Aboard the deep space mining vessel Red Dwarf, Dave Lister, a vending machine repairman, smuggles aboard a pregnant cat. When he is found out he is confined to suspended animation for refusing to surrender the animal to the captain for dissection. During his time in stasis, his annoying self-important bunkmate and supervisor Arnold Rimmer is forced to perform his maintenance duties alone and bungles his repairs to the drive plate, causing it to blow and subjecting the entire crew to deadly radiation.
3 million years pass until the background radiation level has fallen such that human life will not be threatened. At this point Holly, the ship's computer, releases Lister from his long sleep and also resurrects Rimmer as a hologram to be a companion for Lister, basically the last person Lister would want to listen to all day. After the initial shock, Lister realizes that he has the run of the ship, allowing him to be, basically, himself: a lay about slob.
Rimmer and Lister discover that the cat had been sealed in the ship's hold during the accident and has bred there for the last 3 million years and evolved into a race of man-like creatures, one of whom is still on the ship. The rest of the cats mistook Lister's laundry list as navigation instructions to a planet of refuge and crashed and died in space. With his evolved cat at his side, Lister decides to complete his dream of owning a farm on Fiji and orders Holly to set a course for Earth. Much of this first season involves Rimmer trying to still boss Lister around even though he is just a hologram, the cat coming to grips that he is the last of his kind alive, with Lister constantly trying to get Rimmer to "turn himself off" so Lister can replace him with Christine Kochanski's hologram. Kochanski was the attractive officer Lister had a crush on before he went into stasis.
The series starts off with Lister quite determined to get back to earth, but as time passes that mission takes a back seat to all of the adventures the group has. The series is at its peak, in my opinion, after the mechanoid Kryton is rescued from a long ago crashed vehicle, and joins the crew of Red Dwarf. These five together - the vain and somewhat dim cat, Lister who knows he's a slob yet is happy with himself, a bossy Rimmer who fixates on trivial details to avoid dealing with the fact that he is not happy with himself, the intelligent and inquisitive but over-polite mechanoid Kryton, and the ship's rather ditzy computer Holly who is suffering from silicon senility after several million years of use are a perfect comedy team as they go traveling about the universe. There is comedy on the basest and most physical levels, but there is also much ridiculing of social, political, and religious orders - a true iconoclast's delight.
In seasons six and seven the series sags a bit, as the crew has to abandon Red Dwarf and travel about in the smaller transport ship StarBug. In season eight there is a completely changed situation for the original crew, but the series just gets worse having seemed to lose track of what made it so brilliant in the first five seasons. In spite of the slower pace of seasons six and seven and the outright mediocrity of season eight, I'd highly recommend the entire series to anyone who likes British comedy. The first five seasons and parts of six and seven are just that good.
3 million years pass until the background radiation level has fallen such that human life will not be threatened. At this point Holly, the ship's computer, releases Lister from his long sleep and also resurrects Rimmer as a hologram to be a companion for Lister, basically the last person Lister would want to listen to all day. After the initial shock, Lister realizes that he has the run of the ship, allowing him to be, basically, himself: a lay about slob.
Rimmer and Lister discover that the cat had been sealed in the ship's hold during the accident and has bred there for the last 3 million years and evolved into a race of man-like creatures, one of whom is still on the ship. The rest of the cats mistook Lister's laundry list as navigation instructions to a planet of refuge and crashed and died in space. With his evolved cat at his side, Lister decides to complete his dream of owning a farm on Fiji and orders Holly to set a course for Earth. Much of this first season involves Rimmer trying to still boss Lister around even though he is just a hologram, the cat coming to grips that he is the last of his kind alive, with Lister constantly trying to get Rimmer to "turn himself off" so Lister can replace him with Christine Kochanski's hologram. Kochanski was the attractive officer Lister had a crush on before he went into stasis.
The series starts off with Lister quite determined to get back to earth, but as time passes that mission takes a back seat to all of the adventures the group has. The series is at its peak, in my opinion, after the mechanoid Kryton is rescued from a long ago crashed vehicle, and joins the crew of Red Dwarf. These five together - the vain and somewhat dim cat, Lister who knows he's a slob yet is happy with himself, a bossy Rimmer who fixates on trivial details to avoid dealing with the fact that he is not happy with himself, the intelligent and inquisitive but over-polite mechanoid Kryton, and the ship's rather ditzy computer Holly who is suffering from silicon senility after several million years of use are a perfect comedy team as they go traveling about the universe. There is comedy on the basest and most physical levels, but there is also much ridiculing of social, political, and religious orders - a true iconoclast's delight.
In seasons six and seven the series sags a bit, as the crew has to abandon Red Dwarf and travel about in the smaller transport ship StarBug. In season eight there is a completely changed situation for the original crew, but the series just gets worse having seemed to lose track of what made it so brilliant in the first five seasons. In spite of the slower pace of seasons six and seven and the outright mediocrity of season eight, I'd highly recommend the entire series to anyone who likes British comedy. The first five seasons and parts of six and seven are just that good.