Review for Lexx: The Complete Series

(NOTE: This review only covers Season One on this set which includes all four seasons in a nineteen disk box set.)

By the end of the nineties it seemed that everyone was making fantasy or sci-fi shows: Buffy, Charmed, Babylon 5, Stargate and the multiple Star Trek series. One that slipped under my radar was a show called Lexx. The show lasted four seasons from 1997-2002 and really after watching this first season I have to question just how that was.

Lexx follows the lives of a team about the space craft Lexx. The team are very mismatched gathering of Stan, Zev and Kai and after stealing the Lexx they flee from the Cluster and begin a search for a new home. The main plot of the first season, besides establishing the characters, is the story of Kai who needs protoblood to live outside of his cryochamber. In searching for this they run into a number of problems involving a huge insect and to be honest it was at this point that I got very lost. Though saying that, the characters are fun and by the end I was curious about how the next seasons would advance the stories and that's certainly a positive.

However, I do have a number of problems with Lexx and one of the main ones is that these first episodes are all 90 minute movies and because of this it just felt like too much. If it had been one of these followed by half hour shows it would have been fine, but trying to watch all four is a chore and made it very difficult to enjoy. The other problem is that much like some of the sci-fi at this time it looks very dated, effects feel like something you could probably whip up on any basic graphics package now. The acting is very campy to the point where I couldn't quite tell whether this was supposed to be a Star Trek parody show and nowhere is this seen more than in the acting of Tim Curry and Rutger Hauer which were either intentionally trying to be funny or just awful... I just can't tell. Saying that if it was a parody and viewed as such some of it is amusing, if not, I'm not sure how I was supposed to react to a great majority of everything presented to me.

Each disk comes with a fifteen minute featurette that discusses various aspects of the shows creation. This is being discussed by the Producers and Writers and if I'm honest the problem with these is not the content which is quite interesting and I'm sure fans of the show will love some of the insight and insider details it reveals, but the fact that it looks like a copy of a copy of a copy of a video that they couldn't or didn't bother restoring. This is a shame, as I say, because the content is not that bad and does seem to take into account what their fans want to know about the show, which is nice.

Lexx is not a bad show. Not by any means. The plot and the characters are a little bizarre (but then it is sci-fi and really when did Babylon 5 ever make sense?) and the tone is all over the place and father time has not been kind to the effects, but under all this is a fun few hours. If you watch all in one go it might burn you out, but in drops the show can be enjoyable. If you are a fan of the show it is a good set to start off your collection.