It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere...
In 1992, during the lacuna between the fifth and sixth seasons of Red Dwarf, something truly monstrous was born.
Throughout the history of international televisual relations between the USA and the UK, there has been a relationship as 'special' in its one-sided way as the toxic abusive battered-wife syndrome relationship of a political alliance. While the UK has always happily hoovered (in a vacuum cleaner sense, rather than a Herbert or a J. Edgar sense) up many a US TV export and presented it in its original unexpurgated glory to the Great Unwashed British Public, our Stateside cousins have generally opted to remake British TV shows tailored to more Americanised (or 'Americanized') tastes, with the Anglo originals relegated to PBS (with very few exceptions: back in the dim and flickering shadows of the 1960s the antics of Steed and Mrs Peel in ABC's [Associated British Corporation] The Avengers may have aired on ABC [the American Broadcasting Company], but this was a pretty rare exception).
There is a long litany of popular UK sitcoms being reinvented for American TV over the decades, some with great success (Galton and Simpson's Steptoe and Son switching race to become the highly popular African-American Sanford and Son, the bigoted Alf Garnett of Johnny Speight's Till Death Do Us Part translating into Archie Bunker of All in the Family and Man About the House spawning the popular Three's Company and its spinoff/continuation Three's a Crowd) and some less successful (even the star power of Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, failing to help the quickly-canned Viva Laughlin! achieve the success of its Lancastrian forbear Blackpool - while the Indianapolis-relocated Men Behaving Badly made the twin errors of casting Rob Schneider in the lead Martin Clunes role and underestimating the prudishness of the mainstream audience).
So when the popular BBC2 sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf made the leap across the pond (facilitated by vice president of MCA Universal's Comedy Development department Brad Johnson) and the Mancunian originators and co-writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor found themselves nonplussed in a writer's room and branded "The Wave" - short for "The Wave of Negativity" - for not meshing with the culture of emitted braying false laughter at every attempted gag being pitched around the table, signs and portents were not great for the Stateside incarnation of a show trumpeted as being a smash hit on PBS that was watched by a avid fans such as Bill Clinton and Madonna and had Star Trek: the Next Generation's Patrick Stewart phoning his lawyer to sue over copyright infringement. The first couple of these factoids were of course exaggerations and untruths partially put about by Grant and Naylor themselves, the last is - bafflingly - apparently true.
And so the ill-fated pilot (well, pilot and a half - it'll all make sense, probably) episode of Red Dwarf U.S.A. was born, like the scion of the cripple and the idiot. Please note before cancelling that this is a Red Dwarf reference and not some kind of bizarre outburst of bigoted ableism on my part, yeah? And thus it was that the first attempt at an American take on Grant Naylor's space sitcom - bizarrely spawned from a viewing of John Carpenter and Dan O' Bannon's film school project Dark Star via the radio segment Dave Hollins: Space Cadet - begins:
Our twenty five and a half minute (four and a half minutes shorter than the original Red Dwarf opening episode 'The End', presumably to incorporate corporate commercial breaks) pilot opens with the same gag that had opened the show's third BBC season three years earlier: the ludicrously speeded-up Star Wars style scroll, here utilised as a scene setter rather than to gloss over cast and set changes and hastily resolve a cliffhanger.
"Red Dwarf
The story so far...
By the latter half of the twenty-second century, huge space cruisers powered by hydrogen ram-jet drives had colonized the outer fringes of our solor [sic] system. Human kind was poised to explore the dark mysteries of deep space.
We wish we could have told you stories about those brave men and women but we couldn't afford it. Instead what you're getting is this.
This is the story of a beat-up old mining ship which ambles between Earth and the moons of Saturn, transporting raw materials which are badly needed by someone.
Is it just me, or does this sound really tedious? No one's going to like this. A show about people who move rocks from planet to planet? Intergalactic rock movers? Who are we kidding?
I didn't even want to be a writer. Do you realize how hard it is to type this fast? My fingers are bleeding.
Uh oh. Looks like we're slowing back down. I'd better start making sense again, so all the cheapos who don't have a VCR with freeze frame will think they really missed out on something important.
Ahem...
...Which you really need to know to understand this story."
