Red Dwarf is a British science fiction comedy franchise, the primary form of which comprises eight series of a post-watershed television sitcom that ran on BBC2 between 1988 and 1999, and which has achieved a global cult following. It was created and originally written by Grant Naylor (a so-called 'gestalt entity', in reality a collective pseudonym for the writing duo Rob Grant and Doug Naylor). The show had its origins in a recurring sketch, Dave Hollins: Space Cadet, in the mid-1980s BBC Radio 4 comedy show Son Of Cliché, also scripted by Grant and Naylor. In addition to the Red Dwarf television series, there have also been four bestselling novels, a pilot episode for an American version of the show, and a significant number of 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 many off-the-wall science fiction elements used as complementary plot devices. For example, in the early series, a recurring source of comedy was the "odd couple" relationship between Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer, the two central characters of the show, who have an intense dislike for each other but are trapped together in an isolated deep space scenario.

Red Dwarf's highest accolade came in 1994, when an episode from the sixth series (Gunmen of the Apocalypse) won an International Emmy Award in the Popular Arts category. The show also won Best BBC Comedy Series at the British Comedy Awards during the same year, and attracted its highest ratings — of over eight million viewers — by the eighth series in 1999.

The current status of the show remains uncertain, as Doug Naylor (now in sole control of the franchise following the departure of Rob Grant in 1995) is committed to writing and producing a feature film version of the sitcom. Naylor has also stated that he hopes one day to tie up the cliffhanger upon which the eighth series ended, perhaps with a one-off, feature-length television special although a ninth series has not been ruled out, depending on the success of the feature film.

The mining ship Red Dwarf is a spaceship 6 miles (10 km) long, 5 miles (8 km) tall, and 4 miles (6 km) wide belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. In the first episode, an on-board radiation leak of Cadmium II kills everyone except for low-ranking technician Dave Lister (a genial Liverpudlian slob, albeit a more intelligent one than is initially apparent), who is in suspended animation at the time, and his pregnant cat, Frankenstein, who is safely sealed in the cargo hold. Lister had smuggled Frankenstein aboard the ship following shore-leave on Titan, but had been caught in possession of the illegal life form and chose to be sentenced to eighteen months in stasis imprisonment rather than surrender his pet to be dissected. Following the accident, the ship's computer Holly has to keep Lister in stasis until the background radiation dies down — a process that takes three million years. Lister therefore emerges as the last human being in the universe — but not the only life form on-board the ship. His former bunkmate and immediate superior Arnold Rimmer (a fussy, bureaucratic bully obsessed with rank and rules, who is at heart a neurotic coward), is resurrected by Holly as a Hologram after the accident to keep Lister sane, while a creature known only as The Cat is the last known surviving member of Felis Sapiens, a race of humanoids that evolved in the ship's hold from Frankenstein and her kittens during the millions of years that Lister was in stasis.

The main dramatic thrust of the series is Lister's attempt to get back to Earth (indeed, in the novels, this was introduced as a desire of his, even before the accident that left him stranded three million light-years away). Along the way, however, are frequent distractions that usually see the not-so-intrepid Dwarf crew encountering strange races and lifeforms that have developed in the intervening millions of years (although a core tenet of the series is that there are no aliens anywhere in the universe — every element of the large and bizarre mix of intelligent life within the Red Dwarf universe is in one way or another derived from Earth, a result of developments in robotics and/or genetic engineering).

Furthermore, the crew roster changes as the years go by. During the second series, the "Dwarfers" encounter the sanitation mechanoid Kryten, rescuing him from a long-since crashed vessel. Initially, Kryten only appears in one episode of Series II (as Rob and Doug didn't want a robot as a main character), but by the beginning of Series III he has become a full time character in the series. At the end of Series V, however, disaster strikes when Lister loses Red Dwarf, having forgotten which planetoid he parked it around (he offers this as an excuse initially, but Kryten almost immediately informs the crew that Red Dwarf was stolen). This forces the crew to travel in the smaller Starbug craft for two series, with the added side-effect that they lose contact with Holly. And in Series VII, Rimmer departs the crew to take up the role of his alter-ego from a parallel universe, Ace Rimmer, whose name has become a long-standing legend and a legacy passed down from dimension to dimension. Shortly afterwards, the crew find a replacement for Rimmer when they encounter another parallel version of themselves. In this universe, it was Kristine Kochanski — Lister's long-time crush and (because of merged realities) ex-girlfriend — who went into stasis, while Lister died and was brought back as a hologram. A complicated series of events leaves Kochanski stranded in 'our' universe, and she is forced to join the crew.

Finally, in the eighth (and so far final) series, Red Dwarf itself is reconstructed by Kryten's nanobots that had stolen it and broken it down into its constituent atoms. In the process, the entire crew of the ship — including Rimmer — are resurrected, but the Starbug crew all find themselves sentenced to two years in the ship's brig on a set of convoluted charges. The series ends, however, with Red Dwarf being eaten away by a virus and all on board evacuated, save for Rimmer who is left to face Death, for the second time. Unhappy with his predicament, he knees Death in the groin and runs away — although the cliffhanger ending leaves this open to interpretation.

- From Wikipedia