Do you think Dwarf had a realistic chance of getting bigger/more mainstream?

[tombow]

I know Rob and Doug often bemoan the lost chances of the US show or film helping Dwarf get massive and break the USA the way shows like Dr Who and Sherlock would a few years later. But do you think it was ever likely to happen?

Topic

[Ben Saunders]

Well, exactly how big was it, really? Being the age I am I never experienced its heyday. A lot of similarly-aged people I know irl are fond of Red Dwarf when I bring it up, many more than say the same for Doctor Who (which is obviously MUCH bigger) or other sci-fi shows. Series VIII was pretty big, wasn’t it? I remember seeing repeats of it being trailed on BBC2 in ~2004, and I walked in on my mum watching it on Sky+ one night (she will have gotten into it via osmosis from my dad, as I did).

As far as breaking out into the States, how many British shows have managed that succesfully? The Office is the main one, but other programmes such as Peep Show or The IT Crowd failed miserably. New Who took five-or-six series before it really took off in the States.

[Warbodog]

Sci-fi/“cult” TV was getting bigger and more credible in the US at the time. TNG was getting a spin-off, The X-Files was starting. With Who dormant, Red Dwarf was the main British sci-fi, they probably just wanted to make the most of whatever opportunity they had, and could have built it up too much in their minds.

[Ian Symes]

I don’t think it was ever likely that the show as we know it would ever be truly huge in the US, simply because the format would have made it unsuitable for network TV. You’d either have to cut six or seven minutes out to fit it in a half hour slot, or fiddle around with the schedules to fit in a 40-45 minute slot. Just a big hassle either way for them, which is why a lot of British imports only end up on PBS or cable.

As for the UK, I don’t think it could have been much bigger than it was. Over eight million viewers for a sitcom on BBC2 will never be matched. 

[Dax101]

I think Red Dwarf was entering its prime around Series 8 and then there was all the hype of a movie which just faded to nothing. And the show hasn’t really recovered since.

What I notice about American remakes of British shows is when they are successful they become better known than the British version. So had the USA version worked the British show wouldn’t have been that remembered IMO.

[Dave]

I guess a lot of this is subjective, but in terms of hype and public awareness I think the show’s peak for me was around the time of Series VII starting – through the various broadcasts, repeat runs, videos etc. the show had built up a huge reputation based on the 1-VI era, and then being away for a few years built up a huge sense of expectation for the comeback.

Getting the Radio Times cover for VII seemed like a massive deal at the time, and by that point it had become so popular that it was used as shorthand for UK geekery in general (I remember being slightly put out that the Lee & Herring tour programme had jokes at the expense of geeks that said “…and I probably like Red Dwarf”).

Series VIII was also hyped, but at that point it didn’t seem like it was quite as big a deal, to me.

I’m not sure the hype about a movie ever really cut through to the mainstream in a big way – if it had, we might have got one.

[tombow]

I didn’t even know the US had done “Life on Mars” until I saw the dvd the other day. I was just thinking about how the US Office got bigger but so did Gervais’ stand up. So maybe we’d have been in a timeline where US Dwarf was huge, but Craig Charles is the biggest stand up/DJ in the world.

[Dax101]

Series 8 was sorta sandwiched between the 10th anniversary and a potential movie. All the pieces are kinda to suggest the BBC were very happy with the show and that there was potential for greater success.

The movie had other issues as to why it wasn’t made. From studios having demands to independently trying to find 20 million to make the movie. Also might have helped if Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy done better at the box office.

[RunawayTrain]

I don’t have any coherent thoughts to add about Red Dwarf specifically because I came so late to it, and my experience of TV is solely children’s TV / news / snooker at relatives’ houses until about 2000 so I don’t quite have the common frame of reference for how things were in the 90s.  So what follows are just some musings about what factors may generally influence whether something ‘makes it big’ or not through a relatively very recent lens, feel free to skip:

I sometimes think about how big Sherlock became vs how big Endeavour is/was.  I was on the fringes of Sherlock fandom and loved the show at the start, but looking back it definitely has its problems (and I recall not being able to suspend my disbelief enough for some of the later ones – if even *I* am finding it unbelievable within its own universe, you know it’s not going well). 

