Off the Cuff: Babylon 5, how we miss you…
Jan 09Comics, Cartoons, and all things related
By Eric Barrett
It seems J. Michael Straczynski is in the news a lot recently. He certainly seems upset about the direction of Spider-Man 
and One More Day. And frankly I can’t blame him. I’m not particularly happy about it either! But I don’t write Spider-Man, and I don’t currently have an editorial gig at Marvel.
So in a fit of JMS nostalgia I bought the first three season of Babylon 5.
I know nostalgia is supposed to make you remember things more fondly than reality warrants. But in this case, nostalgia wasn’t even close – Babylon 5 is SO much better than I remember.
It’s funnier, has better acting, and the stories are more interesting than I remember. I’m even impressed by the level of CG for a mid-90’s TV show. They look better than some shows currently running!
But there was one area that really stood out – they are packed with hope and optimism. Something that is seriously lacking in today’s cynical TV programming. Each episode ends with the good guys finding a way out of an impossible situation. And they almost always end on a joke. How refreshing is that?
What is the last TV show that you watched that you felt better after viewing it, then before?
Star Trek was excellent at that (until the end of TNG). I always found StarGate: SG1 to be encouraging, at least until Richard Dean Anderson left. And that about sums up my list. TV, movies, and comic books, in my opinion are too obsessed with the “reality” of misery. It seems that so much of our “entertainment” is built around the idea that it’s fun to watch people suffer and be miserable, because that’s “real life.”
I for one, am glad to see a change of pace!
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