Television foundations: The Wire, Babylon 5, The Expanse, She-Ra
The many inspirations behind Tales from the Triverse
The truth is that everything I have ever experienced goes into my writing, whether I like it or not. Things I’ve done, places I’ve been, people I’ve met — as well as all the books, comics, movies, games and music I’ve enjoyed over the years.
This is part one in a short series of posts on the foundational texts that informed and inspired my writing of Tales from the Triverse. Today I’m thinking about core television influences.
I did a short video intro to this series which you can find here, though it doesn’t go into as much detail as what follows:
There are four shows I’m going to be poking at: The Wire, Bablyon 5, The Expanse and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Those first three are probably quite obvious to anyone who has read Triverse, while the last might be raising a few eyebrows.
Let me explain.
The Wire (2002 - 2008)
I’ve only watched The Wire a single time through, and I don’t dare rewatch it for fear of the spell being broken. It’s a show that is so undeniably brilliant that I was left wondering why I should bother to continue owning a television — there would clearly never be a show as good. TV was over. What was the point?
There’s a bunch of clever structural tricks going on in The Wire. There are 10-13 episodes per season, over five seasons. Each episode is individually satisfying to watch, but it’s really about the slow burn story that is building over the entire show. There’s a key difference between The Wire and modern streaming shows, the latter of which appear to share a similar construction, which is that The Wire takes its pacing cues from the novel rather than from movies. It never feels like an oddly paced or indulgent super-long movie, and remains resolutely a television show throughout. The sensibility is closer to the pacing and structure of a novel, and the feeling for the viewer is of having been ensconced within a good book.
Each season takes a new and unique thematic approach. Season 1 focuses on the Baltimore police and their attempts to take down the Barksdale drug family. As much time is given to the criminals as to the cops, with the show more interested in painting a detailed societal picture than moralising episode-by-episode. Season 2 takes a sharp turn into examining dockworkers, unions and how the working classes are getting swept up in the drug war. Entirely new characters are introduced and some of the regulars from season 1 recede into the background.
This happens each season, with the city of Baltimore being the only persistent lead character. The show points its focus wherever it pleases.
When I was in early development on Tales from the Triverse, I knew that The Wire was a key reference text. My book would be very different, of course, but that structural flexibility was hugely appealing, as was the dexterity of the show to move its cast around to suit the needs of the story. Writers of speculative fiction and more adventure-focused stories sometimes can be accused of writing as if their novels are trying to be movies; in my case, I deliberately wanted Triverse to feel like watching a TV show like The Wire. The weekly chapters, the 4-year serialisation, the large and rotating cast, and the continually shifting thematic focus would all play into that.
I leaned into designing Tales from the Triverse as an online serial more than my previous projects, which were more overtly novelistic. Triverse exists in the first instance as a weekly show: even when I compile it into a paperback and ebook, it will still retain the core structure of a serial. Reading it in a singular book form will be closer to watching a box set than reading a traditional novel.
Babylon 5 (1993 - 1998)
No show has been more influential on me than Babylon 5. This may be simply a consequence of it airing during my formative teenage years: I watched it between the ages of 13 and 19. As I shifted awkwardly from child to adult, as I started paying attention to the world and began forming my notions of right and wrong, Babylon 5 was there every year, whispering in my ear.
This being a network show from the 1990s, it had a very different model to The Wire. Everything in The Wire is counting towards that novelistic story, even while it was still able to make individual episodes satisfying. Babylon 5’s seasons consisted of 22 episodes, and their centrality to the main arc varied substantially.
At the time, it was far more common for a 22-ep show to be entirely episodic. Each episode would be a standalone story with the recurring cast. There would be an established setup for the show, which wouldn’t change much over time: a police department, an emergency room, a newsroom, a local community. The characters would be clearly established from the beginning and there wouldn’t be much development between episode 1 and episode 100. A new season might introduce a new element, but otherwise the shows existed in a sort of static, frozen state.
Babylon 5 took a different approach, with a pre-designed main story running through the show’s five planned seasons. Much as The Wire eases viewers into its style, Babylon 5 also went slowly, using its first season to train viewers in how to watch it. Most of season one’s episodes appear to be standalone, much like the other sci-fi shows airing at the time. There’s only a handful of episodes which overtly dive into the longer story, but they’re striking when they appear.
For example, one episode deals with time travel and introduces numerous mysteries that go unexplained. Remarkably, for a genre that rarely made it past the first season before being cancelled, those mysteries are only explained halfway through season three. It still works as bold storytelling today, but at the time, in the mid-90s, it was absolutely astonishing.
