CW rebooting Babylon 5

The CW is developing a “from-the-ground-up reboot” of the Emmy award-winning 1990s series Babylon 5.

The reboot is written by original series creator J Michael Straczynski and revolves around John Sheridan (played by Bruce Boxleitner in the original series), an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, who is assigned to Babylon 5, a five-mile-long space station in neutral space. The station is a port of call for travellers, smugglers, corporate explorers and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war.

Sheridan’s arrival on B5 triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilisation a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race.

Created by Straczynski, the original Babylon 5 debuted in 1993 with the pilot film The Gathering. A future-history story covering the years 2257-2262, with each year corresponding to one season, Babylon 5 was the first series to introduce viewers to the concept of a five-year arc, with a defined beginning, middle and end.

The series launched in 1994 and ran for five seasons and 110 additional episodes. The cast included Bruce Boxleitner, Michael O’Hare, Claudia Christian, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Bill Mumy, Stephen Furst, Andrea Thompson, Jason Carter, Tracy Scoggins, Patricia Tallman and Jeff Conaway.

Speaking of arcs, it seems Commander Jeffrey Sinclair’s arc (played by Michael O’Hare) may be ignored as in the original series the story started with him. Babylon 5 fans will recall his arc involved his own special destiny as he became Valen, a Minbari not born of Minbari. O’Hare left the series due to illness. It will be interesting to see if this storyline is written into this reboot.

Straczynski had this to say about the reboot on Twitter:

To answer all the questions, yes, it’s true, Babylon 5 is in active development as a series for the CW. We have some serious fans over at the network, and they’re eager to see this show happen. I’m hip deep into writing the pilot now, and will be running the series upon pickup.

— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) September 27, 2021

To answer all the questions, yes, it’s true, Babylon 5 is in active development as a series for the CW. We have some serious fans over at the network, and they’re eager to see this show happen. I’m hip deep into writing the pilot now, and will be running the series upon pickup.

The network understands the uniqueness of Babylon 5 and is giving me a great deal of latitude with the storytelling. As noted in the announcement, this is a reboot from the ground up rather than a continuation, for several reasons. Heraclitus wrote “You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.” In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question: if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?

How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day? Fans regularly point out how prescient the show was and is of our current world; it would be fun to take a shot at looking further down the road. So we will not be retelling the same story in the same way because of what Heraclitus said about the river. There would be no fun and no surprises. Better to go the way of Westworld or Battlestar Galactica where you take the original elements that are evergreens and put them in a blender with a ton of new, challenging ideas, to create something fresh yet familiar. To those asking why not just do a continuation, for a network series like this, it can’t be done because over half our cast are still stubbornly on the other side of the Rim.

How do you telling continuing story of our original Londo without the original Vir? Or G’Kar? How do you tell Sheridan’s story without Delenn? Or the story of B5 without Franklin? Garibaldi? Zack?

J Michael Straczynski won over a dozen awards for his work on the series, including two Hugo Awards, the Space Frontier Foundation Award, the Saturn Award and the Ray Bradbury Award. Following the original series, Straczynski continued to tell stories in the Babylon 5 universe, with seven subsequent feature-length films and the TNT spin off series Crusade.

Crusade was based five years after the events of Babylon 5 and the film, A Call to Arms. It was meant to have a 5-year story arc just like B5 but it was cancelled after only one season due to the fact that TNT and Straczynski didn’t share the same vision of what the series should be.  

Straczynski’s most recent work includes creating, writing and show-running the Netflix series Sense8 with the Wachowskis.

I’m interested to see what J Michael Straczynski has in store for us. Are you looking forward to the Babylon 5 reboot?