Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988)

Okay--get ready, because this gets sort of confusing. Joel Robinson is a janitor at the Gizmonic Institute. His bosses are Dr. Clayton Forrester and Dr. Lawrence Erhardt. They trick Joel into boarding the Satillite of Love as it's about to take off, and then use their complete control of the ship to force him to watch B-movies in order to find out how many B-movies (and which ones) it will take to drive him insane. They only show him one per week, and he can start and stop the films whenever he wants, so how it's supposed to drive him insane is beyond me. Joel sacrifices his ability to control the film and uses those parts to create robots--Tom Servo, the know-it-all radio-announcer-type, and Crow, the sarcastic one, to watch the film with him and to help him mercilessly heckle it; and Gypsy, who controls the higher functions of the SoL. Forrester and Erhardt lose their jobs and are forced underground--literally: their new hideout is Deep 13, a subbasement of the institute. They get funding by selling the show we're watching to Comedy Central. After season one, Erhardt goes missing, and is replaced by dim-witted "TV's Frank", a former Arby's employee. Like Erhardt, Frank is not only an assistant but also a guinea pig (not literally!) In the middle of season 5, Forrester and Frank hire a temp worker, Mike Nelson, to help out around Deep 13 as they are being audited ("you know, one of those 'how evil are you really?' things.") They plan to dispose of him after the audit, and Gypsy, thinking Joel is the future victim, forces him into a previously undiscovered escape pod and out of the ship. Joel lands safely in Austraila, but (despite his wishes) is unable to return. Mike his rocketed upwards and becomes the next victim. (All of this happens in 1 episode.) Frank is whisked away to Second Banana Heaven at the end of season 6, and Forrester's maniac mother Pearl moves in for the next season. However, Comedy Central cancels MST3K shortly after this, and Mike and the Bots are about to crash to Earth when Gypsy pulls off a little reverse-engineering and sends them spiraling into the Center of the Universe. Here they become pure energy, or pure thought--well, it's pure something, though they never figure out what. Crow shortly becomes bored and returns to the SoL. Dr. Forrester, years later, is on his deathbed, and discovers the "Worse Film Ever Made"--as he reaches for it, he becomes a star baby, and Pearl laments that she has a chance to raise him right this time. And if you thought that was complicated, you should see the Sci-Fi era. *Sigh*, here it goes... Mike and the bots are mysteriously pulled back to the SoL, only to find that it has regained it's orbit over Earth and that Crow has suffered a stroke. Earth is now dominated by somewhat-intelligent monkeys, and Pearl, who has frozen herself for all this time, has killed Clayton and wants to avenge his death by continuing the experiment. The monkeys blow up Earth, and Pearl (along with ape Professor Bobo) escapes in a RV. The SoL brakes orbit and flies off, with Pearl in hot pursuit (and she's still sending them B-movies.) They come to a planet of people in blue cloaks and white faces who carry their brains in petri dishes and are all named Observer. That planet gets blown up too and Pearl and Bobo and an Observer escape. Than they visit a camping planet which gets blown up too and eventually they all go back to the present and Pearl moves back into her ancestral home of Castle Forrester and continues her experiment from there. However, she hooks the SoL up to a joystick which promptly brakes and sends the SoL back down to Earth. Mike & the Bots survives and moves into an apartment (except for Gypsy, who gets rich with her own startup company.) Pearl moves on to become ruler of Qatar, and the series ends.