It’s reboot time again, and it looks like the latest TV show to be brought back from the archives for a new lease of life is space opera Babylon 5. Original series creator J. Michael Straczynski and Warner Bros. are joining forced to bring the much loved, and highly praised 90s sci-fi staple to The CW in a reboot that has been described as being “from the ground up.” While many such reboots are announced and then sit in limbo before we find out anything more about them, it looks like this time a plan is already in place for exactly where the new iteration of the show will be heading.
The revived series will be written again by J. Michael Straczynski, with the story seemingly going right back to the beginning. Lead character John Sheridan, who was played by Bruce Boxleitner in the 90s series, is an Earthforce officer, with an unknown past, who is sent to the five-mile long space station of Babylon 5, a place that acts as a sanctuary for everyone from smugglers to alien diplomats at a time when there is always a threat of war. Soon after his arrival, Sheridan is thrown into a fight for survival of not only himself and the Babylon 5 crew, but the whole human race thanks to an accidentally triggered war with a futuristic civilization.
Straczynski is no stranger to success outside of Babylon 5, having had a hand in the Netflix series Sense8, the Showtime series Jeremiah, written the script for the Angelina Jolie movie Changeling, and also written on Underworld: Awakening, Thor, World War Z and Ninja Assassin to name a few. However it is the world of Babylon 5 that will stand has his crowning achievement so it is no wonder that he wants to revisit that old friend.
The original series of Babylon 5 launched with a pilot in 1993. When the pilot proved to be a success, the series got underway proper in 1994, bringing to screens a series that would span five seasons with each season depicting a year of time in the show. Its futuristic timeline ran from 2257 to 2262, and was the first series to feature the five-year arc concept, which saw the series allowed to play out from its start through to the end of the story it had to tell. Joining Bruce Boxleitner in the series were Michael O’Hare, Claudia Christian, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan, Richard Biggs, Andrea Thompson, Bill Mumy, Jason Carter, Tracy Scoggins, Stephen Furst, Patricia Tallman, Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Jeff Conaway and Robert Rusler.
By the time Babylon 5 came to an end, Straczynski had picked up over a dozen awards, and after the show went off air, he continued to delve into the world he had created with numerous movies, novels, a DC comic book series, and the series Crusade which aired on TNT. Bringing the show back to The CW for a new generation will be both a huge nostalgia trip for fans of the 90s series that started it all and a way to ensure the legacy of the show continues to grow in future. This news originated at Deadline.
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