| Leynos said: ..Some believe and debate that Star Trek DS9 ripped off Babylon 5 as there are many surface-level comparisons and some history with the Fox Network. |
In a Nutshell, it was basically Paramount with Warner Brothers, then Paramount against Warner Brothers. The whole Babylon 5 story arc was initially presented to Paramount for their planned PTEN Nextwork. So they knew it when they went DS9. From there on, "theft theories" were plentiful, but this might have been a smoking gun:
A commenter named Steven Hopstaken left the following comment in the io9 article:
I was working at Warner Bros. in the publicity department when Warner Bros. and Paramount were preparing to launch a joint [emphasis mine] network. Warner Bros. already decided to buy Babylon 5 for their adhoc PTEN network (a group of independent stations that agreed to show Warner Bros. shows in prime time.)
Paramount and Warner Bros. both agreed that Deepspace 9 would be the show that would launch the new network and there wouldn’t be room for two “space” shows on the network. I was told they purposely took what they liked from the B5 script and put it in the DS9 script. In fact, there was talk of leaving the B5 script in tact and just setting it the Star Trek universe. I had to keep rewriting press release drafts while they were trying to make the final decision.
But then, suddenly, Paramount decided to launch a new network on their own and screwed Warner Bros. over. That sent Warner Bros. scrambling to create their own network; grabbing up any station not already committed to Paramount and getting WGN to show the WB network on cable.
So Paramount definitely knew about the Babylon 5 script, I don’t know about the DS9 show runners, but I find it hard to believe they didn’t know.
At the time, I thought that when DS9 went fully into the Dominion war arc (no more "alien of the week" episodes), DS9 was pretty much a ripoff of B5, idea-wise.
