Straczynski plans a series to its last episode before the first is shot, and Babylon 5 proves the method works: its grudges and alliances pay off over years. His dialogue is another matter, and it has been the complaint about him ever since.
Fi1m perspective
A character on Babylon 5 stands up, looks another in the eye and states, at length, what he intends to do and why. It sounds like a speech because it is one. Then, a season or two later, the thing he said comes due, and the speech turns out to have been a promise. That is how Straczynski writes. He decides where everyone is going before a frame is shot, and the early stiffness is the sound of track being laid.
He came up through animation and network drama in the 1980s, on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Real Ghostbusters and Murder, She Wrote, and nothing there hints at the scale of what followed. Babylon 5 (1994) was conceived as a single five-year story. He wrote 92 of its 110 episodes, directed and produced, with Doug Netter producing alongside him across the run. "It covers five years of storytime and with luck, we will run five years," he told the Los Angeles Times as it began. "Then that’s the end of the story." Afterwards came Jeremiah (2002), a run of feature scripts including Changeling (2008) and the story for Thor (2011), comics on The Amazing Spider-Man, and Sense8 (2015) with Lana and Lilly Wachowski.
What he does well, and few in television did before him, is keep faith with a plan. Grudges on Babylon 5 are not forgotten between episodes; alliances shift and stay shifted; a decision made in one year still costs something in the next. The station holds together as a place because he holds it together as a story. Somewhere in the middle seasons a quarrel we had first heard announced in one of those stiff early scenes finally came to a head, and we found we cared about it far more than the scene that planted it deserved. The plan had done the work the writing could not.
Because the writing is the trouble, and it is the same trouble every time. He writes the point of a scene and then has someone say it aloud. His people are moral, articulate and slightly unreal, and the complaint has followed him from the station to the cinema; Changeling drew it as surely as any episode of the series. Actors who can make a statement of purpose sound like conversation save him. Actors who cannot are left waiting for their next big speech, and on Babylon 5 we could sometimes feel them waiting.
He has been back to the station since, with an animated film in 2023 and a reboot announced, so the end of the story was not quite the end. Anyone starting the series should hold out for the second season and forgive the first for talking so much. The talking is how he tells you where he is going, and he does get there.
Biography
J. Michael Straczynski is an American screenwriter, producer and director. He created the science fiction series Babylon 5 (1993–1998), on which he served as writer, producer and director, writing 92 of its 110 episodes and devising its planned multi-year story arc.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1954, Straczynski attended Southwestern College and San Diego State University. He has created other series including Jeremiah (2002–2004) and Sense8 (2015–2018), and written screenplays for films such as Changeling (2008) and Thor (2011). He has also written extensively for Marvel and DC Comics.
