Tits!

Ah, good old Red Dwarf. As a long-time fan, this comment someone else made on Jumptheshark.com pretty much describes my entire opinion on when exactly it started to lose its appeal.

I know this is really lazy of me to copy and paste someone else's words but honestly I completely agree with whoever wrote this.

"Red Dwarf was progressively good (seasons 1-3), then it achieved a constant state of perfection (seasons 4-6) before taking an unprecedented plunge into awfulness (season 7). Season 8 was OK, but far from the above-average standards of seasons 1-6 (at least Rimmer, Holly and Red Dwarf itself were back, though). Season 7 saw the once-side-splittingly-funny sci-fi comedy become a frequently humourless, cold, sci-fi drama. Who knows where the blame lies? Chris Barrie's absence from most of the season was a fatal blow (the loss of Rimmer, easily the best character on the show was the worst possible thing to happen to RD). The four-year interim between seasons 6 and 7 couldn't have helped either. Rob Grant's departure as co-writer was perhaps the harbinger of the shark-jumping to come (perhaps Grant wisely foresaw that the show had run its course) - the show was doomed as soon as Grant left. I'm open to correction, but I've always felt that Rob Grant was the comedy-inclined writer and Doug Naylor the science-fiction-inclined one (Grant initially disagreed with adding Kryten to the cast because adding a robot was a "sci-fi cliché," his solo novel "Backwards" was more comedic than Naylor's hard-edged, Cyberpunkish "Last Human"). This explains how Red Dwarf VII failed as a comedy (one of the episodes was co-written by Kim Fuller, who wrote the screenplay of "Spice World." Go figure). Long metaphor gags that were no longer funny. No edge to the humour. Cheap laughs. Naylor and/or the BBC became obsessed with making the show more impressive on the superficial level, to cater to the international (i.e. American) market. Recording on film rather than videotape; replacing puppetry and models with bland, cartoonish CGI (the old, model Red Dwarf kicks the new, computer-generated one's arse); "re-mastering" the old episodes; producing more episodes a season; those awful "Smeg Ups" tapes; and, worst of all, adding an "intelligent" female character to the cast. Why did they feel the need to add another character in Rimmer's absence? Kristine Kochanski (Chloe Annett) belongs up there in the same category as Scrappy Doo, Seven, Paul Falsone and Riley Finn. First of all, as we all know, Chloe Annett is the bizarro-Kochanski. I can believe Lister falling in love with the first, perky, Glaswegian-accented Kochanski (Claire Grogan), but not the snooty, condescending, humourless, politically-correct, English-accented Kochanski (Annett). The very fact that Naylor decided to cast a conventionally attractive actress to play Kochanski (instead of the more down-to-earth original) proves that his first priority was making the show look good to the overseas market. The addition of Kochanski was reminiscent of Rebecca Howe joining the cast of Cheers. In both shows, we have a totally unlikeable, unsympathetic female character, suddenly lumped into the cast, whom the makers of the show try to force us to side with. At least when Rimmer scored points over the others, we laughed with him because he's such a funny, likeably unlikeable sad git. When Kochanski got a sneer at the others, I wanted her to die, preferably exploding like the Mutton Vindaloo Beast. Perhaps Grogan could have salvaged something from the boneheaded notion of adding a female character to the Dwarf crew, but the fake Kochanski never came across as a sympathetic character. She is awful, and what's almost as bad as her character is the fact that the other characters had to devolve in reaction to her. Lister and the Cat lusting after her? We are being force-fed the idea that Lister's ignorance and slovenliness are wrong (Red Dwarf goes PC) and Kochanski is right to look down on him. Bollocks to that! And Kryten becoming a stupid, blubbering mess, forever sobbing about how Kochanski was going to "take" Lister away from him? Before season 7 had ended I was wishing that Kryten would be on the business end of an exceptionally volatile bazookoid. That such a funny, invaluable character could become an unlikeable, whining moron is a testament to the wankery that Red Dwarf sunk to. Even the Cat started to get on my nerves - his clothing-obsessed schtick (i.e. his entire character) had gotten stale, and there has never been a single episode centred around him (plans for a Cat episode in season 7 were scrapped). Season 8 was an improvement - a brave experiment (bringing back the entire crew) that didn't quite pay off, but at least it was a notch above having another season set primarily aboard Starbug (season 6 was enough). In hindsight, Grant and Naylor should have slapped the original ending on to "Out Of Time" as the last scene of season 6, and left that as the last scene of Red Dwarf. Ambiguous and not entirely satisfying perhaps, but at least it meant that Red Dwarf - once the funniest and most inventive show on TV - would not have made the painful, clumsy descent from cult comedy into cash cow. What next? A big-budget Red Dwarf movie with lots of celebrity cameos? The Red Dwarf equivalent of the Mr. Bean movie? Smeggin' hell"

Interestingly enough, the other day I found the transcript of the pilot they made for an american version of the show... Anyone else seen this?

Its here: http://members.allst...transcript.html

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