Hoo boy. Red Dwarf has had more than its fair share of trouble over the years:
Series I
- Series I was held up for six months by industrial action at The BBC. They also had so much trouble finding studio audiences that co-creator Doug Naylor had to go around pubs near the studio to recruit audience members. The recording of "The End" went so smegging badly that they had to do it again at the end of the series with a reworked script.
Series II
- The original location shoot on a beach for "Better Than Life" was an unmitigated disaster due to high winds and freezing temperatures. The scenes in question were eventually rewritten and re-filmed to take place on a golf course.
- Craig Charles had to leave the location filming of "Thanks for the Memory" because his wife was in labour with their first child. As Lister was wearing a spacesuit for the scenes in question, floor manager Mike Agnew was able to step in, although he was about eight inches taller than Craig, for whom the costume had been fitted, making for an uncomfortable experience.
- During the pre-record filming of "Stasis Leak", Clare Grogan was accidentally sent home before the last scene had been filmed. Kochanski was thus "played" in the last scene by floor manager Dona DiStefano, wearing a hat that obscured most of her face, and with no lines.
Series IV
- While Series IV in general wasn't overly problematic, two episodes caused troubles during filming.
- The first was "White Hole", where director Ed Bye fell ill and was hastily replaced by the show's executive producer, Paul Jackson, who soon came into conflict with Danny John-Jules after the latter was late to set, with Jackson later frequently chewing him out for flubbing lines during the shoot.
- The second troublesome episode was "Meltdown", which had problems with terrible weather at their location (which forced the withdrawal of the original Gandhi actor after he came down with a cold), which also happened to be on the flight path to Heathrow airport, forcing filming to be stopped whenever a plane flew overhead.
- Then, the outbreak of the Gulf War caused the BBC to reshuffle the originally intended broadcast order, with "Meltdown" and the earlier "Dimension Jump" having to move to the end of the run. Had hostilities not ended when they did, those episodes could have been delayed for months.
Series V
- Series V suffered from the departure of long-standing director Ed Bye. His replacement, Juliet May, soon proved to be totally out of her element on the show, resulting in the intended season premiere "Demons and Angels" having to be punted back to being the penultimate episode when it turned out that not one of the complicated split-screen shots required to show the crew's "high" and "low" forms was usable. As the season wore on it quickly became apparent that the cast had lost any respect they had for May, resulting in creator Rob Grant and Doug Naylor cutting their losses, firing May and directing the remainder of the season themselves.
Red Dwarf USA
- The abortive pilot for the American remake suffered from friction between Grant Naylor and the American creative team, the latter of whom quickly adopted a The Complainer Is Always Wrong stance and shut their British counterparts out of the writing process. Not to be deterred, Grant and Naylor rewrote the pilot script themselves, and the cast and director much preferred their script, but the American producers insisted on going ahead with the original version, which proved a bomb. Not to be deterred, Grant and Naylor managed to shoot a second pilot, a glorified promo reel with No Budget... which got an even worse reception than the first pilot, and killed the whole thing completely.
Series VI
- Grant and Naylor returned to the UK fully intending to write and direct Series VI themselves, with full creative control, only for The BBC to pour cold water on that dream by giving them just four months to write and film the whole series, forcing them to hire another new director (who, fortunately, proved up to the job this time). The rushed schedule forced a much bigger reliance on Running Gags than in previous years, and resulted in the season finale, "Out of Time" being written as it was being shot, with the script being typed directly onto autocues for the cast to read from. To boot, Grant and Naylor then had second thoughts about the original ending to the series and decided to turn it into a cliffhanger; as it was much too late to recall the cast, they had to improvise the cliffhanger in the edit suite using what had already been filmed.
Series VII
- Series VII had a lot of trouble just getting to the point where they could even make it:
- Craig Charles was imprisoned due to a (eventually proven false) rape allegation, while Chris Barrie decided that he wanted to leave the show to focus on his own sitcom, The Brittas Empire (eventually just starring in two episodes of Series VII, with cameos in two more).
- More seriously however, the strain of Red Dwarf USA and Series VI had caused the Grant Naylor writing partnership to collapse, leaving Doug Naylor to write the show alongside a bunch of new writers whose work always required extensive retooling.
- While the more ambitious single-camera production methods paid dividends with the early episodes, they caused the series to run into serious budget problems later on, eventually forcing the Cat-centric episode "Identiy Within" (ironically, one of the few outside-written scripts that didn't have any major issues) to be abandoned in favour of the hastily-written "Duct Soup".
- The BBC Visual Effects Department had, in the intervening years since Series VI, been subjected to rule changes that meant they could not provide their services at a lower rate than external effects houses. This meant that, in order to keep it in-budget, the model shots had to be done on low-quality film stock, and the effects budget actually ran out before the halfway point of the series. This resulted in the Visual Effects Department never being used on the show again, and a single freelance CGI artist having to do half of the season's effects work out of his bedroom in the space of a few weeks — Naylor later said that if not for the production team having found that artist, they would probably have had to cut the season short at the sixth episode, "Beyond a Joke".
Series VIII
- Series VIII was planned to start with an hour-long special, "Back in the Red". However, various production difficulties beset the series as filming went on, with several episodes having to be cancelled entirely as the budget ran out. The only way to reach the required number of episodes was to split BITR into not two, but three parts, and go back and shoot new material. Resultantly, many scenes in the final episodes - especially Part Three - were either written specifically to pad the thing out, or were reshot to pad them out, including making Overly Long Gags go on for even longer, a three-minute flashforward scene that adds nothing to the plot whatsoever, and recaps of the previous episode that go on for inordinately long times.
