When Grant and Naylor first pitched Red Dwarf...

...to Paul Jackson, he said "Don't do a Sci-Fi sitcom. Just don't. It won't work". Hyperdrive is exactly the kind of crap-fest he envisioned Grant and Naylor producing.

An SF sitcom needs a very strong premise, to avoid it descending into "cliche of the week", the way even Red Dwarf eventually did. This show doesn't have one.

I want to like it, but I can't. There's just not enough imagination there, and the characters interactions just aren't funny enough to make up for that.

Red Dwarf stands alone as an SF sitcom that works as SF (at least in the first few series) as well as it works as comedy.