Yeah, not as funny as the original version, is it? There'll be a lot of that.
We then get a title sequence that mixes the footage of a space suited Lister painting the outer hull of the ship that opened the first two seasons - but scored not with Howard Goodall's original slow opening theme that communicated the lonely vastness of a godless universe, but instead a sort AOR/MOR soft rock monstrosity courtesy of Todd Rundgren, who really should have known better - and various model shot of the small rouge one and Starbug with inserts of the new cast, all take from the upcoming episode.
Writer (and 'developer') Linwood Boomer's script isn't simply a straight Americanisation of 'The End', but instead takes the general outline and main story points of the series' genesis and mixes in elements of Grant Naylor's debut novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers. We are introduced to the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel Red Dwarf (apparently a Class 5 miner/freighter with a cargo capacity of 47 cubic miles), replete with Zocalo-style shopping arcade and zero gravity sporting amenities, by the ship's computer Holly 6000 (Frasier's Daphne Moon herself Jane Leeves [though she wouldn't land her most famous role for another year, and wouldn't have if this show had been picked up so it's best for all that timeline was aborted really], who is the best of the recasts and seems to be having a blast in the role). We then meet the ships holographic crewmember Officer Munson (Michael Heintzman), taking up the plot role of George McIntyre and expositing to camera; oddly, here the holograms are marked out not with an 'H' emblazoned on their forehead but with a circular red dot. It was bad enough coming across a Quora conspiracy theory about Chinese people not believing in skeletons (because of China's censoring of certain video games), we don't need one about all Hindu people being dead!
We then meet service mechanoid Kryten, played as always (well, not always; everywhere except in the character's eponymous debut episode where he was portrayed by David Ross) by Robert Llewellyn. Llewellyn would be the sole actor from the UK show to make the transition, though Chris Barrie was asked to reprise Rimmer but balked at signing the standard US TB five year contract. Llewellyn gives his normal Kryten performance, complete with Herman Munster walk and expressions, though the make up job doesn't look quite right even through the haze of a crappy nth generation copy. Making his way through the ship's corridors in search of the commanding officer Captain Tau, Kryten encounters Dave Lister (Craig Bierko, probably the most controversial recast as the slobby everyman Lister is played by an actor who almost landed the role of Joey Tribbiani in Friends; it's odd to see Lister as a square-jawed all-American hunk, though Bierko's likeability and charisma is great) and Arnold Rimmer (Chris Eigeman, who plays all of Rimmer's nasally, prissy dislikeability without Barrie's shades of pathos - but it is weirdly fitting to have Lister and Rimmer played by actors named Craig and Chris respectively) as they fulfill their important function of maintaining the craft's chicken soup machines. When Rimmer is called away on a confectionery-related emergency via his beeper - because this a very late '80s/early '90s 22nd century - Lister takes Kryten and explains his backstory: how he had to sign up aboard the ship after he got drunk (in Detroit, rather than Liverpool) and woke up on the fourth moon of Saturn, material cribbed from the Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers novel.
After on again-off again girlfriend Christine [sic] Kochanski (Elizabeth Morehead) renders their relationship permanently off due to his lackadaisical coasting through life, Lister takes Kryten into his confidence about Frankenstein, the cat he had illegally smuggled aboard in contravention of space quarantine after rescuing 'him' from a being served up in a Titanese restaurant - Kryten has to point out that 'he' is pregnant rather than just gaining weight from all the beer Lister's been putting in the cat's drinking bowl. Lister asks Kryten to hide his feline friend from detection by Holly and the captain. Alas, the subterfuge is captured on the security cameras, and Lister and Kryten are hauled up in front of the captain (Lorraine Toussaint). When Lister refuses to talk, and Kryten self-destructs after being ordered to disclose the errant cat's whereabouts (giving a pretty amusing sight gag - in all senses - of his eyeballs landing in a crewmember's cup of coffee), the punishment is meted out of Lister being frozen for six months in suspended animation. When he's finally released from the stasis booth by a far daffier than usual Holly, he takes a while to grasp the situation.
"There was an accident, Dave. A radiation leak. The entire crew was subjected to a lethal does of Cadmium 2."
