[quote=« J. Michael Straczynski »]I have been online, talking about the work, the various TV series, and the behind-the-scenes stuff, since November 20, 1991. (Technically, I was online far earlier than that, logging onto usenet groups with a 28.8 modem, but that’s when I officially started talking about Babylon 5.)
From that point to right now, 23 years later, I have always been very judicious in the things I say about the work I do. I don’t make claims that later turn out to be false, and when I evaluate the coming work I’m always painfully honest, detailing both where it succeeds, and where it falls short.
For 23 years I’ve kept every promise I ever made online. Which is why I don’t make many of them. I want to be sure before I open my yap.
When we did Babylon 5, we were the first series to create a five-year-arc, and I said at the time that other shows would follow up on this model. This has come true with a vengeance in shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost and many others.
We were the first TV series to use CGI extensively for spaceships, alien worlds, virtual sets and CGI creatures. We said it was the coming wave. Lots of folks made fun of that and said that models were the way to go. Now it’s the dominant technology.
We were among the very first TV series to shoot 16x9 format, which has now become the standard.
We were one of the first series to produce an aggressive 5.1 audio mix for TV at a time when most shows were barely handling stereo, and said it would become the standard. It has.We did everything we said we were going to do. Every promise we made, we kept.
And now that we’re about a month from the end of shooting on season one of Sense8, with vast amounts of the footage now in hand, I’m sufficiently confident with what we’re doing to make another promise.
Sense8 is going to debut on Netflix in 2015. And it is going to change the way you see television, in terms of production values, storytelling, scope, scale, and action. All of it.
We are going to tell a story on a planetary scale. No cheats. In ways no one else has ever done before.
We are going to treat subjects that most TV series, and pretty much all SF series have avoided.
We are going to present visuals and action in ways that you have simply never, ever seen before. Anywhere.
In 2015 we are going to blow the doors off the television business.
Count on it.
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