Red Dwarf is a British comedy franchise which primarily comprises ten series (including a ninth mini-series named Back To Earth) 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. The series was created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. In addition to the television episodes, there are four bestselling 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, oftenscatological 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, ahologram 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.
One of the series' highest accolades came in 1994, when an episode from the sixth series, "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", won anInternational Emmy Award in the Popular Arts category, and in the same year the series was also awarded "Best BBC Comedy Series" at the British Comedy Awards. The series attracted its highest ratings, of over eight million viewers, during the eighth series in 1999. The series was revived after a ten-year break, when digital channel Dave screened a three-episode production, titled Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, in April 2009 during the Easter weekend. This was followed by Series X, consisting of six episodes, which was first broadcast on Dave in October/November 2012.
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