IT Crowd On-line

prostoalex writes "IT Crowd, a comedy television show by UK's Channel 4, introduced on Slashdot earlier, has released the first episode, available on the official show site in Windows Media format." Pretty standard fare- there are nice touches like EFF stickers and an RTFM shirt scattered about. Some funny stuff, but the laugh track makes it really unwatchable for me.

Comments

Online before broadcast

[NickFitz]

The really interesting thing about this is that the show won't be broadcast on Channel 4 until next Friday. I believe this is the first time a UK broadcaster has made a programmes available online before broadcast.

Re:Online before broadcast

[rodbegbie]

Auntie's done this a couple of times with BBC3 shows. The Mighty Boosh and Tittybangbang spring to mind.

Re: Online before broadcast

[gidds]

Open All Hours wasn't bad. The writing was a little formulaic, but the situation was fairly interesting, and Ronnie Barker was worth watching. (He was a better character actor than people gave him credit for.) Can't say it did a huge amount for me, though.

OTOH, I hated Friends. Partly coz most of my college friends loved it, and I never understood why. It just seemed so smug, with all this fake coziness and forced charm. It seemed soulless. It also seemed as if having 300 writers led to a barrage of one-liners with no connection, character, meaning, style, plot, or point.

Which has pretty much been my impression of all the US sit coms I've seen, in fact...

A while ago, someone (Jeremy Hardy?) commented on the difference between the UK and US film industries, to the effect that while American films featured drama, tragedy, and ugly real life, British films featured amiable people getting into a bit of a pickle. Which is odd, because in sit com terms things seem to be reversed: British sit coms often have ugly, cruel, nasty characters, real monsters in some cases (think of Edmund Blackadder, Father Jack, Arnold Rimmer, just about anyone who lives in Royston Vasey...). Whereas the worst US sit coms seem to have is amiable people getting into a bit of a pickle. Impossibly good-looking, amimable people. Smug, impossibly good-looking, amiable people. Who always seem to have an impossibly witty amiable thing to say. And then have to wait two minutes for the applause to die down before continuing.

US comedies are generally pretty popular over here, so I'm clearly in a minority with this one. But I just don't find any of them funny!

Thank god it's just audio visual

[Quirk]

A realistic 'IT Crowd' would just shows fat, oily, pimply, hairy geeks. Fortunately Smell-O-Vision didn't become a hit, or the 'IT Crowd' would have been, literally, an olfactory bomb.

Its too much!

[gasmonso]

This show would be better if it were like The Office. Have the IT guys in there aswell as nerdy users, but this intense focus on it is too much. They are gonna burn out within the first few shows.

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Its too much!

[MosesJones]

Its by the same writer as father Ted and the producers of the office. Father Ted had 4 main characters and lasted for several series.

Intense focus in a sit-com isn't bad, lets face it this is normal, low number of core characters and sets with occasional colour add ons.

Fraser - 3 sets (appartement, Studio, coffee shop) - 5 main characters

Cheers - 1 set (bar) depending on series between 4 and 6 characters

Friends - 2 sets (appartement & coffee shop) - 6 characters

Office - 1 set (Office) 4 main characters

Father Ted - 1 set (the house) 4 main characters

So Sitcom history seems to say that you almost NEED an intense small group of sets and characters.

Re:Its too much!

[wfberg]

So Sitcom history seems to say that you almost NEED an intense small group of sets and characters.

If it doesn't have a small group of sets and characters... Then it's not a situational comedy, is it? It's either a sketch show, or standup comedy, or satire, or a late-night show, or a physical comedy show. Sitcoms have a few, recognizable, main characters, perhaps some recurring characters, and a small number of sets, because that's what makes it a sitcom. There are plenty of sitcoms that were totally unfunny, "despite" having a small group of characters and sets. There are also shows that are funny, but not sitcoms; or that stretch the format a bit (for example, to include storylines that span multiple episodes with characters actually developing/changing their personality; or as in Extras have the same characters, but in different - if similar - situations).

In the same vein, succesful novels are often more than 30 pages. Whereas, surprisingly, many succesful short stories are less than 30 pages!

Re:Its too much!

[jez9999]

Yeah, I agree. It only really made me chuckle a few times throughout the episode, and there was far too much shouting throughout that made everything looks rather forced and wooden.

Richard Ayoade (the black guy, Moss) is an apalling actor. I know he's meant to look awkward and have a nerdy voice, but he comes across as some kind of robot. He was in a very weird show on Channel 4 a while back called Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, and he was presumably in that because all the acting was *meant* to be terrible.

The other 2 are unconvincing. The Irish guy is just a cad, and the woman is way too cute to be in a basement with them; she'd be out of there in 5 seconds in real life.

What's weird is the enormous amount of effort channel 4 seem to have put into advertising this very average work - I've seen billboard and TV ads around.

Re:Its too much!

[carou]

And he co-wrote the first series of Black Books, as well, which had a core cast of three.

