Most basic British sitcoms are grounded in the true world. Fawlty Towers seems on the foibles of a impolite lodge supervisor. The Inbetweeners shines a brutally harsh spotlight on the horrors of secondary college. The Workplace performs like a documentary; it’s dressed up like actual life, and it captures the mundanity and awkwardness of actual life spectacularly.
However one of many biggest British sitcoms ever made, Red Dwarf, couldn’t be additional faraway from the true world. It’s a science fiction sequence set within the distant future — it has extra in common with Star Trek than The Younger Ones — however, regardless of being so completely different, it’s nonetheless one in every of Britain’s finest sitcoms.
Pink Dwarf Is Each A Nice Sci-Fi Present & A Basic British Sitcom
It’s onerous to get one style proper, so hybrid-genre experiments trying to mix two genres hardly ever work out. However Pink Dwarf is the uncommon sci-fi comedy that succeeds as each a intelligent piece of science fiction and a hilarious comedic piece. It ranks alongside Futurama, Ghostbusters, Galaxy Quest, and The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy as a first-rate instance of this mixture creating one thing magical.
Pink Dwarf completely 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 able to manipulating religion, and use it as a automobile for comedy, like satirizing organized faith.
The sequence revolves round Dave Lister, a low-ranking technician on the mining spaceship Pink Dwarf. Three million years after a radiation leak, Lister awakens from suspended animation to seek out that he’s the final surviving human. All he has for firm is a hologram of his useless bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer, and “Cat,” a lifeform that developed from Lister’s pregnant cat.
Pink Dwarf Completely Parodied The Tropes Of Star Trek & Different Sci-Fi Franchises
Pink Dwarf arrived throughout a interval when a whole lot of sci-fi exhibits have been trying to be the next Star Trek. Reveals like House: 1999, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers within the twenty fifth Century hoped to recapture the pulpy spacefaring charms of Star Trek. Pink Dwarf does recapture these charms, nevertheless it’s additionally a spot-on spoof of all of the overdone tropes of Trek and different sci-fi franchises.
It’s to Star Trek what Police Squad! is to police procedurals, or what Get Sensible is to James Bond. The genius of Pink Dwarf is that it satisfies as each a Star Trek-style old-school sci-fi present and a zany, tongue-in-cheek British sitcom with the chuckle charge of Solely Fools and Horses or I’m Alan Partridge.

