On the Gist TV website (http://www.gist.com/tv/scifi). If you go to the site, you'll be treated with some audio clips of the interview and some pictures, of course.
TV's smartest sci-fi show gets a fifth-season reprieve and two new TV-movies, starting with In the Beginning (TNT, Sunday, Jan. 4, 8 to 10 p.m. ET) By Frank Lovece
On a soundstage, everyone can hear you scream. That's one reason it was so quiet last spring in a former hot-tub warehouse in Sun Valley, CA, where Babylon 5 is filmed, and where production seemed about to end after four critically well-received seasons in syndication.
"They never tell you," declares B5 star Bruce Boxleitner, a TV-series veteran who's already been through a hit (Scarecrow and Mrs. King) and a flop (Bring 'Em Back Alive). "You're never 'canceled', you're just not picked up." Every day, as hungry as everyone else on the set to hear a definitive word, "I would look to [series creator] Joe Straczynski, who would walk by as solemn as the angel of death. And I," Boxleitner says chuckling, "all apple-cheeked, would go, 'Hey! Joe! Hear anything? Didja hear anything?' He'd just look at me and, like, through me, and then just walk away. And I'd go, 'Ohhhhh,'" the actor adds with a deflating sound.
Such was the situation for the anti-Star Trek known as Babylon 5, a 23rd-century series about a space station that's part U.N., part Casablanca. Boxleitner, 47, plays station commander Captain John Sheridan, who succeeded Captain Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) after the first season. Amid war and uneasy peace, Sheridan has found himself swimming among such political sharks as Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), the ambassador from, and eventually emperor of, the planet Centauri; G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas), the reptilian Narn ambassador and covert arms dealer; and Delenn (Mira Furlan), the Minbari ambassador, a puppet-master of the universe with whom Sheridan falls in love, and eventually marries.
"As Mira and Bruce, we are those two characters," says Boxleitner with a trace of astonishment. Breakout star Furlan, a classically trained European theater and film actress (When Father Was Away on Business) who's often called the Croatian Meryl Streep, "is definitely from another world than me. I'm this kid she thinks came out of Tom Sawyer, and she's from this Eastern European-bazaar place that is so foreign to us. One time we talked about it, and we said there're these great things we love about each other. But she said I represent America to her, and that she is attracted to it, but she ultimately fears it." Not that she's a waif or a naof. "We're both very headstrong about what we believe," says Boxleitner. "I mean, during the Bosnian conflict, she and I were at each other all the time!"
Babylon 5, unlike the similar but more action-oriented Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has emerged as a sort of thinking-alien's series: a single, novelistic story of empire and frontiers. And while you don't really need to know about the political intrigues of the Ottoman Empire or the forces leading up to World War I, those are just the kinds of things that help you better appreciate the series' meticulous, inexorable, allegorical sense of historical cycles repeating themselves.
Yet Warner Bros., the studio that produces it, seemed to break from historical cycles when it finally axed the show: Babylon 5 had just won sci-fi's prestigious Hugo Award and had just seen its ratings jump almost 13 percent from the third to fourth seasons. Straczynski, who's written virtually every B5 script himself, was stranded four-fifths of the way into his "novel," and so hurriedly shot a final-chapter episode. Then TNT, which had acquired the rerun rights, contracted for two B5 telefilms to help draw attention; the prequel In the Beginning (Sunday, Jan. 4, 8 to 10 p.m. ET), and Thirdspace, scheduled for spring;plus a reedited, re-scored new edition of the 1993 pilot, The Gathering (Sunday, Jan. 4, 10 p.m. to midnight ET).
One of the prequel-movie performers turned out to be Michael O'Hare, whom Boxleitner replaced shortly into the show's run. Partisan fans filled chat rooms and bombarded Boxleitner with snail-mail. "People really got hateful," Boxleitner marvels, "like I was personally putting Michael O'Hare out of work. And I thought, 'How could I have possibly have done that?' I mean, I was offered a job and I took it and I walked in and was made to feel very comfortable immediately. I was barely aware of the man myself; I didn't watch the show! By the time we did "War Without End" [the third-season closer, in which Sinclair's momentous eventual fate is revealed], it was like he was this ten-foot-tall shining knight, the way fans had built him up."
Fortunately, when the two finally met during that episode's production, they jested rather than jousted. "I was just wrapping for the day, heading for the makeup trailer to take the makeup off. In comes this guy with a ball cap on, and he walks right into my face and I walk right up into him, and there was no one else around, and he says, 'Bruce. Michael O'Hare.' And I go, 'Michael! How are ya?' And we talked for a few minutes, and any kind of awkwardness between us went away. When we worked together there was no problem; Michael and I got along fantastically. But among the fans it was like this war, Sheridan vs. Sinclair... and I think, 'My God. These people need a life."
The series, at least, got one: Shortly after commissioning the telefilms, TNT ordered up the long-planned fifth and final season (beginning Wednesday, Jan. 21, 10 to 11 p.m. ET). Straczynski shelved the previously filmed finale for later. Yet even with this last-second reprieve from the governor, "There was no party, there was no nothing," remembers Boxleitner. "Everybody was quite happy, but it was at a point where we were all so exhausted. We were somewhere toward the end of production of In the Beginning [which was shot after Thirdspace, though it runs first] when we found out we were gonna be picked up." When the good news arrived on that set, "There was hardly anybody there. Everybody went, 'Hooray!' but... there was nobody there that should've been there. There were a lot of extras and stuff." But then two days before production re-started, Boxleitner and his wife, actress Melissa Gilbert, threw a party at their home. "And I think that's when everybody really just let it loose and said 'Hey!' and jumped for joy."
Fans, of course, can do so all this month, what with two Babylon 5 telefilms, a new fifth season, and reruns of the first four (running weekdays, 7 to 8 p.m. ET, starting Monday, Jan. 5). And even regular ol' viewers can appreciate the series as well-thought-out political soap opera. Like any show, B5 can be stilted as often as stately; yet even its lesser scripts are more thoughtful than most on TV. And whether the old version or the new, one thing you can say about Babylon 5: It never just babbles on.
Thanks DianeKDe and Bev!
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