Creator J. Michael Straczynski conceived Babylon 5 as a fixed space-station setting partly to keep production costs reasonable, having seen other sci-fi shows go over budget due to a lack of long-term planning.

Straczynski was inspired by epic sagas like Foundation, Childhood's End, The Lord of the Rings, Dune and the Lensman series, and wondered why no television series had attempted the same epic scope, leading him to combine that ambition with the fixed-location concept.

Warner Bros. was initially skeptical of the show even after greenlighting the pilot, worried that American attention spans were too short for a series-long narrative, that syndication would air episodes out of order, and that no non-Star Trek sci-fi show had lasted more than three seasons.

Because prosthetics were difficult for some actors, producers used a recurring group of up to 12 performers—unofficially nicknamed the 'Babylon 5 Alien Rep Group'—for various mid-level alien speaking roles, taking full head and body casts of each.

Writers built a 'trap door' into every character's arc so that if an actor left unexpectedly, the character could be written out with minimal impact on the story; this device was eventually used for Claudia Christian's and Andrea Thompson's departures.

Straczynski personally wrote 92 of the show's 110 episodes, including all 44 episodes of seasons three and four, an accomplishment described as unprecedented in American television.

When the Prime Time Entertainment Network shut down during production of season four, threatening a planned fifth season, Straczynski restructured the season to be able to conclude the entire story arc early if necessary, moving several hours of material into two TNT television films instead.

The intended series finale, 'Sleeping in Light,' was filmed during season four as insurance against cancellation, then moved to the end of season five once a fifth season was confirmed, with a newly shot episode, 'The Deconstruction of Falling Stars,' replacing it as the season four finale.

Babylon 5 was one of the first television shows to use computer-generated visual effects instead of models and miniatures, largely for budgetary reasons, with each episode costing about $650,000 compared to $1.5 million for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The visual effects were created using Amiga-based Video Toaster systems at first, later moving to Pentium, Macintosh, and Alpha-based systems running LightWave 3D, and were designed to simulate Newtonian physics for spacecraft motion.

Composer Christopher Franke scored all five seasons after original telefilm composer Stewart Copeland was unavailable due to touring and recording commitments; Franke directed recording sessions in Berlin remotely from his Los Angeles studio via six fiber optic digital telephone lines.

In the season 4 episode 'Atonement,' the show's real tailors and costume supervisor appeared onscreen fitting Zack Allan for his new uniform, a lighthearted in-joke referencing complaints about the uncomfortable leather-and-wool security uniforms carried over from the pilot movie.

Babylon 5 was shot in 16:9 in anticipation of the emerging HDTV standard, unusual for its time, though it was cropped to 4:3 for original television broadcasts.

In the United Kingdom, Channel 4 aired the show weekly without breaks, causing the final several episodes of early seasons to air in the UK before they aired in the US.