Endeavour is SO much better in so many ways, yet it doesn’t seem to be as big.  I did think a major factor was timing, but actually Sherlock started in 2010 and Endeavour in 2012, so not as big a difference as I had thought.  (I watched the early series of both as they were broadcast, just my sense of time is incredibly unreliable!)  And I don’t know enough about the distribution of them to identify any differences in how they were broadcast/consumed internationally.

Perhaps whether things explode or not depends on external circumstances as much as – or maybe potentially more – than the show (or film or … ) itself.  Look at Taskmaster for instance, the decision to make it available internationally on YouTube during the pandemic really helped it explode.  That also coincided with the move to Channel 4; whether that enabled the YouTube availability or whether it was just coincidence, I have no idea.  But without the pandemic (and hometasking) things would undoubtedly be different and it would not be quite so big just yet, despite the show itself fundamentally staying the same. 

Although interestingly a large part of the fanbase activity is on Twitter, and so far seems to be surviving the relentless ‘developments’ consistently making the platform ever worse.  Whereas fandoms on LiveJournal didn’t survive the relative demise there.  I don’t really know how any of this compares to Red Dwarf fandom or how important it was to the popularity of the show. 

(I know that for some, fandom was instrumental in more being made (e.g. original Star Trek, Farscape) and for others it’s pretty much irrelevant.  I don’t know where on the scale Red Dwarf sat in the past.)

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I didn’t even know the US had done “Life on Mars” until I saw the dvd the other day.

If you don’t plan on watching it, and you want to hard roll your eyes at American’s totally not getting something, look up the last 10 mins of the series, what is basically the end of our series 2. 

It’s a case for never letting American’s touch anything of ours ever again. 

[Dax101]

The US version of “Life on Mars” had only 1 season but it did get a proper ending as they were aware they were not getting a season 2. Which is more than a lot of shows get.

[desbug]

Is the first series of Endeavour better than the first series of Sherlock though? I mean this is the sort of topic I come to a Red Dwarf site to find out about.

I would rank the Oxford adjacent series Lewis (if you look past the obvious), then Morse, then Endeavour. I watched Endeavour but I was thinking of Lewis.

But if you didn’t watch Morse with your parents and came to Endeavour without any real history of what went before, maybe that’s a whole different thing?

I agree that Red Dwarf as we know it probably was a big as it could have been in the 90s. In the days before every meme could be custom printed on a t-shirt you were limited to what HMV wanted to flog and you saw people wearing Red Dwarf t-shirts. 

[Flap Jack]

I wondered if RunawayTrain meant to say Elementary (which also started in 2012)? Valid to compare with Endeavour just for both being detective shows, but comparing the 2 “Sherlock Holmes in the modern day” shows is more obvious.

[Hamish]

[Technopeasant]

[Technopeasant]

I walked in on my mum watching it on Sky+ one night

And you were scarred for life.

[RunawayTrain]

No, I did mean Endeavour.  I watched most of Lewis when it aired and really enjoyed it, but I have never felt compelled to rewatch in the way that Endeavour grabbed me.  Maybe I should see if I can rewatch though.

In terms of the first series of each, Sherlock was certainly much more exciting and novel than Endeavour – for all its flaws, that much is undeniable.  And probably who its creators were helped as well, being relatively high-profile particularly with their then-recent involvement in Dr Who.

( … aaand brain now ground to a total halt.  Apologies if any of the above doesn’t make sense or sounds disjointed.  Disjointed would certainly reflect my mind.)

[Flap Jack]

OK, that’s fair enough! I guess Sherlock being so huge compared to Endeavour is due to how ingrained Holmes is in global popular culture compared to Morse who is more Britain specific, and also Sherlock being a modern reinvention while Endeavour is a period accurate reinvention. Also Sherlock had international superstars Tim From The Office and Martin From Cabin Pressure in it.

Slightly ashamed to admit I didn’t realise that Endeavour had the same format as Sherlock (feature length episodes, only a few episodes per series) until looking it up just now. That gives extra reason to compare them, even if Endeavour had more series in total and released them more frequently.

I wonder if Endeavour being a TV series has scuppered all those people who liked to trot out “Do you know what Inspector Morse’s first name was?” as a fun fact to act slightly smug about knowing.

[Ben Saunders]

“I need to watch Sherlock, I love Steven Moffat” – me, dozens of times over the past decade-plus

[Warbodog]

“I need to watch Sherlock, I love Steven Moffat” – me, dozens of times over the past decade-plus

At the time, Sherlock series 2 felt like it was offsetting the decline of DW series 6B that it was partly responsible for.