One thing that may be unfamiliar to American readers, is that the usual model of British TV sit-coms is that a series lasts for just six or eight episodes, very tightly scripted (normally by just one or two writers) and concentrated: the best of them will fit as many laughs into three hours of TV, as a typical American sitcom will get in a 26 episode run.

Short series mean there's less danger of ideas getting stale; on the other hand, a new programme can't afford to spend more than one or two episodes setting up the situation - with a longer season you could have filmed ten episodes before the writers or cast have really hit their stride, but that's just not an option for a producer in the UK.

Re:Laughter Track

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring Back a Real Show to BBC!

Until the beeb brings back "The Prisoner" (reruns, not a remake!) I'm not gonna waste my time on a new show aimed a "geeks". If they make it understandable enough for the average viewer, it wonm't be geek enough for us. Kind of like jokes... if you have to explain them, they're not funny. A truly geek show would go right over the head of most TV viewers. (But then this is British TV, so it may just go over their heads anyway.)

My suggestion: Put Heidi Klum in a kilt and a two-sizes-too-small Defcon t-shirt and have her dance/bounce around for 30 minutes... that would be the ultimate IT/Geek show and a predictable plot line wouldn't bother us in the least! :-)

Re:next ep

[Cassius105]

There is no laughter track, its filmed infront of an audiance.

pretty decent

[gubachwa]

I was actually pleasantly surprised. It was pretty decent for a sitcom. I don't normally watch much TV, especially not sitcoms. (I consider 'Friends' one of the best reasons not to watch tv.)

Are all the episodes going to be online, or just the premiere?

Crashed

[aliquis]

I tried running them from /tmp as a regular user (not extracted by root), don't know if that matters but I guess not, anyway it crashed:

Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf).
subtitle font: load_sub_face failed.
[wmv3 @ 0xafee20]VOP DQuant info: 0.000 1/ 1 ??% ??% ??,?% 0 0 96%
[wmv3 @ 0xafee20]concealing 300 DC, 300 AC, 300 MV errors
[wmv3 @ 0xafee20]VOP DQuant info: 0.003 2/ 2 ??% ??% ??,?% 1 0 96%
[wmv3 @ 0xafee20]Transform used: 4x8
[wmv3 @ 0xafee20]concealing 300 DC, 300 AC, 300 MV errors .....
MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: flip_page
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
    Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
    disassembly. Details in DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash .
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
    It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
    gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
    DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
    won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.

MPlayer interrupted by signal 2 in module: enable_cache

MPlayer interrupted by signal 2 in module: uninit_acodec

Re:don't be a troll

[GrayMatter4tw]

This show did not make me laugh once. Seemed very poorly written, acted, and filmed.

Re:What's wrong with a laughter track?

[Tim Browse]

Which to me is slightly ironic, because when younger I watched the Mash TV series - it was shown n the UK on BBC2 over a number of years. It was funny but also thought provoking, moving and bleak.

Yet when it was later reshown (by Sky I think), I was amazed to find that Mash came with a laughter track. (and it was canned laughter, not studio laughter). It utterly changed the whole tone of the show, and I basically couldn't watch it.

I'd be curious to know if this laughter track was used as a matter of course in the US, or whether the original US broadcasts were shown without laughter track, as God intended.

An interview with the writer

[Bob[Bob]]

Here's an interview with the writer/director, Graham Linehan, published yesterday:
http://telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2 006/01/28/btvline28.xml

Re:If you want to have technobabble, get it right!

[Jaseoldboss]

Who spotted the reference to Mark Russinovichs blog on the Sony rootkit?

It's never safe to unload a driver that patches the system call table since some thread might be just about to execute the first instruction of a hooked function when the driver unloads; if that happens the thread will jump into invalid memory.

Re:Laughter Track

[Fred_A]

It's far too excessive.

True, just watching them installing printer drivers, silently removing spyware and patching the corporate firewall would have been much more funny to the 0.005% of those in the know. (snort)

Besides I don't know where you've been working but I've always seen characters like those lurking in the corners, including one that actually had 2 tshirts (one for summer, one for winter) who apart from that was a true wizard, one of the very few I've encountered. He did fail with the girls, and the boys, and probably got bitten by dogs as well. But he did get his patches in to gcc, managed to debug Guardian (the Tandem OS which we ran in addition to a number of Unix at the time) and would silently chuckle when looking at your tty, spotting in seconds a problem that would take you hours to fix.

And yes we had plushy toys, dinosaurs and the plastic cat puke that always sat upon the newest machine. We also had a baseball bat with 'RTFM' engraved on the side hanging on the wall.

What we didn't have, was a cute redhead as head of IT. Sometimes fiction surpasses real life.

Anyway, I enjoyed that first episode, it reminded me of my younger days (well, apart from the redhead, luckily there were other sources for girls in the company), with a bit of BOFH added to spice things up. I regret that, being in France, I won't be able to see the rest of it (unless it too makes it to the net).