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Red Dwarf was exactly like Buffy, in that it had an excellent central premise that it threw away after three series when the writers realised that, if they were to stick to it, they'd have to exercise some imagination.
You're right, Boboss, about that core idea, although really it was about one bloke in a cold, indifferent and - with the one exception that he himself provided - entirely empty universe. It carried on with that idea, by and large, until in the fourth series the writers decided to pretend that they'd never said anything about there being no other life in the universe - when, actually, that had been made explicit in a number of the previous episodes - and suddenly alien life was everywhere.
And so was cheap satire. And so was horrifically ugly fandom. And so was a sudden death of wit and intelligence.
Don't know how to progress your own concept? Easy. Abandon it and pretend like what you're doing now is what you always meant to do in the first place.
Red Dwarf did a Pratchett. Instead of being a sly commentary on the conventions of the genre it was ostensibly a part of, it lazily began to take itself very seriously indeed as a genuine part of the genre, in line with the increasing nerdism of a fanbase that appeared from out of nowhere. When you start having conventions dedicated to you, you know you've become a part of the establishment. In a very, very bad way.
That old load of balls about the best comedy being based in tragedy, it kind of worked for those intitial few series of this show. There was a clear tragedy there. Then it became a pantomime and the search for laughs began and ended with the next gurning expression that Chris Fucking Barrie or Scrapheap Challenge could screw out of themselves. Like Jim Carrey, only even more annoying.
I said this elsewhere when the news of the new eipsodes first appeared, but it bears repeating: if you liked the idea of Red Dwarf, but found that it never lived up to a premise that it could have done great things with, John carpenter's Dark Star is the movie that was made for you.
And also a movie that Grant and Naylor had seen a number of times when developing their concept.
I love it, by the way. Dark Star. Not Red Dwarf. |
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