The IT Crowd: Have You Tried Turning it Off and On Again?
By Angela Roberts
September 12, 2011
While I’ve been hacking away like a geriatric smoker this week, I’ve watched eighteen episodes of a quirky show called The IT Crowd. If you’ve already heard of this hilarious British comedy, good for you. You know what I’m talking about when I say that this show is something of a hidden gem, at least for those of us in North America. I understand it’s quite popular in Britain. The IT Crowd is a fantastic little show about the weird members of an IT department way in the basement of an equally bizarre mega corporation. It actually began its run around the same time as The Big Bang Theory spawned the geek craze that’s captured audiences under its spell in the last few years, but I don’t know how much the show has benefited from that. Certainly, it takes a different approach to geekdom, a more “Revenge of the Nerds” approach, than Big Bang Theory. And in true British fashion, it’s just a little bit surreal.
The IT Crowd centers on the antics of the three members of the IT department of fictional corporation Reynholm Industries. Roy, played by Chris O’Dowd, is a slovenly Irish slacker, disdainful of the computer-illiterate and generally endeavoring to get out of doing as much work as possible. Of course, this usually gets him into more trouble than the effort was worth. Moss (Richard Ayaode), his fellow technician and best friend, is a genius and your typical nerd; thirty-two, living at home with his mother, a brilliant scientist but lacking in the ability to comprehend practical tasks and social situations. Some of the best and most surreal comedy comes from his lack of understanding simple social rules and conventions. But he’s not rude and bitter like Roy; of the two of them, Moss actually is better at interacting with people and making friends. It’s just that he can’t pick up on subtle cues and he doesn’t know when to shut up. And rounding out the trio is Jen, played by Katherine Parkinson, an ambitious young woman who accidentally bluffs her way into becoming the new head of the IT department despite knowing nothing about computers. She becomes the department’s self-styled ‘relationship manager’ when she realizes how badly the techs get along with the rest of the company (being valued only by the head of the company, and even so in sort of a dismissive way). Roy and Moss are wary of Jen at first, certain that they don’t need managing, but eventually the three form an uneasy friendship.
Written as it is by Graham Linehan, creator of such shows as Father Ted and Black Books, you can see right away where the show gets its weird, manic, surreal charms. Linehan is the master of writing shows about social outcasts desperately trying (or sometimes refusing) to navigate a world that at times is even weirder and more insane than them. And the hilarious hijinks that ensue. He’s absolutely brilliant at taking somewhat awkward situations and carrying them to surreal extremes without losing the audience. There is an absolutely hilarious scene in the first season when Moss accidentally starts a fire in the office with a soldering iron and doesn’t notice for a good five minutes. Then he grabs the fire extinguisher and proceeds to calmly read the full instructions. Just as he’s about to use it, the extinguisher bursts into flames, and Moss notices that the extinguisher was made in Britain, which of course, to him, is why it was defective. So what does he do? He puts the extinguisher with the fire. But Linehan can’t leave it there. Early in the episode, a new long phone number had been announced for emergency services. Moss can’t remember it, so he sends an email, but being Moss, he writes and rewrites the email a few times before sending it. Then he calmly goes back to work.
Linehan’s sense of humor is all about taking things one step further, pushing the boundaries of the absurd. Things just keep escalating until you’re wincing in sympathy while you’re laughing your head off. But it’s not just the writing that sells it. You can’t really appreciate the humor of the scene I just described until you see Richard Ayaode act it out. Each of these actors knows how to milk every line for its comic potential. They nail every facial expression, every line; you almost believe they resemble their characters in real life. And Linehan also fills in the cast with superb secondary characters; Richmond (Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh), the office Goth, Denholm Reynholm (Chris Morris), their dense and mercurial boss, Douglas Reynholm (Matt Berry), his flamboyant, womanizing son who talks like he lives in a romance novel and who inherits the company in season two. All of these characters are amazing caricatures, and they work the way only Linehan characters do, pushing the boundaries of believability.
If you haven’t seen The IT Crowd, go for it. You can see the first three seasons of the show on Netflix or on DVD here in North America. You’ll be ROFL.
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