Hi think they are planning or thinking about doing a couple more series now. If they could get Rob Grant back on the writing team then I think it'd be good again.
It was mentioned in the storyline of this special that the characters have already done a 9th & 10th series. Whether life will imitate art is anyones guess.
ramon wrote:
Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote the first 6 series (which were funny).
I agree that 1-6 were great. Though I would say that the first two were superior to the next four. In my opinion the dialogue was much better.
ramon wrote:
Then Doug Naylor wrote the last two on his own. Not that Doug Naylor isn't funny, I think if Rob Grant wrote on his own it still probably wouldn't be as good as if they wrote it together. (Out of the books they've written on their own though, Rob Grant is funnier).
The shows took a marked dip in writing quality in the last two series.
The special was as I expected, a parody of a parody of a parody. One good thing it did though, was encourage me to dig into my DVD collection and watch the old Red Dwarf episodes.
Series 1 and 2 were the best - they were a sitcom in space, which was what the original concept was. Series 3 was good, with a good mix of the original style of character comedy and a bit of sci-fi.
Series 4 was when it started to go downhill. That was when they tried too hard to make the series fit in with the novels and leaned more towards sci-fi and "alternative" comedy than standard character based comedy. Series 5 was the same as series 4, but both had thier high (and low) points. Back To Reality was comedy genius and was also a good scifi story!
Series 6 was where they really lost the plot. Between series 5 and 6 the red dward smegazine ran a poll asking what people were hoping for in series 6. The answer were to have more stuff on the ship instead of hopping about on Starbug, more character based situations and to bring back the original Holly. So what was Series 6? Red Dwarf is missing, Holly is gone, and the crew is stuck on Starbug! Crazy!
At the same time, there was a huge leap towards more sci-fi stories and the comedy became really formulaic - Calling Kryten names and childish jokes about the Cat's nose became the standard. Gone were the old character moments and in came an action adventure format. Series 7 was basically the same: sci-fi with the occasional joke.
Series 8 at least tried to get back to the original format! Red Dwarf was back, and the whole series was on the ship. The original Holly was back! Sadly, so were the rest of the crew, thus killing the "last human alive" concept. So close! Series 8 was better than 6 and 7 but didn't quite recapture the original 2 series charm. Better production values seemed to take over and the scripting suffered - even the acting seemed to suffer, overshadowed by CGI and pretty sets. Still, it was a start, and looked hopeful to be the start of something better.
Sad. hey need to ditch the fancy graphics and the "high drama" concepts and get back to basics - get a good team of writers (comedy writers, that is) and start writing COMEDY again. yeah, it's in space, but for the love of god it was created as a SITCOM!!! Where are Lister's dirty shirts these days? The slobbiest man in the universe is now just another hairy biker!
