While I don't think the American version works, I think that most of the actors had potential (which may be why nearly all of them have had decent careers since then).
Craig Bierko isn't slobby enough to play Lister but he does seem to be trying and has his own sense of comic timing that, over time, could have worked.
As Holly, I'd say that Jane Leeves isn't as good as Norman Lovett but I'd say she's better than Hattie Hayridge.
Terry Farrell's Cat has nothing to do with the character that Danny John-Jules played in the original British version. However, as an original character, I liked her a lot and I wish that they had found a way to bring her over to the British version for a guest appearance or two. (Although, I'd say that a female Cat doesn't quite work because, at some point, she & Lister would both get drunk/desperate enough that they'd start sleeping with each other... a lot. By making the cast exclusively male, you increase the isolation that they all feel because none of them can achieve the kind of intimacy that they crave, which just makes them all progressively more defective individuals, which is funny.)
That said, The Doctor being half-human was bullcrap - although it still annoyed me that they ignore it in the new series - I was getting used to it.
For my part, my pet theory is that the Doctor IS partly human and that's the reason why he was able to survive the Time War. Whatever it was that wiped out the other Time Lords across all dimensions, the Doctor was able to survive because, genetically, he had one foot anchored in a single dimension as a human. His Time Lord half routinely overwhelms his human half but that sliver of humanity was just enough to allow the Doctor to survive while the rest of the Time Lords perished.
. I honestly switched it off before the end of the first part. Lister wasn't a slob, Rimmer wasn't a big enough douche, Kryten was just a watered down version of him with no character development at all, and I didn't get a chance to see the Cat.
