Seriously B5 is worth the long watch. The one thing that you should be aware of, is that it seriously is a multi season arc to the story. The unfortunate side is that when they got told that they wouldn't get the 5th year to wrap things up, the creators and writers struggled to compress two years of story into one season... and then after shooting it they got told they were actually getting a 5th year. So they had to stretch out a few things and do some "post story" consequences and what happens now. The final year had a lot of interesting concepts and a nice approach, but still didn't quite match up to the earlier stuff.
The character evolution on so many of the characters are brilliantly done. (key note: G'kar and Londo. Plus, the ambassadorial aides Vir and Lenier). Ivanova and Garibaldi also get a lot of really well delivered lines, with that amusingly sarcastic bite.
They do poke fun at themselves a few times, but try to do that serious issues with a foot in the slightly campy-sci-fi area.
While the sfx and cgi can be a bit ropey by todays standards, they actually helped establish a lot of the techniques of how to achieve quality sci-fi sfx on a minimal budget that actually got translated later to how films achieved thing. - Random Film/TV production trivia.