And, it’s a fun series: there’s plenty of humor and excitement, new aliens to meet and worlds to explore. Babylon 5 is grounded, grim, hopeful, and optimistic all at the same time.

Michael Straczynski has an excellent sense of how the world really works, and in a number of ways, the show feels like a counterpoint to the most optimistic and utopian world that Gene Roddenberry introduced with Star Trek. This rewatch showed me that the series has really held up over the years since it first began airing in 1993: J. I've long been a fan of the series since I first saw it while in high school, and ended up writing an essay about its continued relevance for Uncanny Magazine. This week, I've been watching Star Trek: Lower Decks, and it ties in with a line of thought that I've had recently: what would a modern-day, episodic space opera series look like? Or, what would Star Trek look like if it was founded today?Įarlier this year, I tore through the entirety of Babylon 5 after I wrote about how it had gotten a bit of a visual upgrade for HBO Max. I've got a couple of longer pieces that I'm working on for other sites as well, so the next couple of weeks might be a bit quiet on this front.

This week has been busy: deadlines on the book are looming (I've seen marketing copy for it, am expecting edits to hit my inbox shortly), and work on the podcast is progressing. But what would a great, episodic space opera series look like today? Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash Serialization has brought plenty of excellent shows to television. What does the next great space opera series look like?

Space opera shows