Since we’ve started showing Babylon 5 to a new group, I’ve been surfing the Lurker’s Guide and other sites. I came across an interesting tidbit about the spinoff series Crusade that I had forgotten.
At the point that TNT cancelled Crusade (13 episodes into filming, and months before it aired), Warner Bros. tried to sell it to the Sci Fi Channel. SciFi was interested in picking it up — and they actually did buy the rights to show reruns of B5 — but they had already committed their original-programming budget to several new shows. No mention of what shows they were, but…
Something jogged my memory. “What year was this?” I checked; it was 1999. “What year did Farscape start?” Sure enough, 1999.
Apparently they have a low sci-fi quota. 😛
Remember that they were less established 5 years ago, and it was the middle of a season. They’d already picked up Farscape, First Wave and a couple of other shows which were going to start airing that March. (The TNT deal broke down in January or February.) And rumor had it that TNT was asking for an unreasonable amount of money to sell the show, just to make sure that no other network could make it a hit (because that would make them look like idiots for rejecting it.)
As I recall, there was quite a bit of sci-fi on Sci-Fi back then, even if it wasn’t all high-quality. I wonder if it would be possible to find an old schedule and see what their lineup looked like that year.
Just back from holiday. Nice new logo thing.
A while back I remarked that the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade died in part because the Sci-Fi channel […]