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During the Television Critics’ Association press tour in Los Angeles, I mentioned that I was grateful to FX for listening to my plea for a new sci-fi sitcom, by picking up U.S.S. Alabama, from the makers of Reno 911! Of course, we already have another sci-fi comedy on TV on the air—albeit an animated one—on Comedy Central, in the form of Futurama. But before Futurama, there was a brilliant, short-lived sitcom of my youth: Quark, starring Richard Benjamin (and now available on DVD).
The trick with making a comedy in a genre like sci-fi is that it can become mainly a comedy about the genre; parody can be hilarious, but it doesn’t necessarily sustain well. The thing I like about Futurama is that it’s both a spoof of sci-fi, and a comedy that just happens to be set in a sci-fi universe. Quark, which aired a few months in 1978, never really got to live long enough to prove itself, but it had that kind of potential. (Also, a not-dissimilar premise: where Futurama is about the crew of a space-age delivery service, Quark takes place on an interstellar garbage scow, with characters including Ficus, a humanoid plant, and Jean/Gene, a bigendered “transmute.”)
In its way, Quark was the Police Squad of space; it got the short life, but not the TV-martyr status. But it’s worth digging out of the trash.