[jerf]

Your post sums up why I'm interested in going back and seeing it again. As I said, I've only sampled a couple of episodes, and even in my brief dalliance there I can see what you're talking about in my second paragraph.

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.

It seems to me that it is a general problem that a multi-writer show like Star Trek can only carry along certain types of nuance. I suspect there's a lot of writers that, given six or seven episodes to play with, could have done fantastic things with Worf or Troi... but that's not how it works. They also have problems with change... especially in the movies (which I do more clearly remember), they had a real problem with Data. By the time of the movies he'd made a lot of progress and grown a lot as a character, but in a couple of the movies (particularly Insurrection) it's like he's regressed almost all the way back to the first episode of TNG. The "Pinocchio" aspect of the story carried along, but the already-existing nuance had disappeared.

Multi-writer stories are hard.

[jonnathanson]

There are benefits and drawbacks to multi-writer teams. I say this as someone who spent the first half of his career in TV development and production. (In fact, I briefly interned on a Trek series back in college.)

One of the benefits is, for lack of a better word, scalability. A single writer would take forever to write 100+ cogent, consistently great, full-length episodes of a TV show. Since TV series' fates are always in flux, you can't afford a primetime series with only one writer, who becomes a crushing bottleneck if any changes in volume need to be made. Writing a great TV episode is hard, hard work and takes time. Now imagine writing 12, or even 22 of them on an insane production deadline!

On the other hand, some shows and formats work really well with a single writer/auteur. True Detective is famous for having been entirely written and entirely directed by just one writer and one director. Now, True Detective was a miniseries of only 8 episodes, and at that scale, a single writer is more realistic. I doubt you could have produced a primetime Star Trek series with only one writer and one director.

An interesting hybrid approach is what I'd call a staff structure with a clear "visionary" at the helm. This is sort of like what we saw on Battlestar Galactica: a show with a full writing staff, but one or two writers who basically dominated the process and authored the bulk of the series. MASH is another good example; Larry Gelbart clearly exercised strong, authorial control over the show, even though he didn't write every episode.

This latter approach tends to work the best, in my experience as a fan and as a former TV person. But it can have its difficulties and drawbacks, all the same. Sometimes there are limits to the imagination of even the most creative individuals. If you're relying too much on a strong auteur type, and he or she gets writer's block, or gets sick, or becomes extremely difficult, you're SOL.

[mavhc]

Babylon 5, 1 guy wrote most of it, and it was much better planned than BSG

[jonnathanson]

Babylon 5 is what I'd call an acquired taste. :) So many people swear by it, and for the life of me, I just couldn't make it past the first two episodes. It was a slog. I respect the creator of the show immensely; he is a fantastic writer, and also the author of one of the best how-to books on screenwriting I've ever read. And by all accounts, I should love the show. But I just...can't. I don't know why. Does the pace pick up a bit after the first few eps?

[ghaff]

B5: 1 - Took some seriously rose-tinted glasses in terms of many of the production values and the acting (especially earlier on); and 2 - Was one of those shows that required a significant commitment on the part of viewers to the "mythology" (including early-on exposition) 3 - Toward the end suffered from "will it be canceled or won't it?" whiplash.

For these reasons, I'm not sure B5 really paid off on its promise and, at best, took a considerable willingness to overlook the weaknesses.

[jonnathanson]

The production values have not aged well at all. And it's kind of jarring to see them in contrast, to say, the production values on the early seasons of DS9, a contemporaneous series. The latter probably had a much bigger production budget, and I guess it shows. But I'll forgive a show its low-budget feel if it makes up for that in other ways. Try as I might, I just couldn't summon the attention span to last past the first few episodes. They were about as exciting as reading a particularly dry textbook on political economy.

I'll grant you that every sci-fi show seems to have its bad episodes, and many of them occur early on. DS9 was not immune to that effect.

At some point I pledge to give B5 a more serious attempt. But I feel I should do that sooner, rather than later, because the show's looks are not aging gracefully.

[llllllllllll]

I urge you to give it another shot too. After I few episodes I barely stuck with it, but by the end of the 3rd season I already preferred it to TNG/DS9 and just about any other sci-fi show. I think some of the characters are intentionally painted as one-dimensional early on, so that they can grow later (Londo and G'kar especially). There are many campy and lame parts too, but if you can get in the mindset of "enjoy the good, make fun of the bad" then it's highly enjoyable. I take the same mindset with most sci-fi.

The last 1.5 seasons of B5 were a letdown though. They had problems throughout with actors leaving abruptly, imminent cancellation, etc. that threw the plot arch off track a little. It could have been a lot better. The six or seven movies that were produced after the show's run... couldn't get through more than a few minutes of those.

[teh_klev]

I couldn't get on well with early episodes of B5 season 1 when it first came out and gave up. Then a few years later I gave it another shot and bought the DVD box set and have watched it three times over.

It is worth the initial slog to catch the cross season story arc about the First Ones, the Shadows and the time travel stuff.

I think what puts folks off with B5 is that some of the sets and makeup are a a wee bit iffy, but the story itself is pretty damn good once you get past that.

I do recommend persevering because there is a very good deep story being told in B5.

[tracker1]

My single biggest issue with B5 (which I truly love) is the acting in the first season is very soap-opera like... I mean it's just pretty bad all around. It gets better though.

[CurtMonash]

Very much. Only the first season, and especially the first half, was in "crisis of the week" format.

Seasons 2-4 comprise an outstanding story arc. Londo Mollari, the alien with the upward-pointing hair, goes from Falstaff to Macbeth to redemption, and that's far from the main story.

And the central character -- head of the station -- was changed after Season 1, to a figure who was more heroic and more funny at once.

[dragonwriter]

> Babylon 5, 1 guy wrote most of it

I thought that while JMS oversaw all of B5 and wrote the broad story arc, he did not write most of the episodes.

[qohen]

No, he really wrote most of the episodes [1]:

Creator and showrunner J. Michael Straczynski wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of Babylon 5, including all 44 episodes in the third and fourth seasons;[63] according to Straczynski, a feat never before accomplished in American television.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Writing