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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no laughter track, its filmed infront of an audiance.
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!
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Are all the episodes going to be online, or just the premiere?
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.
== Jez ==
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This show did not make me laugh once. Seemed very poorly written, acted, and filmed.
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.
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.
Here's an interview with the writer/director, Graham Linehan, published yesterday:2 006/01/28/btvline28.xml
http://telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/
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).
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