Quark is a 1977 American science fiction sitcom starring Richard Benjamin. Broadcast on Friday nights at 8:00–8:30 p.m. on NBC, the pilot aired on May 7, 1977, and the series followed as a mid-season replacement in February 1978. The series was cancelled in April 1978. Quark was created by Buck Henry, co-creator of the spy spoof Get Smart.

Plot

The show was set on a United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol Cruiser, an interstellar garbage scow operating out of United Galaxy Space Station Perma One in the year 2226. Adam Quark, the main character, works to clean up trash in space by collecting "space baggies" with his trusted and highly unusual crew. Quark draws heavily from Star Trek as a source of parody. In its short run, specific episodes also satirized such science fiction as Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon. Three of the episodes were direct parodies of Star Trek episodes.

Characters

Episodes

Reception

Awards

The series won one Emmy Award nomination, for costume designer Grady Hunt's work in the episode "All the Emperor's Quasi-Norms, Part 2".

In popular culture

In the television series Breaking Bad, the character Gale Boetticher creates a music video of himself singing "Major Tom (Coming Home)" by Peter Schilling with footage of Quark in the background. It originally appeared in short in the episode "Bullet Points," but the full music video was later released online by AMC.

Home media

The complete series was released on DVD on October 14, 2008.