Crusade is an American spin-off TV show from J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5. Its plot is set in AD 2267, five years after the events of Babylon 5, and just after the movie A Call to Arms. A race called the Drakh have released a nanovirus plague on Earth, which will destroy all life on Earth within five years if it is not stopped. To that end, the Victory class destroyer Excalibur has been sent out to look for anything that could help the search for a cure. Like Babylon 5, Crusade was intended to have a five-year story arc, although as Straczynski notes in the DVD commentary for A Call To... Arms, it was intended to resolve the Drakh plague after a season or two and move onto other arcs. However, conflicts arose between the producers and executives at TNT, and production was cancelled before the first episode was broadcast. TNT's research had indicated that the audience for Babylon 5 did not watch other TNT programming, and likewise TNT's main audience was not watching the show, making another related program unattractive to the network's management.
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