- "Pete" was also originally a one-part story before it had to become a two-parter for similar reasons; the second part is effectively just a 30-minute piece of Padding in its entirety, relying on many of the same tricks pulled with BITR.
- Then the season finale came along. Doug Naylor initially wrote a ludicrously over-ambitious episode that would have seen Red Dwarf finally return to Earth, which couldn't be afforded largely because they had blown the budget on a CGI dinosaur for "Pete", before hastily writing the actual season-ending episode, "Only the Good". Filming of that episode went well, albeit with Naylor having to pay for an all-important model out of his own pocket due to the budget having completely run out. But then Naylor decided to ditch the original ending (which clearly set up a Series IX) in favour of a more open-ended conclusion that would allow him to end the TV series and do a Continuity Reboot with the planned Red Dwarf: The Movie, while still doing Series IX if he wanted to. This resulted in the episode's eventual ending being something they thought of only minutes before shooting, with no idea how they were going to resolve it. There are four different endings to that series: two which were filmed but unused, one which was going to be filmed but cancelled so late that the cast were actually in costume ready to shoot it, and the ultimately used ending which replaced the cancelled ending at the last minute, and required the director to step in to play one of the parts using a costume nicked from another series.
Back to Earth, a.k.a. Series IX
- After Red Dwarf: The Movie died in Development Hell, the eventual Series IX took the form of a three-part miniseries called "Back to Earth" for digital channel Dave. Unfortunately, they only had the budget for a two-part miniseries; it was originally supposed to be accompanied by a standalone special named Red Dwarf Unplugged, in which the cast would have performed classic Red Dwarf sketches before a live audience. However, during a run-through it was realized that the special simply didn't work on any level whatsoever. Since Grant Naylor was still under contract to provide three episodes however, they had to stretch their minimal budget out in any way they could. Some of the crew worked for nothing, and a few filler and slow-motion segments were added to stretch out the time.
Series X
- Series X had a myriad of problems which began from two things.
- Firstly, the new channel, Dave, did not budget for the live studio audience for each episode. This wasn't a problem back when the BBC were still making the show, as they handled that in-house, but Grant Naylor had to hire an external agency to provide the audience at considerable expense, which in turn caused nearly all the season's location scenes to be scrapped (it being a choice between that and the studio audience, as they could only afford one; the only location filming in the entire series is a single scene in "Lemons", which was filmed in the backyard of Shepperton Studios). Concerns over audience members leaking spoilers also meant Naylor had to fight to convince Dave to allow an audience at all; he eventually won, and Dave's fears proved unfounded.
- Secondly, the season's intended producer, Jo Howard (who had worked on the show in various capacities since Series III, and produced "Back to Earth") was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, which claimed her life not long afterwards. She was hastily replaced by Doug Naylor's son Richard, who did an admirable job given the circumstances, but made several beginner's mistakes which caused filming to be incredibly rushed.
- Thirdly, the cancellation of all the location filming meant that the originally planned episodes 5 & 6 were now unusable despite having been written; both had to be thrown out, and replacements were being written whilst the other four were being filmed. Only half of the new episode 5, "Dear Dave", could be filmed in front of an audience because that was all that had been written, and they had to go back later, film new material on greenscreen and splice it together. (The new episode 6 managed to avoid similar problems by cannibalising the script for the abandoned movie.)
- The company hired to do the special effects specialised in CGI effects and weren't as skilled at model work. Their efforts with the models were eventually deemed unusable as they would have required extensive digital enhancement that was outside the series' budget. As a result all of the model shots had to be redone with new, higher-quality, models.
- On top of all this, there was a camera problem that required substantial re-editing on the first episode of the season, something not helped when all the rushes went missing. Things got so bad that when the cast and crew were being interviewed for the behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD, they still weren't sure if they were going to be able to get a complete series on air.
Series XII
- Series XI and XII were filmed back-to-back, and generally went smoothly (thanks to another production company being brought in to take some of the pressure off Doug Naylor), with XI being a rare example of an entire series of the show being produced mostly free of incident (barring a fire alarm going off midway through the live audience recording for "Samsara"). The first recorded episode of XII, "Siliconia", didn't fare so well, with the prosthetics the regular cast were required to wear for the episode making Chris Barrie ill, meaning some of the scenes meant to be filmed on location had to be cancelled. Robert Llewellyn also came down sick during the filming of "Timewave", and the knock-on effect was that the date in which the finale was filmed in front of the studio audience had to be moved to accommodate the missing scenes from the earlier episodes (and even then they were not able to pick up all of the missing scenes, which resulted in some plotting issues with the broadcast episodes).
The Promised Land
- Robert Llewellyn fell ill mid-shoot, with a body double in an immobile mask filling in for some shots until he had recovered enough to continue filming and reshoot missed scenes, in particular some scenes aboard the Iron Star. The real trouble occurred just before the episode aired; according to reports that emerged the following year, Creative Differences saw Doug and Richard Naylor completely removed from any further involvement with the franchise, and saw co-creator Rob Grant placed in sole control of the rights. This has put the franchise as a whole in Development Hell, with it being unclear what plans, if any, Grant has to continue it by himself. However, as of March 2023, these legal issues have seemingly been resolved with Grant and Naylor to continue with separate iterations of the franchise.
