12 TV Sitcom Remakes That Completely Bombed

Just before work began on Red Dwarf V, America came calling with grand visions and big cheques. And so begins the ill-fated tale of Red Dwarf USA. And yes, this one is also by NBC.

When writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (along with Robert Llewellyn reprising his role as Kryten) arrived in Los Angeles, they were greeted with a room of fourteen writers pitching one-liners while ignoring story and character problems. As well as an already written script later described by Naylor as “a kind of botched horrible version of the pilot” that had the fatal flaw of not being tailored to the cast.

This dynamic led to an absolute cluster-smeg of game playing. A sidelined Grant and Naylor (nicknamed “the wave of negativity”) fought for their vision, slipping a new script written overnight under the cast’s hotel rooms as they weren’t allowed to formally show it to them. But despite unanimous cast approval for the new script, events (and probably executives) conspired to make sure that large portions were never shot. Resulting in a pilot closer to the original script.

After the failure of the first pilot, a shorter in-house promo was ordered on the budget of a few thousand dollars. It was ten minutes long, and a mix of stock footage and disconnected scenes with the Cat (originally played by Tony Award winner Hinton Battle) rewritten and recast with Star Trek’s Terry Farrell. As you can expect, no full series was made and the pilots have only ever escaped into the world as bootleg DVDs sold at conventions.