhood fan of the show and decided to do an update. When that project fell apart, Universal promptly lost interest. It was only after The Sci-Fi Channel (U.S.), which had done well with reruns of
B5, failed to make a series deal with Warner Bros. for
Legend of the Rangers that they thought about
BG. They thought a space-based, arc-driven military adventure show would appeal to the right demographic, as shown by the
B5 ratings. But they wanted to own a part of the property, and Warner Bros. doesn't do that kind of deal, as a rule. Then somebody remembered that Universal, which owns Sci-fi, also owned
BG, and that the Bryan Singer thing has produced a lot of interest, buzz and free publicity in fans cirlcles. So they brought in a
DS9 alumnus (how appropriate) to turn the basic concept of
BG into Sci-Fi's own version of a
B5 series. All of which just about buries the needle on the old irony meter, but there you have it.
WB knows that at this point
B5 is JMS and JMS is
B5. There is simply no other way to approach it, certainly not one that the fans will accept. Nor is it the kind of virtual ATM for WB as Paramount was for
Trek (and there even Paramount proved you could go to the well one time too many. The last two series and the last two films have mostly sucked and the ratings and box office reflected the fact.)
I don't think WB is going to have any compelling reason to continue
B5 beyond JMS's active participation. Maybe 30 or 40 years from now some witer producer who grew up watching
B5 will approach the studio about doing a reboot (which by that time they may be able to shoot largerly in orbit, with location shooting on Mars
) and convince them that s/he knows how to pull it off. But I can't see
them deciding to bring it back and then seeking out a show-runner to make it for them.
Unless science fiction goes through one of its periodic down cycles and the whole genre almost vanishes from movies and TV (except for kiddie stuff) and it then revived by the mid-century equivalent to
Star Wars. Then WB might asked the same question Paramount did ("Say? Don't
we have one of those space ship things?") and remember
B5
But I honestly can't think of a more pointless excercise than trying to imagine what studio execs who haven't been born yet might do with this show in a time that many of probably won't live to see. So I'll leave that to others.
Regards,
Joe
