The IT Crowd: Proof Not All British Comedy is Clever and Subtle

On Pluto TV they frequently advertised this British comedy from 2006-2010 called The IT Crowd.  So finally I watched a few episodes on one of their channels.  They weren't that bad.  But if you're worried that British comedy is so much cleverer and subtler than American comedy, well, prepare to be pleasantly surprised!

The premise of the show is similar to The Big Bang Theory and it premiered a year earlier.  In the basement of some big company is the IT department of two nerdy guys:  Roy and Moss.  And then they get a new boss, a redheaded woman named Jen who knows nothing about computers.  In one episode when she gets a swelled head about making a speech as Employee of the Month, Roy and Moss trick her into thinking a little black box with a red blinking light is "the Internet."  Like the whole source of the Internet.  The idea is to make her a laughingstock...except her audience is so clueless none of them realize the joke either.

So the humor of the show isn't exactly slapstick pie-throwing but it's not overly subtle either.  Most of it made me think of Seinfeld from the 90s as usually it involves them committing some social faux pas or otherwise getting embroiled in some situation and then making it worse.  Like one episode when they go on a "work outing" to a play and Roy tells a fib about being disabled and winds up being taken to a home with a bunch of other disabled people while Moss tells a fib when he stumbles into the employee restroom and ends up becoming an employee for the night.  Stuff like that where little lies or faux pas snowball into bigger problems.

One funny episode has Roy suffering from a sore back so he goes to a masseuse.  At the end of the massage the male masseuse gives him a very unhappy ending by kissing him on the bottom.  So Roy takes the guy to court.  Meanwhile Jen is dating a guy who looks mentally challenged because he's in a band--at least until her meddling gets him kicked out.  In another episode Jen tries to show up a female coworker by saying she can translate Italian.  Since she can't, Moss rigs up a translation program on her laptop.  There's a password for it so she needs to get it from Moss, except he's gotten himself stuck in one of those claw machines in an arcade to try to get an iPhone from it.  "I can get an iPhone without having to pay any money to Apple!  I'm living the dream!"  (Also the only way I'd be able to get an iPhone.)  But when the boss forbids using laptops in the meeting with an Italian businessman, Jen ends up just blathering gibberish and no one except the businessman is any the wiser.

Another good bit is when the government changes the emergency number from 999 to some horribly long number, Moss can't remember it when he starts a fire in the department.  So he emails the fire department!  I wonder how many times that happens in real life?  And then when Roy comes in he says "Don't worry, I've sent an email."  While the fire is continuing to burn.

Or in another episode when Moss and Roy decide they're spending too much time together, Moss answers a personal ad for "someone to cook with" but gets there to find out it's a German who wanted someone TO COOK.  Realizing the mistake in the ad they just watch a movie.  Later, when Roy is trying to find somewhere to watch a bootleg DVD, he pretends he wants to be eaten--so long as he can watch a film first.  When the police show up you think they're going to bust the cannibal, right?  Aaaactually they just want Roy for pirating a movie.

Most of it is pretty funny.  I just wish it didn't have a laugh track because then I start to question whether I'm laughing because I want to or just because I hear the canned laughter.

What is refreshing though is that there's never any will they-won't they romantic crap between the three characters.  Jen never hooks up with Roy or Moss.  She pretty much hates them except as work colleagues.  That's much better than those annoying American shows where they have that cycle of hooking characters up, then unhooking them, then rehooking them ad nauseum.

Of course being a British show the four "seasons" are only 6 episodes each.  There's a "fifth season" that's actually just an hour-long episode from 2013 that wraps up the series with Jen, Roy, and Moss becoming the heads of the company.  (Is it a spoiler if no one will read this or actually go watch the show?)  I watched it mostly on Pluto TV but I could have watched it in order on Hulu.  I don't know about Netflix; they might have it too.

What I'm really jealous of on that show is they never seem to do any actual work and their "office" looks like the clubhouse of a couple of teenage boys.  Here I am busting my ass in a shitty gray cubicle when they have an office with a couch and video games and toys.

BTW, Roy's catch-all solution whenever anyone calls is:  Have you tried turning it off and on again?  So the next time you have computer troubles, maybe try that.  If that doesn't work, blow on it.  That always worked for Atari and Nintendo cartridges.