SNL is nightmare material for this. There are some good bits in seasons 2-5, but seasons 6-11 are apparently awful. I’ve been attempting to watch the entire show, and I’m currently stuck halfway through season 6.
Are you not supposed to treat it like the NFL and just watch the highlight reels?
Nothing against the comedians on SNL but who’s line is it anyway has a much higher hit rate.
And that’s how all my friends got introduced to Babylon 5.
Rambling old person storytime, consider yourself warned:
My wife is from Hungary, and grew up while it was still communist so there’s many TV shows she’s never seen.
When we were first together I introduced her to Star Trek, which she’d never heard of, and we got into the routine of watching one or two episodes of TNG every week.
Fast-forward 9 years and we’d watched every Trek we wanted to, and were at a loose end on how to continue. My first thought was Babylon 5, but after Trek that first season appeared rough as anything, and it became more of a time-filler than actual enjoyment.
A little while ago we hit the third season, and my goodness, it’s still rough, but the whole thing came together into something properly enjoyable!
Me and my wife just hit our 10 year anniversary, and we’re both happily Trekkies together :-)
I’ve probably watched all of B5 about 10 times or more. Going through another cycle right now. Just watched the first episode of season 2 today, having finished season 1 yesterday, so this is very fresh. I think if I was going to introduce a friend to it, I’d say to skip season 1 entirely.
There’s a lot of stuff that feels like filler in season 1, even though I think quite a few of those episodes are actually trying to introduce lore in a sneaky way. Like, the Soul Hunter episode feels a lot like hot garbage, but it does put some important lore in your head. Similar with the episode that they find some ancient organic alien technology. Plus, I think everybody will instantly like Sheridan in a way that never happened with Sinclair.
I’ve grown to like season 1, but it took several watches before it stopped bothering me.
You just have to keep people tied up for the first 3 or 4 episodes. After that, they still won’t like the show, but will be invested into so many questions that the first 5 seasons will barely answer any amount of them.
Do you have a source where to watch it? Star Trek is often available on streaming but I’ve not found B5 yet (in Germany).
Hum… Not from .world, I can’t.
(Or seriously, in Brazil you can’t legally watch it either.)
We need a GoG for videos…
I ended up “buying” it off of Amazon digital. Before I had “purchased” it, it had been variously bouncing around free or ad-supported streaming services like Prime and Tubi. I stopped paying attention to that stuff after I “bought” it, though.
(All that stuff in quotes because you don’t really own it, but I’m at least using whatever I paid for.)
Thank you! I agree with the quotes. Something like DRM free GoG would be great for videos… but I also don’t know any service like that.
Babylon 5, season 1, is largely skippable.
2 and 3 are very good. 4 is the single best season of sci-fi television ever done.
Ideally, you watch it all in order.
In a pinch? 2-3-4-1-5.
Shows that fit this bill for me:
Schitt’s Creek Breaking Bad
Schitt’s Creek in particular, from S02 onwards they really locked in to what we ended up loving about the Roses, which was there in S01 but not so clear. As a result, S02 on is damn near perfect.
Parks and Rec is a big one. Season 1 is fine, but it’s no indication of what the show becomes.
When rewatching you’re essentially waiting for Brendanawicz to Brandenaquitz so the show can start getting good.
Same with Bojack Horseman.
I tell people to just skip season 1.
God so accurate on Schitt’s. A friend recommended that show and when me and the wife got past epi 1 we were like ‘wow this is hot garbage’. Yeah no, just setting up and showing you how horrible they were initially which I think makes their transformations that much more impactful later in the show.
Today people are obsessed with starting at season 1 and watching all the show. But, not all shows require that type of viewing. I grew up in the times of syndication and cable TV. You didn’t get to watch the show from the start. You just hop up on whatever was on the air that day. It’s perfectly fine to skip shitty seasons and episodes and only watching the bangers. There are very few series that actually have perfect records where every single episode is worth watching. I don’t understand people who endure 45 minutes of awful TV to experience 3 seconds of a dialogue that will somehow become relevant 4 seasons later.
Back then, the way to watch shows was to randomly catch an episode whenever they were aired, because most of them didn’t focus on a 36 episode incomprehensible knot of twists and surprises. They were self contained with a quiet background story arc that you could pick back at any time.
Yeah I’m in agreement here as well. As someone going in blind though you tend to pass judgement based on what you first see. In the age of streaming most people are going to start on S01E01. I definitely get your point.
