Babylon 5 was such an incredibly uneven production. There's award winning makeup production, combined with the worst 90s daytime TV soap level of taste in set design and fashion.
The feeling I get from the show is that it is absolutely earnest. Like a group of a b-tier community theater folks got the biggest budget of their lives to finally tell the story they wanted and they just swung for the fences.
It's a total, glorious, mess of a show that is as entertaining if you take it seriously as if you make fun of it. I love it.
That may be the best description of the show, ever. My fondest memories of it were how detailed the online analyses of each episode were as they aired. All of the speculation, references to previous clues - everything was dissected. And JMS was right in the only fray most of the time, teasing and clarifying and explaining, but never spoiling what was coming up. It was the golden age of Internet synergy with a show, not just trolling and shitposting.
I think you're forgetting the most important aspect of the show: the entire series was plotted out before the first episode was shot, which allowed for things like foreshadowing and multi-season story arcs that could be more "fundamental" because they weren't ad-hoc.
The feeling I get from the show is that it is absolutely earnest. Like a group of a b-tier community theater folks got the biggest budget of their lives to finally tell the story they wanted and they just swung for the fences.
It's a total, glorious, mess of a show that is as entertaining if you take it seriously as if you make fun of it. I love it.