iamwidescreen

File under ‘things they shouldn’t have done’

There is always something slightly apalling and creepy about bringing back ‘cult’ characters in the same old milieu and one has to work hard to avoid the ‘Oh God, look how old and fat they all look’ factor that Star Trek mostly avoided in their movies by having storylines, plots and knowing humour. Not so much with the much vaunted ‘Red Dwarf’ reunion(s). I watched the first episode with growing disgust and puzzlement. How could they have all gotten it so wrong? Not since the legendary Jar Jar binks first pissed all over our childhoods had I witnessed such a terrible rendering of a former favourite. This crap was not Red Dwarf. It was just a group of seedy looking actors who had found it difficult to sustain a career after the original show ended. And here they were back in costume, in character and cracking wise. Except it wasn’t- Wise, that is. It was instead the most awful dumbed down dribbly shit I had seen in a long while. 

 Neither funny nor charming, it was just dialogue and acting that was not so much phoned in as sent from a distant shittier galaxy. All of the crew looked like they’d rather be drinking or having a curry and a spliff than working their way through the painfully obvious attempts to relive past glories and be that high school quarterback prom king champ once more, but with a bit more of a middle aged gut and lack of enthusiasm. 

 If you’re going to bring back a tv show, try and actually do something with it- look at why it was popular back then and what made it tick and proceed from there. What the Red Dwarf writers did here was just pastiche old episodes and pile cliche upon cliche and leave it all on 350 degrees for the whole episode each episode. Not good enough, people, not anywhere near good enough- the show, the actors and especially us loyal fans deserve a lot better than this.