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The basic plot revolves around McHale's crew's wacky schemes to make money, get girls, and have a ball, and the efforts of Captain Binghamton (McHale's superior) to rid himself of the PT-73 crew for good, either by transfer or court martial. Although they are forever getting into trouble, they (almost always unwittingly) get out of trouble. Despite their scheming, conniving, and often lazy and unmilitary ways, McHale's crew is always successful in combat in the end. The entire show is based on only two locations, one in the South Pacific at a fictional base called Taratupa (the inferred location is in the Solomon Islands) and an equally fictional town in Italy called Voltafiore.
The crew of PT-73 get into trouble when they back the wrong horse in a race. Now they have to come up with a way to raise the money to pay off the winners.
The crew of PT-73 are in trouble again when Ensign Parker is mistaken for a pilot and gets shanghied into the Air Force.
Retired Lieutenant Commander Quinton McHale spends his days puttering around the Caribbean in the old PT-73 selling homebrew, ice cream, and swimsuit calendars. He's brought out of retirement when his old nemesis turned the second best terrorist in the world, Major Vladikov, takes over the island of San Moreno and starts building a nuclear launch silo on it. With help from his old crew and hindrances from Captain Wallace B. Binghampton, who sank a cruise liner a while back, McHale tries to put Vladikov out of business.