I'm not sure there was a need for filler B-plot and C-plot. There's no particular reason it needed to be planned as 5 seasons if there wasn't enough A-plot to fill 5 seasons.
Hell, Severed Dreams felt like a season's worth of plot all on its own, and all the better for it.
Frustratingly, the subsequent seasons try to address different issues and questions without answering any of the quests raised in the previous seasons. It's almost like they want to jump from topic to topic so as not to spoil the potential of what's worked on so far.
I'm hoping that this policy leads to much tighter story arcs which aren't designed to take 5 seasons to come to a conclusion. There's far too much TV that basically only has actual new plot elements in the first and last ten minutes, and then pads everything out to a full episode.
A world in which writers know they have, at best, 24 episodes to tell their story will hopefully result in much more focused story telling, and fewer filler episodes looking into the exciting history of what minor character C did 15 years ago.
It was plotted and written in the era where a plot of the week had to carry an entire episode. Main characters can no longer be allowed to get entangled in a non-critical event for a full episode just to reveal something important about them for later. Writers have to be more clever than that. There's no room for "this time on B5, a rebellion/alien/telepath problem/encounter."
With 22-episode seasons like the original, I bet a good writing team could do something like this:
Season 1: building up the world, revealing the Shadows at the end
Season 2: Shadow war
Season 3: proxy wars
Season 4: Loose ends & Consequences, including Thirdspace and the telepath war. If there's enough material, maybe even move the telepath war to a 5th season. I always wanted to see what happened to the Vorlons' favorite telepath.
There should still be room, in seasons 1 and 2 especially, for some cute but essentially irrelevant subplots like Green vs Purple.
And also, different characters have different desires and motivations. The story had its own arc, but it's oversimplifying to act like there aren't many mini arcs performed by the characters of every story.
Is there a list of common story lines somewhere? I used to watch sitcoms as a kid, so my memory needs to stretch back a bit, but that seems to sum up almost any episode that I can think of.
I've heard something along the lines of "there are only 6 types of plots and every movie is just a rehash of one of them", but I've never actually found the list.
I've become a little tired of series with continuous plots at this point. It's really hard to create content for so many episodes that isn't repetitive, irrelevant to the main story, or hard to believe because of the piling up of coincidences. Then you often have implausible character changes and other typical series-but-not-movies problems piling up. It's an art form that seems very difficult to get right, and so it usually goes wrong.
When I was a lad, a story spanned 4 or even 6 episodes so had time to evolve properly, and of course gave the famous cliffhangers at the end of each episode. This mechanism worked really well, even if the writing was often iffy.
The modern scheme of parcelling an entire story in a single extended episode, otoh, hardly ever works, because there just isn't time for the viewer to get invested in what's going on. The New Year's day one, for example, seemed to be entirely resolved in about 10 minutes, which was just flat.
"fluff" padding is much worse than "can we get an extra season or three out of this show", IMO.
[ EDIT: d'oh, I meant to write this in reverse, as "fluff padding is much less bad than .... oh well. ]
I prefer stories to be told that already have a beginning, middle and end at their outset, not just some fingers-crossed "we might get 5 seasons, we can decide how it unfolds once we get to season 3" stuff that has dominated way too much TV.
Granted, the purely episodic shows (e.g. Star Trek, LA Law and the like) are immune to this, mostly.
But give me more True Detective, where the story ending is known before they even start filming, and the only question is "do we get to try another story?"
This is why the Animatrix is great. It's divided into 9 episodes across various points in the timeline. Each episode was created by a different group, so you get 9 perspectives on the overall story.
I’m sad that that stopped about halfway through the story, I think they were shooting for about 10 parts or so. But part 7 was a kind of sidetrack listing games on the platform, and the writer might have run out of contacts or behind the scenes info to finish the narrative.
the new story pitch is actually very good. i just rewatched the whole 9 seasons in the past weeks, and it feels right at home.
edit : now that i think about it, i wonder how they'll manage to get multiple variation of the story unfold depending on your choices. it's already hard enough to write one linear... i suppose they'll just block you until you click on things in the right order. Wonder how interesting or funny this could be in that context. Maybe a lot ? Like, making the absurd choice and bad decisions the character usually make and see the consequences unfold... this could be fun.
> Abrams and the writers were planning from the outset to do that many seasons and wrote a story bible outlining all the lore and mythology referenced throughout the writing.
"lore and mythology referenced" is not the same as having a plot outline.
I agree. I like 5, in all the ways that it's different- but I always feel like 5 has a long expanse of seemingly meaningless turns until all of a sudden things get good. Then it will have another long lull between interesting events.
Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)
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