"Is everyone okay?"
"Everybody's dead, Dave. That's what 'lethal' means."
Finding himself the last human alive almost three million years in the future ("My baseball cards must be worth a fortune!") with an eccentric computer and a holographically resurrected Rimmer for company, Lister is happy to discover the sentient but still disassembled Kryten, whose head has been stuck on a shelf whiling away the millennia by reading the fire exit sign opposite him. Meanwhile, an 'alien' life form has been detected down in the cargo hold - which is introduced in a slightly janky matte shot that seems to aim to replicate the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark - the same part of the ship that Kryten concealed the cat. Venturing into the hold, they encounter the humanoid Cat (the sadly recently departed Hinton Battle, probably best known to genre fans as the musical demon Sweet from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'Once More, With Feeling' instalment), the last mutated and evolved scion of Frankenstein's line. Assembling in the drive room, this ragtag crew try to help Lister overcome his existential ennui ("I started out with absolutely nothing... and I couldn't hold on to it!"), and are aided in buoying up his spirits by a quick visit from their future selves - with Kochanski joining Lister, Cat and Kryten in Rimmer's place in a weird foreshadowing of Red Dwarf VII five years early. Lister resolves to get them back home to Earth, even if the road back entails encountering "parallel universes, time warps, black holes... y'now... space stuff!"
When the decision was made by the higher-ups to fire not only Boomer (is it so wrong of me to hope that the memo he was sent regarding his dismissal began "OK Boomer"?) but most of the cast except for Bierko and Llewellyn, Grant and Naylor decided to helm the second attempt themselves. Instead of a full second pilot episode - a 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' to Melman's 'The Cage', if you like... what, you don't like? Bloody sod the lot of you - the Grant Naylor effort would take the form of a short promo reel to convey the idea of the projected new series and spotlight the main characters (including fresh recasts).
Shot as a 'promo reel' rather than a full-blown pilot episode, this second go contained quite a bit of footage from season V's 'Terrorform' as well as new sequences including bookend scenes of Lister and Rimmer (now played with more authentically Rimmerish traits by Anthony Fusco, with the hologrammatic 'H' duly reinstated rather than the red circle) recording a message on the ship's black box - scenes which bear an uncanny similarity to Llewellyn's Kryten linking narration on the Smeg Ups VHS. We get a recreation of the opening bunkroom scene from 'Backwards' with Fusco's Rimmer taking the place of Danny John-Jules' Cat in the 'Wilma Flintstone or Betty Rubble?' discussion, as well as scenes of Bierko and Leeves from the first pilot, with close-ups of Fusco spliced in to replace Eigeman. Lister then introduces us to the new female version of Cat (Terry Farrell, in the same year she was on the big screen in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and a year before starting his long stint as the Trill Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [which as any discerning viewer knows is the best Star Trek]), descended from "a common alley cat" with nine lives, a fearless warrior ethos, a slinky predatory sexuality and back-combed hair.
We then get a selection of scenes "from future episodes" (feel that optimism) including recreations of 'Marooned' (with "Cup a Noodle" substituted for Pot Noodle) and a reformatted version of 'The Last Day' retitled 'Shutdown' that gave Fusco's Rimmer and Farrell's Cat a good dialogue exchange that would later be used for the Barrie and John-Jules originals in season VI.
In all, a very interesting doomed experiment and a glimpse into a parallel reality that was never to be. Jane Leeves is a great Holly, and after getting over the initial shock of such a different portrayal of Lister Craig Bierko is certainly charming and likeable and doing well with the material. What we see of Fusco's Rimmer is much closer to the 'proper' portrayal and could have worked well, and Farrell's Cat is certainly an interesting - if totally different - take on the character that's valid in it's own right.
Maybe if they'd reshot the pilot with this cast it would have been better; then again it's impossible to argue with Craig Charles' comment that it would have been White Dwarf with nary a non-caucasian cast member. So maybe it's better for everyone - including Leeves and Farrell's careers - that it didn't happen. After all, we might never have got Red Dwarf VI if this had worked out.
And a universe without 'Gunmen of the Apocalypse' in it scarcely bears thinking about.
