Okay, I know, but hear me out.

If you haven’t encountered it, Red Dwarf was an 80s / 90s science fiction comedy that has definitely aged interestingly, but still has a solid fanbase. Lister, a low-ranking engineer on the mining spaceship Red Dwarf is put into stasis as punishment for smuggling his pregnant cat aboard. In the meantime, a radiation leak kills everyone else on board, and the ship’s computer, Holly, keeps him in suspended animation until the radiation dies down. When Lister is eventually revived, he discovers that the computer is senile, the cat has led to a single, highly evolved but self-absorbed descendent, and everyone is dead. To his horror, his smarmy, overbearing, deeply insecure supervisor — who caused the leak to begin with — is resurrected as a hologram. Now lost in deep space, the rest of the series loosely revolves around finding their way back to Earth.

So, look. Some of the jokes are maybe a little out of date, and even the creators were a bit embarrassed by the first season. (It really comes into its own from Red Dwarf III onwards.) But the concept is really solid. It’s a different kind of story: if you squint a bit, it shares DNA with Alien, in the sense that it’s about the lowest-ranking member of a future crew (something that’s still really rare in commercial science fiction) whose life is subjected to the whims of corporate decision-making far above him. There are also parallels that indicate the need: at the time, Red Dwarf was an antidote to more earnest genre shows like Blake’s Seven and my beloved Doctor Who. A similar positioning has worked pretty well for Deadpool, which followed a long string of superhero movies. So, like, I guess what I’m saying is, an update could work.

Okay, so they’re actually still making the show, as well as a prequel. My controversial opinion is that the existing format needs to be radically updated, and just making more of the same show that they were making in the eighties isn’t quite right. Get some fresh creators in there, make the jokes more pointed and a bit less banter-down-the-pub, re-cast it while paying tribute to the existing characters, and I think there’s something really special there.

That’s all. Please carry on. More tech commentary etc to follow.