Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf is a British comedy which primarily comprises ten series (the ninth being a mini-series) of a television science fiction sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1993 and from 1997 to 1999, and on Dave in 2009 and 2012, gaining a cult following. In May 2015, it was announced that Series XI and XII will film back-to-back later in 2015 and will air exclusively on the Dave channel in 2016 and 2017.

The series was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. In addition to the television episodes, there are four novels, two pilot episodes for an American version of the show, a radio version produced for BBC Radio 7, tie-in books, magazines and other merchandise.

Despite the pastiche of science fiction used as a backdrop, Red Dwarf is primarily a character-driven comedy, with off-the-wall science fiction elements used as complementary plot devices. In the early episodes, a recurring source of comedy was the Odd Couple-style relationship between the two central characters of the show, who have an intense dislike for each other and are trapped together deep in space. The main characters are Dave Lister, the last known human alive, and Arnold Rimmer, a hologram of Lister's dead bunkmate. The other regular characters are Cat, a lifeform which evolved from the descendants of Lister's pregnant pet cat Frankenstein; Holly, Red Dwarf's computer; Kryten, a service mechanoid; and, as of Series VII to Back to Earth, Kristine Kochanski, an alternative-reality version of Lister's long-lost love.