“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
You best put seat belts on your ears, because I’m about to take them for the ride of their lives. Let’s talk about the British sitcom IT Crowd. It takes place in the fictional Reynholm Industries, which does we-don’t-know-what and makes billions doing that. It revolves around the lives of the company’s three most down-trodden employees: the folks of the basement IT Department.
The two typical technicians: Roy, the slacker (and “the Irishman”), and Moss, a terminally socially-awkward nerdite. Jen was recently hired as head of the Department because her Curriculum Vitae included “experience with computers,” although she knows almost nothing about computers.
Here are top reasons why you should watch The IT Crowd right away:
It doesn’t have an American equivalent
Unlike contemporary mockumentary The Office, The IT Crowd hasn’t sparked an American equivalent. Back in 2007, when the show was almost remade for NBC: Richard Ayoade, who plays Moss in the original, actually reprised his role in a pilot episode for the series and Graham Linehan headed a team of writers that produced a few scripts, but plans for the remake were inexplicably dropped.
British Humo(u)r!
What makes The IT Crowd so funny is what is “inherently British” about it: the use of irony, sarcasm and dry humor in addition to poking fun at geeks. Instead of making it inaccessible to international audiences, the style makes the show unique.
Big Business Satire
A lot of television shows center on job despair and drudgery. It might be old hat to poke fun at the corporate lifestyle, but The IT Crowd does so to extremes and maintains a completely straight face about it the entire time:
It is taped in front of a live audience
Rather than relying on canned laughter popular in some sitcoms, the organic reactions of a live crowd give a certain something to sitcoms that helps you feel like a part of the crowd seeing it for the first time.
Richard Ayoade as Maurice Moss
Ayoade hasn’t broken into the international market the way that co-stars Chris O’Dowd and Katherine Parkinson have. He plays up socially awkward to extremes and does a gut-splitting job of it.
More than that, though, every episode manages to create an individual storyline for each of the characters that seamlessly blends with the other plots and comes together in the end for a truly satisfying denouement. Every. Single. Episode.
There are only four seasons of six episodes each. That’s only twenty-four half hour episodes. You can do that. You’re a champion.
So. Have I convinced you? No? Well then you’re just not awesome, I guess. But really, it’s a great show, not a huge time commitment, and genuinely bizarrely hilarious. I can’t recommend it enough.