[jefc1111]

The disclaimer is just based on my own opinion, so inevitably there will be people to whom it does not apply. Some of the acting in season 1 is great, I would just say there are some spots where it kinda briefly falls through the floor. It may be just because I have seen it several times so am spotting things that I wouldn't have first time round.

With season 4, I believe what happened is that towards the start of production JMS was told there would be no S5 after all, so he put all of S4 and S5 into S4 ... but then there was an S5 after all!

[WorldMaker]

Yeah, Season 4 is acknowledged for compressing a lot of the story that would have been Season 5 in the original plan. The series finale ("Sleeping in Light") was even shot as a part of Season 4 and delayed once Season 5 was picked up to keep it the series finale. The epilogue it tells spins out enough past the show that it mostly isn't that noticeable, but the big tell is a brief appearance of Ivanova rather than Lochley, which doesn't really break the episode because of the out-of-order storytelling of the whole episode and the glimpses of the crew are "timeless" flashbacks, but it is interesting.

[pwg]

IIRC, this was because there was significant uncertainty about whether the network exec's would cancel the show after season 4, so JMS reworked things so that 4 wouldn't end on an open-ended cliffhanger if that were to have happened.

In the end, season 5 was given the go-ahead, and so now season 4 seems rushed needlessly.

[WorldMaker]

The uncertainty is actually an interesting behind-the-scenes story that the mini-TV Channel hoping to grow up into a full TV Channel that B5 was distributed under was PTEN [0] and leading up to and during Season 4 of Babylon 5 PTEN split in a weird divorce to form the WB TV Network and the UPN Network. (It got its wish, it grew up into not one but two competing TV networks.) Season 5 was a last minute pick up/rescue by one of WB's cable networks, TNT. (TNT wanted more than just one season which led to the mess that was Crusade. As a Crusade fan, TNT was both the best and the worst of what could happen to B5.)

(History repeating itself, and Babylon 5 being cursed to ironic timing, the WB Network and UPN eventually remerged to become The CW. A Babylon 5 reboot project development was started at The CW this decade, just before WB Discovery decided to get out of the broadcast TV business and start a fresh divorce at The CW somewhat resembling the PTEN divorce.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Time_Entertainment_Netwo...

[sidpatil]

> smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward

This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.