alt Hacker NewsFor those who have watched both Babylon 5 and Star Trek TNG- which did you like better?
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Babylon 5.
When people asked me what I preferred, "Star Wars or Star Trek?", I've always responded with "Babylon 5".
I couldn't stand TNG at first, and in fact didn't really watch it until a decade ago. To me the first 2 seasons, and pretty much anything involving the Q character, are unwatchable, but once I learned to skip them the rest became really interesting. For the sake of comparison, I loved the old TOS movies, DS9, and liked Voyager as a purely episodic "watch whenever I catch it" show.
Babylon 5 still lords over all of them.
TNG, by a country mile. B5 has "writer identifies too much with the main character" written all over it. It's the story of how Our Great Leader does the right thing and saves the world, over and over again.
They were, for me at least, too different to compare like that.
TNG was the hopeful future - something an idealist would like to imagine society could achieve.
Babylon 5 was the realistic future - where fascism and racism are issues still prevalent in society, but largely left unaddressed.
If you ask me to pick between them I'd have to go with Babylon 5 but only because of the writing. There were so many times that JMS foreshadowed events literal years in the future on the show and it was such a huge payoff as a fan.
Star Trek just wasn't structured as a show in a way that can compete with that level of world building that was all interwoven in the same kind of way.
Babylon 5 was space fantasy in the vein of epic literature, like a Lord of the Rings in space, and influenced modern TV productions like Game of Thrones, whose author says that he was indebted to the former.
Both TNG and B5 have significant cultural value, but for different reasons. More people should watch them.
It's a hard comparison. They are both very good, in wildly different ways.
B5 is much more character driven and more of a slow burn that sets up a big payoff in the later seasons that has permanent world-changing impact. It was really ahead of its time, closer to something like Game of Thrones than anything else at the time.
TNG feels more static, even the "big events" don't really change the world all that much in the next episode, except Tasha Yar being written out of the show in season 1 causing Worf's head to shrink in season 2 or something I guess. It's a mystery-of-the-week show, you know what you're gonna get and you know it's good. No complaints, but also nothing mind blowing.