3/5 Flawed, but with the promise of future greatness
  by A. Whitehead (Colchester, Essex United Kingdom)
The mining ship Red Dwarf, five miles long and three miles wide, is making its way through the outer Solar system on a mission to process and refine ore. It's not a particularly compelling job, but Third Technician Dave Lister entertains himself by slobbing out, partying with his friends in the rec rooms and making life a misery for his boss and room-mate, the wound-up, arrogant, ambitious and spectacularly incompetent Arnold J. Rimmer. Lister's fortunes take a turn for the worse when the captain learns he has sneaked a pregnant cat on board in violation of quarantine (cunningly discovered when Lister sent a picture of himself and the cat to be developed in the ship's lab). Unwilling to let his cat be killed and dissected, Lister agrees to forfeit 18 months pay and spend the rest of the trip in stasis.

Of course, when Lister wakes up he discovers some complications ensued whilst he was in temporal stasis. A lethal radiation leak wiped out the crew and the ship's computer, Holly, set course for deep space to avoid exposing anyone else to radiation poisoning. However, he had to wait for the radiation to die down to a safe background level before he could release Lister. Unfortunately, this has taken three million years. As Red Dwarf starts its long journey home, Lister discovers that the only other lifeforms on board are a holographic recreation of Rimmer, created by Holly to 'keep him sane', and a humanoid lifeform who descended and evolved from Lister's cat.

Red Dwarf bears the honour of being the greatest SF sitcom ever made. True, this isn't exactly a difficult achievement (apart from Futurama nothing else is really even on the same radar as Red Dwarf), but nonetheless it is a notable one. It is also fair to say that the show took a good year or so to get into its stride, and watching this first season again twenty-one years on is a bit of a mixed bag. On one level most of the ingredients of its later greatness are there and there are some excellent ideas and gags, but on another the show is hamstrung by insanely low production values and a lack of experience on the part of its main cast, resulting in a series that is quite variable in quality.

The first episode, cunningly entitled The End, sets up the basic premise and does so quite well, running through the set-up in half an hour and establishing a long-term goal for the crew (a goal which seems to be increasingly forgotten as the show continues). There's some good laughs, but the low-budget sets (grey, grey and more grey) mean that it feels very cheap although, at great odds with contemporary British SF series like Doctor Who, the actual model shots of the ship itself are excellent and remain impressive. The cast is a mixed bag, consisting of a dancer (Danny John-Jules as the Cat), a stand-up poet (Craig Charles as Lister), an impressionist and voice-over artist (Chris Barrie as Rimmer) and a stand-up comedian (Norman Lovett as the ship's computer, Holly). They all bring great enthusiasm to their roles but their lack of experience come through in some scenes, particularly with Craig Charles who tends to shout most of his lines as if he's still doing a punk-poetry recital in a noisy Liverpool bar. As the season progresses, however, the cast seems to learn that less is more and they relax into their roles.

The second episode, Future Echoes, sets up the future format of Red Dwarf quite successfully. A hard or at least semi-serious SF idea is introduced, in this case breaching the light barrier, and comic ideas are spun off from this concept. More groundwork is laid for the future as Lister gets some glimpses of how his life will turn out (some ideas of which are eventually explored and resolved in future seasons) and Chris Barrie deserves a round of applause for a scene where he has to perform the exact same scene twice with no effects trickery at all. A clever idea, well-explored. Balance of Power sees Lister and Rimmer's struggle for supremacy and rank reaching a new level when Lister decides to take the chef's exam so he outranks Rimmer and is an amusing episode. Waiting for God explores the history of the Cat race and Lister's position in their religion, but it's more vaguely amusing and a bit silly than genuinely funny or clever. Rimmer's speech about the Quagaars (an alien race he hopes who will appear and give him a proper body) is the episode's highlight. The premise of Confidence and Paranoia is completely daft - Lister contracts mutated pneumonia which makes gives his hallucinations solid form - but played amusingly. The season finale, Me 2, sees Rimmer joined by another hologram and the ensuing struggle for dominance is quite entertaining.

