B5 is fantastic.

Let me start with the bad though: The CGI, especially the spaceship CGI in the first couple of seasons is bad. Really, really, really bad. Like listen, I have a high tolerance for bad scifi CGI (I watch Starhunter!) and I can tell you in some of the space battle scenes I literally can’t keep track of what is happening sometimes. The CGI improves in the later seasons, but it goes from “I don’t understand what I’m even seeing” to “Playstation 2 cutscene” level.

Ok, that’s mainly it. If you can get past that, it is an amazing show. The most impressive thing it does is character growth. There are characters that you start out hating who end up becoming very sympathetic. There are characters who make face heel turns and it never feels unearned.

One amazing thing about the show is the running dispute between two alien races which is very similar to the Cardassians vs Bajorans in Star Trek Deep Space 9. To me, in DS9 I never really liked the Bajorans as a people, I know that I was supposed to but for various reasons I kind of just didn’t care about them. In Babylon 5, I really care about the conflict and about the ambassadors from each species and what they are going through, and how their personal and professional relationship evolves. It was very smart to make the ugly alien reptile species the one which was being unjustly oppressed.

Without going on too much longer, the setting of the show is strong. You can see how dystopian earth is and how principled the main human cast is, and how every so often those distant dystopian tendrils from the earth government start reaching into the affairs of the show.

As a side note, if you like Star Trek TNG but don’t like the “moral of the week” kind of thing, I do highly recommend Star Trek Deep Space 9. Great acting, very good effects that hold up well, and a fun cast of characters. A little slow in the beginning but once the main conflicts start kicking off it starts feeling very modern in how the story arcs are presented. Worf returns from TNG, but DS9 actually finds a purpose for his character and he really gets to shine.

My husband swore by B5 and had a hard time convincing me, especially since the CGI effects have not aged well and in general the sets, costume, etc. feel cheap. He was right, though: I really enjoyed it, although I think it took a season or so to really get into it. The writing is surprisingly good, especially later on, and it has complex alien characters in a way that a lot of scifi series struggle with.

There’s a widespread belief that Deep Space Nine is a knockoff of Babylon 5. B5 was apparently pitched to Paramount before they started work on DS9, but they turned it down. So it’s certainly possible that DS9 is at least inspired by B5, although I think people with more inside knowledge tend to doubt that it’s directly ripped off from the B5 pitch as others claim. It’s clear though that there is a deep similarity between B5 and DS9, and considering B5 aired later it’s natural that people feel the need to defend B5 on this point — it’s not a cheap ripoff of DS9, if anything, DS9 is an expensive ripoff of B5!

All that is background for me saying that I think B5 is a better DS9 than DS9 is, but DS9 might be a better show. What I mean by that is that the original concept that DS9 and B5 share, that of a multi-cultural space station resolving diplomatic disputes at the edge of human territory, is much better done in B5 than DS9 where it’s almost secondary to DS9 as a military outpost in the Dominion war. That said, DS9 had a bigger budget, better effects, and in my opinion better actors, so it’s easier to get into than B5. It just looks better.

Another interesting thing about B5 is that its creator, J. Michael Straczinsky (think I spelled that right?) was Terminally Online in a very early age of Online. He had a reputation for getting into dumb but heated arguments with fans on Usenet, which is pretty funny to think about now. This was a particularly big deal when the lead of the show had to be abruptly changed between seasons 1 and 2. Years after it became public that this was because of the original lead actor developing some serious mental health problems, but JMS understandably didn’t want to talk about that in public and so the abrupt and unexplained replacement lead to a lot of flamewarring (mostly under the presumption the original lead had been fired) that gave the show sort of a bad reputation among some.

I’d totally recommend that you watch B5, just be prepared for a rough given the much poorer production quality. It does get better over time, and most significantly the acting gets a lot better over time as cheesy stereotypes evolve into more complete characters. Of course pretty much every show goes through that evolution but it’s especially important with B5 where Londo starts out as an annoying guy with annoying hair. He remains as such through the rest of the series, but also gains other traits to the extent that he’s one of the more relatable characters.

There’s also a really funny left turn that happens in the last season - the last season is good! but there was some weirdness that happened where the last season was bought after the writers had already wrapped up the show (they thought they wouldn’t get another one), so they had to swap around episodes and come up with a whole new arc for the last season. The result is actually some of the best episodes of the series since they end up with sort of “free time” episodes to dig into aspects of the world that you don’t get much other detail on. The original finale of the series got moved into the actual last season, so the finale of the second to last is an episode they kind of shoved in at the last moment that is, admittedly, half clip-show but also explores the world of B5 in a really interesting way that we probably wouldn’t have gotten if the writers room didn’t have to scramble to produce something that was both fast to shoot and a satisfying season end.

Oh, and I didn’t even really address your actual question, I just rambled about television scifi for a long time like I’m prone to do. I think you’d like B5: it does have a definite aspect of moral parable to it, but it’s a more complex and nuanced one than most TV shows of the '90s. I think that’s part of the reason it didn’t get the kind of big-budget production that Star Trek did. It’s not set in a post-scarcity, largely post-politics utopia like Star Trek. The world of B5 is very political, and there aren’t really any “good guys.” Humans (from the central government charmingly called EARTH DOME) are just as much a part of the problem as everyone else, and I think the show does a much better than average job of representing different interests that have to come to compromises to get along, and the real political and cultural results of scifi concepts like telepathy. It’s not all happy endings!

Oh my lord YES! It’s one of the best Sci-Fi series to have been made to date and worth every penny should you buy it.

I suggest this retrospective on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FfKOubWE14

Same Youtuber also did all the Star Trek films and series.

I just (re)-watched it recently, so I feel qualified to answer. I’d seen much of it during its original run, so I knew a lot of the broader story, but I still enjoyed watching it and would recommend it. If you get to the end and Londo & G’Kar aren’t your favourites, I don’t think we can be friends.

Has it aged ok or does it feel like old?

There’s definitely the occasional wooden acting and cardboard set, particularly in the early stuff. It’s more about the story though. There’s a remastered version out, with the original effects upscaled.

According to Engadget:

Babylon 5 Remastered has been scanned from the original camera negative. The film sequences were scanned in 4K and then “finished,” or downscaled, back to HD, with a dirt and scratch clean-up, as well as color correction. The show’s CGI and composite sequences, meanwhile, have been digitally upscaled to HD with only some minor tweaks where absolutely necessary.

Before that there was a widescreen version that you should avoid - it wasn’t meant to be broadcast like that and you can see e.g. actors not in that scene watching their colleagues.

There’s some extra stuff as well - TV movies and spin off series. I’d have to look at the titles to remind me what was worth it, but in summary some of the movies were worth it and Crusade is not.

I really liked the first season which it´s supposedly the worst of the series so I think I´ll be fine for the rest of the seasons. I should be starting season 2 soon.

Haven’t seen it for ages but it looked incredibly cheap at the time. Great story though especially the relationship between the two ambassadors (can’t remember their names)