Star Trek Meets Douglas Adams In The BBC's 74-Episode Sci-Fi Masterpiece

Whenever a TV genre catches on and becomes the hot new thing, you can bet a parody isn’t too far behind. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and similar spy-fi capers were lampooned by Get Smart and Tom of T.H.U.M.B. Detective shows like Columbo and Dragnet were mocked by Police Squad! More recent procedurals like CSI and Law & Order have been spoofed in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The Larry Sanders Show parodied the late-night format, Brass Eye parodied pearl-clutching current-affairs shows, and Soap parodied, well, soaps.

In the mid-1960s, the success of Star Trek led to a wave of space shows throughout the ’70s and ’80s, from Space: 1999 to the original Battlestar Galactica, and it wasn’t long before the satirists took aim. Get Smart’s Buck Henry created Quark, a short-lived sci-fi sitcom following the exploits of an interstellar garbage scow in the year 2226. Adam Quark sets out to clear the galaxy’s trash with the help of his eccentric crew. Quark was fun, but a much better Star Trek spoof came along on the other side of the pond a decade later.

The BBC has always been at the forefront of the spoof genre. They parodied historical dramas in Blackadder, they parodied detective shows in A Touch of Cloth, and they parodied bumbling broadcasters with the misadventures of Alan Partridge. In the ’80s, the BBC spoofed the Star Trek formula with the greatest sci-fi sitcom ever made: Red Dwarf.

Red Dwarf Is Still The Greatest Sci-Fi Comedy Series In TV History

Created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, Red Dwarf has taken a long and winding road on our screens. It originally aired on BBC Two from 1988 to 1999, then got revived on Dave from 2009 to 2020, so it has a rich history (74 episodes across 12 seasons, to be exact, with one made-for-TV movie).

Red Dwarf takes the basic foundational premise of Star Trek and its imitators — following the interstellar travels of a ragtag band of misfits aboard a spaceship in the distant future — but approaches it as a tongue-in-cheek sitcom. Where Star Trek looked to the future with a sense of optimism, hoping we could one day come together as a unified utopian society and explore the cosmos together, Red Dwarf looks at the future with a bleak, ironic pessimism.

The series revolves around a lowly technician named Dave Lister, who awakens from three million years of cryosleep to find that he’s the last surviving human, and he’s all alone on a mining vessel called the Red Dwarf. All he has for companionship are a hologram of his deceased bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer, and a lifeform that evolved from Lister’s pregnant cat, simply known as “Cat.”

It’s reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ darkly comedic approach to science fiction in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, using the boundlessness of the cosmos and the inevitability of human extinction to highlight just how little we matter, and how fleeting and inconsequential our lives are. It would be heartbreaking if it wasn’t so hilarious.

Red Dwarf Continues Douglas Adams' Influence On The Sci-Fi Genre

Between Red Dwarf and the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, sci-fi and comedy have proven to be perfect bedfellows. Like horror and comedy, it’s a match made in heaven, mixing the boundless speculation of Star Trek-style science fiction with the delightful oddities of Pythonesque absurdist humor. We’ve since seen that combination replicated in brilliant shows like Futurama and Rick and Morty and Avenue 5.

But, as great as some of those other shows have been, and as far as they’ve pushed the boat out visually and thematically and comedically, none of them have topped Red Dwarf. As a pitch-perfect blend of endearing ensemble sitcom and genuinely thought-provoking science fiction, Red Dwarf remains unparalleled.

Red Dwarf

Release Date 1988 - 2017-00-00

Showrunner Doug Naylor

Writers Rob Grant, Doug Naylor