In terms of the nuts and bolts of how I designed Tales from the Triverse, and specifically how I plotted it over its 4 and a bit years, Babylon 5 was always the gold standard and the ideal model. Hence if you look at the first couple of seasons of Triverse, the stories are mostly standalone and can be theoretically read in any order. It begins in a very contained manner, focusing closely on the core cast of detectives.
As with Babylon 5, there are seeds scattered throughout about where the bigger story is headed, for readers who are paying attention and like to speculate. It isn’t until ‘Procedural’, four months into the weekly serial, that the background story suddenly becomes the main plot. In Babylon 5, that was the season one episode ‘Signs and Portents’.
Over time, the background plot becomes increasingly foregrounded, with the ratio between standalone and arc episodes shifting. That’s how B5 did it, and it’s the approach I took with Triverse.
Another trick Babylon 5 pulled was to present itself as a ‘thing of the week’ show set on a space station. It is exactly that for the bulk of the first two seasons. The boundaries of the show keep being pushed out, until midway through season three when the show deliberately detonates its own core setup in a trilogy of audacious episodes. The established context is gone and all of the characters are forced to respond to a vastly changed status quo.
That paradigm shift comes at the end of season three of Triverse, again in the form of a trilogy of sorts (‘Unintended consequences’, ‘Loyalties’ and ‘Assault on Stamford & Coin’). The serial is a different beast after those stories. Trying to pull off such a thing made me respect the Babylon 5 team even more — a big switch-up is fiendishly hard to do without alienating all of your readers/viewers.
Related, I’ve been doing a rewatch of the show right here on the newsletter:
The Expanse (2015 - 2022)
There was a time when I thought the Battlestar Galactica remake was the natural successor to Babylon 5. It had a similar structure, was equally happy to rip up the rulebook, and appeared to have a plan. Turns out, not so much of a plan and the writers were making it up as they went along — which worked brilliantly for the first half of the show, and less well for the latter half.
Which is a key point in how I plan my serials. While it’s true that I write and publish as I go, without a safety net, it’s not that I’m just winging it each week. I have very detailed files (very detailed files) about where the story is going, and while the details can change over time I’m never flying blind. Babylon 5 had to adapt and respond to real world events, such as cast members leaving and budget changes, but the showrunner still had the core blueprint, so was able to roll with the punches.
The Expanse is an interesting case because it’s built upon a series of source novels. This made for a show that knew precisely what it was doing, and was able to hit its marks while changing significant details so as to fit into the television format. Some characters are merged and reinvented, for example, to shrink down the huge cast list in the books.
The show’s enduring impact on me was its commitment to embracing science. Sure, it’s still hand-wavey pseudoscience, and is adapted to suit the needs of the drama, but they lean into realism whenever possible. Most screen sci-fi runs away from actual science, either because they’re pursuing the space fantasy stylings of Star Wars or because it’s simply very difficult to do. Bear in mind that the high water mark for realistic depiction of space was the film Apollo 13, which used every trick in the book to depict zero gravity — including filming scenes while inside a plummeting jumbo jet.
The Expanse commits to zero g on a TV budget (albeit one vastly in excess of what Babylon 5 would have had 20 years earlier). It embraces Newtonian physics and incorporates the dangers and inconveniences of space travel into the plot. TV scifi tends to view science as an inconvenience, or as a deus ex machina to get out of a tricky plot dead-end. The Expanse instead incorporates science into the story and uses it to create tension and plot beats and character moments.
As a result, it feels like The Expanse is properly set in space. Babylon 5 is on a space station, sure, but it could be set in an airport with a few tweaks. Star Trek’s ethical dilemmas could be retold with a crew aboard a 17th century exploration sea vessel. In The Expanse, space is treated with respect — but as a result, it also becomes something mundane to the characters. It’s where they go to work, and where they live.
That general vibe is something I wanted to embrace in the sections of Triverse set in the ‘future’ dimension of Max-Earth.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018 - 2020)
Hold up! This doesn’t seem to fit with the other shows on the list. What’s going on?
The year is important context here. In 2018 my son was six years old. I had fond memories of the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons in the 80s, and the Netflix remake was getting surprisingly good reviews, so we thought it might be a good show to watch together as a family.
Fun fact: the original She-Ra was put together by J Michael Straczynski and Larry DiTillio, who would go on to create Babylon 5. Funny how these things go around.
Anyone who has a young child knows how difficult it can be to find decent television. There are tons of wonderful books for kids, and there’s a big catalogue of classic movies for young children (thanks, Pixar!). TV is trickier, not least because it tends to be rather specific to its time, both thematically and technically. A show from the 1970s or 1980s might as well have been made in the 19th century as far as a Gen Alpha child is concerned.