Jekyll’s more stereotypically Moffat, and 100% written by him, so you might have fun with that. I watched a bit of episode 1 of Dracula, but got bored.

[Dave]

I haven’t watched his new one, Douglas Is Cancelled, yet – anyone checked that out?

[RunawayTrain]

OK, that’s fair enough! I guess Sherlock being so huge compared to Endeavour is due to how ingrained Holmes is in global popular culture compared to Morse who is more Britain specific, and also Sherlock being a modern reinvention while Endeavour is a period accurate reinvention. 

Two excellent points, I genuinely hadn’t thought of that.

“I need to watch Sherlock, I love Steven Moffat” – me, dozens of times over the past decade-plus

Point cheerfully taken!  Though it was explicitly an initial factor for a not insignificant number of people in the vast Wholock subsection of the fandom in the early years.  I can’t speak for outside the fandom though, nor whether it had any bearing on any international broadcasters’ decisions to air it.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

 At the time, Sherlock series 2 felt like it was offsetting the decline of DW series 6B that it was partly responsible for.

So The Final Problem was DW returning the favour, then?

[si]

I haven’t watched his new one, Douglas Is Cancelled, yet – anyone checked that out?

I really want to love it, but I merely like it. Certainly not bingable. It’s reasonable enough, but nothing spectacular. 

[Dave]

Might give it a look, thanks.

[Technopeasant]

Slightly ashamed to admit I didn’t realise that Endeavour had the same format as Sherlock (feature length episodes, only a few episodes per series) until looking it up just now. That gives extra reason to compare them, even if Endeavour had more series in total and released them more frequently.

In fairness, is that not the case for most British mystery series?
Hell, even some American ones like Columbo.

[Flap Jack]

Well, now you’ve put me on the spot, I’m less sure. I was definitely under the impression the more standard approach for crime series is 45 minute or hour long episodes with 6-8 episode series, but I haven’t done the research.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Well, now you’ve put me on the spot, I’m less sure. I was definitely under the impression the more standard approach for crime series is 45 minute or hour long episodes with 6-8 episode series, but I haven’t done the research.

Going on nothing but a general gut feeling from having just existed in the UK for 36 years …
I think a lot of those types of TV detective series (Morse, Frost, stuff like Waking the Dead, anything based on a book like Poirot etc) have only a couple of feature lengths, or 2x two parters a year. Like Sharpe was a couple of TV movies every year.
That’s why there’s so many of them. There is just endless movie length detective series constantly on TV doing the same thing just with different characters all the time. 

[International Debris]

Yeah, they often start as mini-series of three or four weekly episodes, then over time tend to become one-offs. “Series 8” of Morse is spread over five years, a lot of Frost “series” are single episodes or two-parters. 

Waking the Dead and Silent Witness ran as series, but always as runs of two part stories broadcast on consecutive days, a bit like Davison era Who. 

You do get more conventionally structured ones, but they’re often the lighter kinds of show like Death in Paradise.

I get the comparisons between Endeavour and Sherlock in some regards, but on the whole they had very different audiences: the former going for Morse fans and similar, Sherlock being a lot more quirky and aiming for a younger, Who-esque audience. 

[Hamish]

Certainly would not see Sherlock slotting neatly into the PBS Mystery! block.

EDIT: Except it actually did? Huh, I guess I should not make pronouncements when I no longer have satellite TV.

[Technopeasant]

[Ben Paddon]

I haven’t watched his new one, Douglas Is Cancelled, yet – anyone checked that out?

My wife and I planned to watch the first couple of episodes last night and ended up watching the whole lot. I’m an ardent fan of Moffat’s work, while my wife is more critical of him. We both loved it.

[Dave]

Sounds promising!

[si]

Just watched Episodes 3 & 4 actually. Not always a comfortable watch, but certainly a compelling one.

[Dave]

I watched Douglas Is Cancelled and really enjoyed it. I liked that the first two episodes set you up to expect a fairly light satire on cancel culture etc. but then it becomes something a bit deeper and more complex in the back half. It’s always entertainingly written (it feels quite theatrical in that it’s almost exclusively built around People Talking In Rooms) and there are good performances all round too.

[International Debris]

It was initially intended to be a play, which would explain it feeling theatrical.

[Dave]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense then.

[Author]

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