B5 Scripts makes the /.

[Gkar4ever]

Well, I guess it was bound to happen. The scripts (at least a review of them) has been posted on Slashdot. This can only be good news, as Slashdot is read by quite a few people, and should, hopefully, help generate a bit more interest in the scripts. Who knows? maybe enough interest will be generated to make people clamour for some more material! (Movie, anyone?)

http://books.slashdot.org/books/05/1...?tid=214&tid=6

[Joe Nazzaro]

It was interesting to read some of the comments posted after the review, discounting the usual 'Babylon 5 sucks! (Insert favorite show here) rules!' type of remarks that usually dominate most discussions of this type.

The one I found particularly interesting was the person who suggested that JMS's writing an entire season wasn't all that unusual, and that many British shows were often written by a single creator, such as David Renwick (on One Foot in the Grave) or Grant Naylor on Red Dwarf. This ignores the fact that many UK shows of that type only ran six episodes per season, and in the case of Rob Grant & Doug Naylor, that's actually two writers working together on six episodes. Even Blake's 7, in which the first season of 13 episodes was credited to Terry Nation, was heavily rewritten by script editor Chris Boucher. Towards the end of the season, as the script crunch got really bad, Nation's scripts were more like multi-page outlines than scripts. So the fact that JMS actually wrote 22 episodes in a season is more like a British writer doing four seasons, i.e. four years but within the space of eight or nine months. I'm not sure that feat will ever be duplicated.