Douglas Adam's eccentric private eye Dirk Gently uses 'holistic' methods, believing everything in the universe to be connected. When hired to trace elderly Ruth's missing cat, Dirk, with down-trodden sidekick MacDuff, investigates a warehouse, which houses a strange contraption, which blows up. A connection is made to a missing billionaire, Gordon Way, who has been besotted with MacDuff's girlfriend Susan for over a decade. Dirk connects the dates when Ruth acquired her cat and when Susan threw over Way to solve a puzzle involving time travel and homicide, accounting for the missing cat and billionaire as well as the disappearance of Ruth's husband. Filmed by the BBC in the UK using British actors including Stephen Mangan, Darren Boyd, Helen Baxendale, Jason Watkins and Lisa Jackson, this was only developed into a full series once it had crossed the Atlantic. None of the actors from the pilot appear in the full series, which is set in the US.