Babylon 5 built the future of entertainment, and now the future is letting it rot.
By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago
Ask any sci-fi fan to list the top space sci-fi shows of all time, and that list will almost always include shows like Star Trek, The Expanse, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and Babylon 5.
Four of those shows have endured and live on in endless rewatching on streaming. One of them has been thrown on a streaming trash heap and left to rot. The situation has gotten so bad that it’s on the verge of vanishing altogether.
The name of the show is Babylon 5. And it’s up to us to save it.
Why Babylon 5 Matters
Babylon 5 premiered with a self-contained pilot movie in 1993. It ran for five seasons, through to 1998. Produced by Warner Bros. Television, it aired primarily in syndication on the Prime Time Entertainment Network, before moving briefly to TNT for its final season.
Set in the 23rd century, Babylon 5 centers on a massive space station that serves as a diplomatic hub where humans and alien races try to maintain peace after a devastating interstellar war. The station’s commander, Jeffrey Sinclair, played by Michael O’Hare, and later John Sheridan, played by Bruce Boxleitner, navigate political tensions, alien conspiracies, and ancient cosmic forces that threaten the galaxy.
It had politics, war, love, religion, and prophecy all woven into a single plan that stretched across five years. It did it through deeply serialized storytelling, an approach almost unheard of in 1990s TV. It told one long, connected story at a time when most TV shows hit the reset button every week. Those things and more made Babylon 5 one of the most groundbreaking television shows of its era.
Babylon 5 wasn’t just a narrative trailblazer; it was ahead of its time, technically too. It was the first television show to use fully digital CGI effects, rather than relying on expensive model work. This allowed Creator John Michael Straczynski to depict large-scale space battles on a TV budget.
More than just a sci-fi series, Babylon 5 was designed as a five-part television novel, complete, ambitious, and revolutionary for its era. Now it’s being treated like trash.
The Problem With Watching Babylon 5 Now
First, the good news here is that the five seasons of the original show are mostly watchable and available to stream. You may have to pay extra to do it, but streaming is possible. Unfortunately, you’ll be forced to watch them in ultra bad, low resolution, with zero attempt to update them or remaster any of the effects.
The series isn’t all there is to B5. After the show ended its run, there were numerous TV movies. And they’re almost all totally unwatchable.
The TV movies (Thirdspace, In the Beginning, A Call to Arms) are available on streaming but often have broken audio, strange color grading, and warped images. It’s so bad that they cannot really be watched.
Crusade, the short-lived sequel series, isn’t in much better shape. Try streaming it, and you’ll discover a show that sounds like it’s been recorded underwater. Audio often doesn’t sync up with lip movements, and the picture quality is like trying to stream on a dial-up modem.
These issues aren’t new; they’ve been reported for years, but no one at the studio seems to care to fix them. Viewers end up fiddling with settings or switching apps just to try and make them barely watchable. It doesn’t work. They give up.
A show that once led the future of television now looks and sounds like it’s been stuck in a blender. It’s been this way for years.
How Babylon 5 Became A Streaming Mess
The problem starts with how it was made. Back in the 1990s, Babylon 5 filmed its actors on real film, which could look great in HD. But all the effects, the starships, space battles, station shots, were created and edited on old, standard-definition video. That means the final versions of those scenes only exist in low quality.
When studios later tried to clean it up, they could rescan the live-action film, but the effects could only be upscaled, not truly remade. That’s why parts of the show look sharp while others look like blurry video game cutscenes.
Aspect ratios made things worse. Babylon 5 was shot to fit old square TVs (4:3), but later releases tried to stretch it into widescreen (16:9) to look “modern.” That ruined many shots. Characters were cropped, effects got misaligned, and it just looked wrong.
A 2021 remaster finally restored it to the correct 4:3 format, but depending on where you stream, you might still get the bad version. Some platforms use outdated files, and others mess up the encoding entirely.
Why Babylon 5 Is Being Left To Rot
Why doesn’t Warner Bros. fix it all properly? Because it’s expensive, and frankly, they don’t care.
The original 3D models and effects files were made using 1990s software on old computers. Rebuilding them for HD would mean starting from scratch, millions of dollars of work for a show that, in the studio’s eyes, might not make that money back.
For now, they’ve done the laziest, cheapest option: polish what they can, randomly upscale the rest, and leave the rest to fans’ patience.
The show’s treatment is a shame because Babylon 5 was built on ambition. It proved that a sci-fi series could tell a deep, planned-out story like a novel. It inspired everything from Battlestar Galactica to Game of Thrones to The Expanse. It showed that TV could be smart, serialized, and emotional.
And yet, when someone tries to watch it for the first time today, they see a broken picture and drifting dialogue. It looks like a show no one cared about, when the truth is, it’s one of the most important sci-fi stories ever told.
The Damage Being Done By Babylon 5’s Mistreatment
The recent Blu-ray release proves it doesn’t have to be this way. The discs use clean film scans, fix the sound, and present the show as it was meant to be seen.
It’s not perfect, but it’s miles better than the mess that most streaming services offer. The difference is night and day. You can finally see the detail in the sets, the emotion in the actors’ faces, and the sense of scale that made the station itself feel alive.
Unfortunately, Blu-Ray is an all but dead format. Fewer than 50% of the population still has access to a Blu-Ray player, and that number’s declining rapidly.
Babylon 5 deserves that level of care everywhere. Every episode, every movie, every spin-off should be treated as part of TV history, not as old junk dumped on streaming in order scam people into paying rental fees for something so broken they can’t enjoy it.
Without proper preservation, future generations won’t understand why Babylon 5 mattered. They’ll see a fuzzy, badly-sounding relic and move on. That’s the real tragedy. This was the show that redefined science fiction on television: visionary, ambitious, ahead of its time.
Babylon 5 built the future of entertainment, and now the future is letting it rot.
Fans Could Save Babylon 5, But Hollywood Won’t Let Them
Fans could fix it themselves by simply uploading good copies lifted from the Blu-Rays to YouTube. Yet, while Warner Brothers refuses to spend any money on making the show watchable, they’re more than happy to spend money on lawyers to police their Babylon 5 copyright.
Their enforcement is extremely strict, and they go out of their way to shut down any attempt by fans to upload or promote anything watchable from the show.
In fact, there’s a decent chance the video we made on this topic will itself end up being demonitized; that’s often what happens when our YouTube channel tries to boost Babylon 5. But that won’t stop us from trying. Babylon 5 is worth the risk.
It’s time for someone at Warner Bros. to care as much as we all do. Babylon 5 showed us that stories could last forever. The least we can do is make sure the show itself does too.
If you agree, help me spread the word. Because what is built endures, and what is loved endures. And Babylon 5…. Babylon 5 should endure.