We sit down to check out the show, adults bracing themselves for something deeply naff, and instead we get a really competent adventure show with compelling characters and vibrant animation. Over five seasons and 52 episodes, the show went from strength to strength, never underestimating or patronising its core audience. The story goes to dark places, deals with complex thematic material and is never afraid to upend its status quo.
At its core, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is an affirming, optimistic show. I imagine some older viewers might struggle with that, and I found it challenging in a satisfying way. It’s a story that never shies away from the horrors of war, but in which the characters don’t resort to petty insults. The central themes are friendship and tolerance, but it explores that notion through conflict and mistakes and sacrifice.
It’s cleverly written, in other words, and by the final episode I was every bit as invested in the characters as my son. I’d never have watched it without having the impetus of a tiny child to entertain, but I’m hugely grateful that I did. We finished watching it right as I was in pre-production on Triverse.
In terms of Triverse, it impacted in a number of ways. The endless optimism and general vibe was imbued into the stories set on Palinor, the more overtly ‘fantasy’ dimension. It’s not a coincidence that many of the lead characters there are powerful women, and often princesses or former princesses. The Netflix show reclaimed the idea of ‘the princess’ from Disney, and from the British royal family, and turned it into something altogether more kick ass.
As a middle-aged, middle-class, white English man, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power presented a challenge to me, to not always default to the easy characters that my brain spits out. I wanted Triverse to have the most diverse cast of characters of any of my projects to date, because the central concept of the series is exploring what happens when disparate cultures mix and collide. To have had too homogenous a cast would have reduced the opportunities for stories and thematic exploration.
Another connection worth mentioning: She-Ra showrunner ND Stevenson is a big reason behind me writing this newsletter, and specifically writing it using Substack’s tools. It’s always been a controversial platform, and when I was weighing up the various platforms it was the presence of writers like Stevenson that helped me make a decision.
If all of that has whetted your appetite, you can read Tales from the Triverse starting here:
Meanwhile.
Next time, I’ll be looking at the novels that contributed to my big brainy melting pot that eventually produced Tales from the Triverse.
Over on Notes, I’m trying to create a meme. It’s going quite well so far:
An explanation, of sorts: I once used this exact same panel to post a joke, sometime in the early 2000s, to a filmmaking forum. It’s from a 1980s Transformers comic, which I’d since lost. Thanks to Skybound’s epic Kickstarter collection, I finally stumbled upon the page again, in UK issue 160 from 9th April 1988:
That original line of dialogue is really something: “Snap Trap - bring me the psycho probe!” It may be the most 80s line of comics dialogue ever written.
Anyway, it’s the perfect panel to re-use with a different speech balloon. Hence, Shockwave’s order to “Read serial fiction!” Given the enthusiastic response, there’s clearly a demand for serial fiction around these parts.
2026 could be a good year for serial fiction on Substack and in the newsletter scene more widely. Spread the word.
Note to self: add The Wire, She-Ra, and the Expanse to my to-watch queue asap.
The only reason I wouldn't dive right into the Expanse is that I'd wonder whether I should read the novels first and then the show, or after, or alongside, or if it even matters; I tend to be a purist about these things (I'm probably the only LOTR fan in North America who loves the books and dislikes the Peter Jackson movies) but there are some movies that improve on the source material, or at least enhance it (i.e., the Godfather.)
Note: watch The Wire and She-Ra.
Of COURSE Apollo 13 is the high water mark for space realism. It's historical, not sci-fi.
Saw that with a friend who didn't know it was a true story AND overlooked the "based on a book by Jim Lovell" credit at the beginning. Thus, she had no idea how it ended. She was clutching my arm so hard during re-entry I had bruises. There are two shots I want to remove where, in my opinion, Howard went too far into style over storytelling and snapped me out of my suspension of disbelief*. Otherwise, Apollo 13 remains the most perfect movie I've ever seen.
*During the launch all the carefully recreated news footage has me in awe of the power of the Saturn V... Then there's that overhead after it's cleared the pad where the Saturn V goes right by the virtual camera and the exhaust whites out the frame. This breaks the documentary feel for a cool, but impossible shot.
The second is that stupid fast tracking shot over Apollo 13's electronics to the sparking boards just before the blowout. Again, this is an "impossible" shot which breaks the grounded, documentary feel of the rest of the film. For storytelling purposes this could have been static.
Both shots CALL ATTENTION to themselves as VFX.