Most classic British sitcoms are grounded in the real world. Fawlty Towers looks at the foibles of a rude hotel manager. The Inbetweeners shines a brutally harsh spotlight on the horrors of secondary school. The Office plays like a documentary; it’s dressed up like real life, and it captures the mundanity and awkwardness of real life spectacularly.

But one of the greatest British sitcoms ever made, Red Dwarf, could not be further removed from the real world. It’s a science fiction series set in the distant future — it has more in common with Star Trek than The Young Ones — but, despite being so different, it’s still one of Britain’s finest sitcoms.

Red Dwarf Is Both A Great Sci-Fi Show & A Classic British Sitcom

It’s hard to get one genre right, so hybrid-genre experiments attempting to combine two genres rarely work out. But Red Dwarf is the rare sci-fi comedy that succeeds as both a clever piece of science fiction and a hilarious comedic piece. It ranks alongside Futurama, Ghostbusters, Galaxy Quest, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a prime example of this combination creating something magical.

Red Dwarf perfectly mixes the profundity of science fiction with the absurdity of the sitcom. It’ll take a thought-provoking speculative sci-fi premise, like reimagining God as a race of superintelligent aliens capable of manipulating faith, and use it as a vehicle for comedy, like satirizing organized religion.

The series revolves around Dave Lister, a low-ranking technician on the mining spaceship Red Dwarf. Three million years after a radiation leak, Lister awakens from suspended animation to find that he’s the last surviving human. All he has for company is a hologram of his dead bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer, and “Cat,” a lifeform that evolved from Lister’s pregnant cat.

Red Dwarf Perfectly Parodied The Tropes Of Star Trek & Other Sci-Fi Franchises

Red Dwarf arrived during a period when a lot of sci-fi shows were trying to be the next Star Trek. Shows like Space: 1999, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century hoped to recapture the pulpy spacefaring charms of Star Trek. Red Dwarf does recapture those charms, but it’s also a spot-on spoof of all the overdone tropes of Trek and other sci-fi franchises.

It is to Star Trek what Police Squad! is to police procedurals, or what Get Smart is to James Bond. The genius of Red Dwarf is that it satisfies as both a Star Trek-style old-school sci-fi show and a zany, tongue-in-cheek British sitcom with the laugh rate of Only Fools and Horses or I’m Alan Partridge.