I am almost finished up with Babylon 5 so I thought I’d look for another sci-fi show to watch. I decided to watch the pilot of Red Dwarf…and went away with an incredibly surreal feeling, like “What the fuck did I just watch?”
It is the weirdest humor (humour) I have ever seen, and I generally love British comedy. The two main guys riffing off each other was kind of funny occasionally, though not hilarious, and I thought the computer was funny, but then the evolved cat guy showed up and I basically spent the rest of the episode going “WTF?”
I’m not even sure what to ask here. Will I like it? Well, sense of humor is subjective, of course, but I guess the bigger question is, is there a plot or any sense of drama at all or is the whole serious increasingly bad and painful jokes at each other’s expense? Really anything you could tell me would probably help with my befuddlement!
The plots are paper thin and continuity is nil. If you don’t find Lister and Rimmer hilarious, stop watching, because that’s 90% of the draw. I loved it myself, but it’s definitely not for everyone.
Red Dwarf was a genius show. I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember the first four of five seasons being some of the greatest tv I have ever had the privilage of watching.
I have no idea how it describe its tone or what is good about it, but give it a chance, you might just like it.
Oh yeah, there is no real plot, its just the dynamic between the characters, you really cannot look at it as being very deep.
The first episode was far from the best (too much backstory), and the show didn’t really hit its stride until the second series. Give it some time and it may grow on you.
Yes, that’s about it. If you like the characters, keep watching. At least until Series 6. Then stop. It gets terrible after that. It’s cold outside, there’s no kind of atmosphere…
The first two seasons are very much Lister and Rimmer going at each other.
After that, it turns into a more conventional Sci-Fi comedy. The humor arises from weird event-of-the-week and the characters interactions and reactions with them.
I always liked it. My wife despises it. But obviously she has shitty taste.
ETA: Six was fine. The stuff after that was pretty mediocre. I think my all-time favorite is probably the Season Three episode called…Spacewrecked? The one where Starbug crashes on the frozen planet and Rimmer and Lister are trapped with no food.
Is that the season where it got super-formulaic? E.g., every episode had to include Rimmer citing a regulation by number and Kryten explaining that that number belonged to some totally irrelevant rule? And Cat had to say “We’re as dead as [insert obsolete fashion statement here]”?
Red Dwarf isn’t really a science fiction series like Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. It’s a situation comedy like Fawlty Towers or The Office, except it’s set on a spaceship. The point of the show is to laugh at the characters and their interactions. There’s no plot to it beyond the level of “Gilligan tries to get off the island again”.
The first few shows are really very lame. You can pretty much see every joke coming up the street and they aren’t funny jokes to boot. It does get much better after a while. First time it showed in the US I was put off by the poor writing in the first couple of episodes and didn’t bother with it until some of my more patient friends mentioned how it got much better.
That’s not entirely true. A lot of the humor does come from tweaking some of the traditions of sci-fi.
Rimmer, there’s nothing out there, you know. There’s nobody out there. No alien monsters, no Zargon warships, no beautiful blondes with beehive hairdos who say: “Show me some more of this Earth thing called kissing.” There’s just you, me, the Cat, and a lot of floating smeging rocks.
The books were much, much better IMHO. The writing team split around series 6 and the show is generally considered to have cratered after that. It was a gestalt of a romantic and a heartless bastard and the romantic would write a lovely story and then the heartless bastard would come along and stomp all the characters. So the romantic got you sucked in, then all of a sudden you’ve got the foot from the sky, often repeatedly, and therein lies comedy. After series six it was just the romantic and you started getting stories where all the characters dreams started coming true and it became more of a cast of plucky adventurers you were rooting for instead of the typical British comedy, which, in the words of Steven Moffat, consists of “ugly people being nasty to each other in the rain.”
I’m as big a fan of the Red Dwarf franchise as anyone, and I can quote lots and lots of it(the novelizations at least), I even typed up one of my favorite passages and posted it on my wall(and possibly on the SDMB), but the series never lived up to the books IMHO. The books were contemporaries with the TV show and follow much of the same plotlines from the first few series, but without the constraints of the television medium. So they could go into third person omniscient and tell backstories with complex concepts that wouldn’t translate well into television.
So if you were intrigued by the concept you might like the books. They’re red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Red Dwarf: Better than Life. The two others written in the Red Dwarf universe were The Last Human and Backwards. The first was written by the romantic, and the second was written by the character-stomper. I haven’t read these because I liked the way they worked as a team, not so much their style individually.
I do love the show though. I definitely didn’t like it as much once they “found” Red Dwarf again.
I taped all the shows when PBS would brodcast them during membership drives, and very nearly wore them out. I even had an “H” made out of duct tape that I would wear to parties.
Now I have the DVD’s, as well.
I occasionally yell “betta make myself look BIGGGG!” for no apparent reason, and the “everybody’s dead, Dave” sequence gets repeated surprisingly often.
Ooo - the books. The first one - very good. Second one, okay.
The third and fourth, once the team had split? Oy. What a mess. I have them, of course.
And I’ve re-read all of them more times than I should really admit to, but man; what a disaster that was. I still wonder how both of them managed to get their books published.
I found one at a comics and memorabilia shop (had a nice faceted affect in the reflection and everything) and wore it when I was answering phones during a PBS pledge drive.
Classic Red Dwarf is really seasons three to six (but yeah it was getting formulaic at that point) earlier and even subsequent seasons have their moments but are very patchy in quality. At least until series seven, I can’t recall much about series eight and haven’t seen any of the subsequent material.
I think part of the genius of Red Dwarf is that it often asked interesting or just plain fun questions and playing with science-fiction ideas, time-travel, virtual reality, genetically engineered lifeforms, parrallel universes, as well as being funny when at its best its actually genuinely clever.
I think one of my favourite moments in any fiction anywhere is when Rimmer finally embraces his destiny, its a fantastic character arc, from the galaxy’s biggest douchebag to the multiverse’s greatest hero!
And my favourite episode of the lot is the one when Ace Rimmer is first introduced, “What’a guy!”
btw the Red Dwarf books are surprisingly good as well, at least they were to my teenage self but I’d be surprised if they weren’t at least still readable.
edited to add that I know its heresy but I much prefer the female Holly!
This thread had me fire up the ol Netflix to revisit my favorite show from my ill-spent early college years.
My word, that did not age well. Maybe being stone cold sober is the difference? I started at series 1 ep 1, so I’ll try one of the later ones but right now I’m just looking at myself in the way back mirror and shamedly shaking my head.
But yeah, I’m going to try a later season tomorrow.
I’ll try a bit. I wasn’t completely turned off, but it definitely wasn’t what I was looking for (some slightly harder sci-fi without the extremely dark overtones of BSG).
My main experience with the show as around, I wanna say s8? That seemed to be where PBS had the syndication rights when I was in high school. I liked it. I like female holly a lot more than male holly. Most of the eps I saw took place on either the starbug or the reconstituted red dwarf.