So.. BoredOfJam sends me this link… and I felt the need to write some guidance for the writers.. who will hopefully be Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, but probably won’t…
- Put it back on the Red Dwarf – pre Kryten, pre Kochanski-from- another-dimension, pre crew-resurrected-by-a-bunch-of-nanobots.
- Lister is a slob. He doesn’t care. He’s only on Red Dwarf because of a Monopoly-based pub crawl that went wrong. He’s not a space adventurer. He just wants to get home.
- Rimmer is a hologram of a dead person. HE CAN’T TOUCH ANYTHING. He is also NOT Brittas. He’s not a fan of Hammond Organ music, or a collector of pictures of 20th century telegraph poles. He just happened to be Lister’s immediate superior and was brought back to keep Lister sane. He just wants to be NOT DEAD.
- Cat is A CAT. He sleeps, eats, sprays things, and doesn’t want to do any work (he’s got a note from his mummy, after all). He just wants to sleep, eat, look good and have sex with something.
- Bring back Holly. Norman Lovett’s incarnation, naturally. And remember that he has been alone for 3,000,000 years and has gone a bit strange.
- The creators realised, after just two series, that they had written themselves into a hole because they had a cast of four that couldn’t be bothered, or just simply couldn’t, do anything. So.. stop turning them into people that can, or can.
- No “aliens”. Red Dwarf was unique because EVERYTHING they stumbled upon was somehow related to the crew, the ship, or Earth. “There are no aliens – just you, me, the cat, and a lot of floating smegging rocks.”
- Red Dwarf is about people that don’t get on, forced to live together. With that in mind, and taking into account the above, if you’ve run out of ideas.. STOP.
Of course I don’t expect them to listen to me. I fully expect a strained rehashing of old ideas and lots of special effects. But I thought I should at least try.
You know, I think I’ll watch series 1 and 2 to remind myself of just how good they were. Perhaps the writers should do the same…
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Do you really need to watch the series again to remind yourself? Surely it is all so fresh in your yet-to-be-tested-on-Mastermind brain?
I agree with your last point most though, if this is a new series for the sake of a new series, stop now and think up some new sit-com set in space. Don’t dig up the grave of a show which once was an amusing waste of half an hour.
If you want fresh ideas, someone should commission MY sitcom. It’s brilliant. Well, the concept is.