You will read goodnoght punpun and it will be horrible and you will like it! /s
This is Battlestar Galactica for me. You must make people suffer through a few dry episodes to get to the Goood
Except that Battlestar Galactica started good and got steadily worse. Season 1 was the show’s peak, the first half of season 2 was okay, but after that it went down the toilet.
So say we all!
I loved it from episode 1! It lost me at the final season though
I loved it all
Who was your favourite character? I loved Starbuck and not just cos she was ridiculously attractive.
Enough mass in the Zeitgeist and I can work though a few slow episodes.
There is just too much content out there for me to wade through entire seasons though.
Honestly, DARK is fantastic from the very start, although Season 3 will fuck you up.
It is so good, I only regret watching it dubbed (though the English dubbing was OK) just because my spouse hates subtitles.
Still such a great show to lead you down so many rabbit holes that require some serious flow charting to keep track of it all. 10/10
I agree completely. My wife is dyslexic so we watched it dubbed the first time. On the second viewing (which we both enjoyed immensely because we were able to spot so much foreshadowing) we saw it in German with subtitles. I personally found this so much better.
here here! one of the best ones around, epic. If only they had let them finish 1899…
DARK was truly a perfect show. If it had been 5 minutes longer, it would have been 5 minutes wasted.
I really liked season 1. Season 2 as well I think (it’s been a while), but season 3 was just too confusing and I really didn’t care for it
It all came together in the end. I remember getting to S3E4 and my brain was fried so I just let it wash over me. Then E7 and E8 explained everything and were perhaps the best 2 hours of TV I’ve ever watched. A re-watch of the entire show made everything so much better too!
If you have to explain that much about your story, it just means that you weren’t able to show your story (or universe). So it’s either not a good story or you’re not a good writer. After all, we call them “TV shows”, not “TV explains”. And it had strong “it was just a dream/wasn’t real” vibes.
I would have to disagree. It wasn’t an explanation of the plot, it was philosophical discussion on the concept of free will. Everything was shown but one had to really observe: not a show to watch whilst looking at one’s phone!
Edit: I know I used the word ‘explain’ in my previous post; ‘clarify’ would have been a better word. Let’s be honest: I’m a massive fanboy of the show and have watched it 8 or more times. I just think it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.
I didnt end up liking the ending episode. Otherwise the show is a 10/10 banger.
spoiler
I thought it went against the theme of the show which is don’t fuck with time. But instead the ending rewarded the guy for fucking with time by saving his son.
Essentially the show ends with a “well if his son dies then he will cause a contradiction in time so his son must live” which essentially rewards the guy for fucking with time. At least that is my interpretation of the ending.
I thought it was just a time travel mystery, focused on how you won’t remember the original timeline since it didn’t happen.
season 3 looked like they didn’t know what to do next to put a new level of weird
Really? It was convoluted but it was all clearly planned from the beginning for there to be 3 seasons. It all went full circle in the end and all plot points got explained.
You don’t have to like it of course, but I disagree that they didn’t know what to do next.
I mean seriously, how have you not had chance to watch SG1 yet?
Watching it now with some skip list. Some stuff is hard to watch as modern viewer who expects tightly written 10 or 12 episodes.
It’s like xfiles where you only need to watch mythology episodes.
Yeah if you wanna miss all the super cool creature episodes which (some) are some of the best ones!
Used to watch Stargate as a kid on TV, but how I can’t imagine myself rewatching it, episodes are all copy paste of the same, gets more interesting with Valla and the Ori, but until there it’s not something I want to rewatch.
I miss episodic “monster of the week” series like it. Now most shows are serialized where you have to pay attention to the stretched out story arcs and deal with filler episodes.
It’s really episodic and I think that can hurt it when it’s binge watched.
I actually feel the same about a lot of those hour long network shows.
There are a couple that I would just watch one a week and slowly work my way through.
Everyone should watch sg1 at least 3 times in their lives!
Indeed.
Deep Space Nine fits the bill with this one.
Which is the one with an alien barkeeper in it that has cinnamon rolls for ears?
TNG, Voyager as well
TNG season one is rough to be honest.
I tried rewatching it recently and…yeah I just can’t. It’s so bad.
And Voyager doesn’t get good til S3.
Weird that both other comments at the time right now associate it with sci-fi series about space stations.
DS9 infamously took much of its story from what would become Babylon 5.
I can’t say, I didn’t watch more than a few unrelated episodes of both series and at the time they were running here in Germany they basically turned into a single entity in my mind “the dark and dirty space station show”.
A year or two ago I tried watching DS9 from the beginning after forcing myself to watch Star Trek TNG but stopped before the first season ended.
I would try the same with Babylon 5 but it seems not available on streaming.
