The IT Crowd, ep 2

OK, I gave The IT Crowd a second chance and was still disappointed. While the second episode was not as bad as the first it still suffers from the same flat characterizations, broad comedy and grating laugh track. The wig and glasses on Richard Ayoade still remind me of Andy Millman on When the Whistle Blows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Whistle_Blows#When_the_Whistle_Blows) far too much. The interminable plotline revolving around Jen's obsession with a single pair of shoes to the point of deformity was neither funny nor remotely original. I did get a couple of laughs out of the way Maurice handled the fire situation and the fact that he built his own stress tester when he wasn't allowed to use someone else's. However, the biggest, ripest target, the doctor giving the stress seminar, was entirely wasted on the dullest, simplest of ironies (lol he is really stressed, too!). Roy still has yet to DO anything to make me notice he's in the show.

Nearly all of the time dedicated to Jen's shoes and Maurice's lack of soldering wisdom could have been dedicated to fleshing out the stress therapist for a better delivery on deflating a self help windbag rather than aiming for the low hanging fruit of 'women sure are car-azy about shoes!' and nerds not having any common sense.

What I find most frustrating about this series is its middling sensibilities. It doesn't have enough balls to do a Dada approach and let the situations grow to absurdist proportions like, say, The Young Ones. But it lacks subtlety and depth of character to become a show where you honestly care about what's happening to any of the characters either, such as (to be cliche) The Office. Just when the show looks like it is about to really skewer a target it pulls back and relies upon something safe and easy to digest. For example, the boss character (who's so remarkable I can't recall his name or title) has all the makings of a tyrannical dictator, demanding more and more unreasonable tasks from his crew. Instead he begins to demand these things and then pulls back and threatens to fire everyone. Far too simple a punishment if he's going to make demand such as "you can't have any stress." The show needs to actually follow through on what it begins before it will make any progress.

I'm going to watch the full first series this week or next (I actually do have some packing, travelling and editing to attend to this week) but I'm frankly not expecting much from such a highly touted series. Thus far still unimpressed.

Yo ho ho, I TV critic am I part 2

The IT Crowd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd)

I also caught this pilot episode this weekend on Netflix. I had high hopes for it as it has been talked up for a while by friends of mine, has won an International Emmy for best sitcom and co-stars Richard Ayoade of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and The Mighty Boosh fame. Those hopes were dashed by the end of the first ten minutes. The pilot episode of the first series was dreadfully corny, relying on the worst and broadest of 'IT tech are nerds' stereotypes as jokes and possibly the laziest and most grating application of a laugh track I have ever seen in a comedy series. Well, a British comedy series.
None of the characters are worth recalling anything about. Ayoade plays Maurice Moss, the Revenge of the Nerds style character with thick glasses, fuzzy hair and naivete so thick you can cut it with a knife. He gets very few lines of note, mostly just acting as though he doesn't understand what's going on around him. Chris O'Dowd's Roy is the other kind of geek showcased by this series, the smelly comic book dork with poor social skills and a chip on his shoulder. His dialogue is also quite cliched and trite. He is confrontational where Maurice was clueless. Their inept boss, Jen Barber, is played by Katherine Parkinson. The show begins with her being assigned to run IT by her own clueless and arrogant superior. In an ironic twist (yes, seriously) she knows nothing of computers. Hilarity. A series of sub-Three's Company attempts at sabotage and undermining the boss ensues until Barber's big secret is revealed. Roy attempts to rat her out to her own boss until it is established that everyone on a team will be fired if the team doesn't work together. Yes, that broadly is the manager character written. He's like something from a Monty Python sketch but lacking the depth and likely expected to recur. Eventually all agree it would be in their best interest to stop screwing one another over and work together.

I'm mildly interested to see where the series goes from the dull and clumsy set up. Now they are allies but what does this mean to them? Will they keep attempting to one up one another in a power struggle but with the subtlety not to get then entire dept fired? I am not in the least interested in a single of the only four characters from the pilot but the series began in 2006 and won the Emmy in 2008 so there must be some growth in between here and there. Given the nature of the comedy in the show this could be simply painful to sit through as well. I was hoping for another series on par with Garth Merenghi or Black Books but the pilot was all too much like the fake show "When the Whistle Blows" from Ricky Gervais' Extras.