Overall these are entertaining episodes, but there's clearly a lot of work to be done. The Cat in particular comes across as quite distant and even cold in these early episodes, not caring if Lister dies in one scene and cracking jokes during another tragic moment. It's true to the idea behind the character, perhaps (cats don't really care about people, only where their next meal is coming from), but it makes him hard to like. Many of Rimmer's character traits are set up in this season but until the finale he mostly comes across as pathetic rather than sympathetic or with pathos, which the later seasons manage more successfully.

Still, all the ingredients for the series' later greatness are here in full, and watched in the knowledge of how fantastic this series gets later, Season I (Red Dwarf's seasons are numbered in Roman numerals for reasons never adequately explained) becomes more interesting in retrospect. First-time viewers may find themselves wondering what all the fuss is about, but I recommend them to stick with it as it does improve immensely in the second season.

The extras on the DVD set are quite impressive. All six episodes have full cast commentaries, whilst there is a detailed documentary exploring how the series was created, written and produced and the immense problems Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had getting it on air. The extras are genuinely impressive and well worth a look.

Red Dwarf: Season I (***) is available now on DVD in the UK and USA.

5/5 I love this Show!
  by Gerald Smith (Los Angeles)
While it may not have the same satirical sophestication of 3-6, I still love the first season. It's one of the few shows where the inconsistancies aren't annoying but actually add to the fun of a great show! Brilliant!

5/5 Smeggin Brilliant Man!
  by mechgogo (Minnesota)
Right. I've been a Red Dwarf fan since I first stumbled upon an early episode back in the mid 90's. But the vagaries of local scheduling were such that I never was able to see more than half a dozen episodes from the whole series. Just enough to know I was missing out on something truly brilliant. The Season 1 set fixed that. It arrived in a timely fashion. The packaging was pristine and the episodes themselves were a blast. Not much in the way of over the top humor but some good laughs. The acting was solid and the writing first rate. "Oh thats our scutter droid stabbim" . Brilliant. If you like good science fiction or just good programing where the emphasis is on character interaction and not a bunch of FX get this and the other seven seasons in the series. Well worth it.


3/5 Given the show's reputation, watching Season One was a major disappointment
  by Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
I had long hoped and needed (for a research project I'm undertaking) to watch RED DWARF. I'd heard many, many good things about it over the years and looked forward to seeing this with enormous anticipation.

I was so disappointed! One of the reasons I had wanted to see this was because it had been depicted often as a great Sci-fi series. It most certainly is not. It is a low-budget comedy with a Sci-fi background. But the nuts and bolts of the show are comic. The Sci-fi elements are purely props.

Even more disappointing was the extraordinarily low budget aspect of the whole show. There are only three or four extremely cheap sets upon which all of the show takes places, giving the show a static, immobile feel.

What we are left with is a mildly funny series. I've long been a fan of British humor, but I don't find this to be on the level of MONTY PYTHON, FAWLTY TOWERS, THE OFFICE, or THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN. The extremely small cast is likable (and also oppressingly male -- I hope to god that a few women are added to the cast in subsequent seasons) and the writing solid if not outstanding.

My hope is that the show gets better as it goes along. it is possible that the passionate reviews here represent the reviewers feelings about the show as a whole and not just the first one. Hopefully the cast will expand and we will not be restricted to only a few males. And hopefully it will not be so extremely low budget. Those who have seen the show will know whether or not this is true. But as a reviewer I have to review not subsequent seasons, but Season One alone. And the brute truth is that while Season One is mildly entertaining, it is not an especially great show. But hopefully I'll change my opinion with future seasons.

5/5 The British version
  by Cynthia J. Simpson
Red Dwarf: Series 1

The DVDs are the British version of the show, so they're slightly different than the American version. However, that didn't detract at all. I thoroughly enjoyed the shows and the bonus material.