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The IT Crowd
2006 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Graham Linehan
The comedic misadventures of Roy, Moss, and their grifting supervisor Jen, a 'motley crew' of IT support workers at a large corporation headed by a hotheaded yuppie.
39 positive10 negative2 mixed56 neutralfrom 107 commenters
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113 comments on Hacker News
Red Dwarf had a tiny budget initially, you just need good writers and actors
I can’t imagine Yes Minister’s budget was particular high either.
And it’s not just confined to the 70s and 80s. The IT crowd budget was pretty low, gave us some classic relatable episodes.
You don’t need a big budget. Even the “big budgets revival of Doctor Who with Edleston in 2005 paled in comparison to the budget of the most recent series, but the quality was so much better.
This seems to have happened about a year before "The IT Crowd" episode "Smoke and Mirrors" aired.
In that episode Moss, one of the IT denizens, goes to a TV studio where he is mistakenly put on a news program and interviewed about a war.
I wonder if they're related...
Reminded me of an episode of the IT Crowd where they put a recording of "Have you tried turning it off and on again? as the answering machine for an IT department.
Apparently the people downvoting haven't watched The IT Crowd TV series. It was a joke.
The first thought that popped into my mind when reading this article was whether Andrew Strangeway was the Elder who maintained The Internet on Big Ben, because the sitcom "The IT Crowd" has ruined me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
The streaming services in recent years decided to remove that IT Crowd episode entirely, which is unfortunate as it was very funny.
From the hilarious TV Series "IT Crowd":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWc3WY3fuZU
Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done.
For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.
Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.
For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.
For anyone who doesn't understand the reference, it's from the IT Crowd and the entire episode is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuTMphDrc4A
I remember my own phone number and the new emergency number from the IT crowd episode: 0118999881999119725 3
It's funny how the brain works. I don't even remember my girlfriend or my mother's number, but I can recognize it when I see it.
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
Reminds me of the episode of IT Crowd where Roy pretends to be disabled.
I really enjoy the process of ripping a disc to my hard drive, especially the process of finding the right combination of VapourSynth filters to clear up and fix any issues done in the mastering process. I also have discovered some interesting extra features.
An interesting DVD set was the first season of The IT Crowd, which has base64 encoded subtitles. It was a fun little project to OCR those, combine them together, and then decode them.
In terms of interesting DVD commentaries, Goodfellas and Catch Me if You Can have commentaries with the actual criminals who are the subject of the film, which gives an interesting perspective. There was also a hidden commentary track on one of The Simpsons episodes where the writers go into details about why there was a drop off in quality on the show. Actually the commentary tracks on The Simpsons episodes are generally excellent.
> I would have expected this from some weird UK black comedy...
There was an episode of the IT Crowd with this as the scenario. The boss declares war on stress, and says "Oh, by the way, anybody still experiencing stress at the end of the day WILL BE FIRED!"
It's pretty crazy how quickly it happened/happens. The Deppenapostroph is maybe less problematic; I see it more as a simplification just like the dative replacing the genitive. But Denglish really just makes everything harder to understand; even if you are fluent in both English and German the "switching" is tiresome. Still, maybe we should get rid of "handy" and "beamer" first...
Ironically, even British English has the issue of Americanisms sneaking in, see e.g. the IT Crowd episode: "How hard is it to remember 911?" "You mean 999? That's the American one".
I have fond memories of watching Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, and Kevin Rose (of later digg fame) on The Screen Savers and Call For Help on the old ZDTV, then TechTV before it merged with G4. So many amazing hosts and shows got their start on that network, and many of them continue on their own shows/podcasts on YouTube and elsewhere, especially on the TWiT.tv video podcast network that Leo started. I met Leo once in SF at an impromptu meetup he announced on Twitter in the early 2010s, and he was the nicest person ever. Truly a larger than life personality and career, and you should check out all their shows if you're into IT on TV type content. They have like 10+ current active shows, including the namesake This Week in Tech and Security Now.
The closest to a show about IT support is Ask The Tech Guys, which is live in ~1.5 hours from now, and goes for 3 hours, and they have a Zoom link you can call in on @ call.twit.tv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechTV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screen_Savers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWiT.tv
https://twit.tv/
https://www.youtube.com/ThisWeekinTech
https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys
https://www.youtube.com/TechGuyLabs
I'll never forget watching Patrick accidentally break a brand-new ~$1-2K AMD 64-bit processor iirc live on TV while Leo watched in like 2002 due to misalignment or improperly mounting the heatsink. They were experts but they still make mistakes like the rest of us, and they took it in stride along with some good-natured mockery. It was the epitome of r/techsupportgore schadenfreude.
If instead you wanted a drama about IT support, I don't know of one - the closest would probably be a tie between the equally fantastic Mr Robot and Halt and Catch Fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series)
The closest thing I know to a show about IT support would probably be the British sitcom The IT Crowd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
Likewise, “IT Crowd” is great.
But the point about BBT is that it isn’t really a show about nerds or physics; it’s about emotional intelligence. This was a fairly groundbreaking angle for a Hollywood sitcom at the time when comparable mainstream shows were built on rather mean-spirited writing and stunted character development, like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Two and a Half Men.”
Interesting, And I'd still rather watch a episode of IT Crowd than any BBT.
This reminds one of my favorite episodes of the IT Crowd, in which Roy gets a life expectancy of only days, hilarity ensues
https://youtu.be/X-lU1SeyWew
Trying to rank the IT Crowd right now and the episodes keep refreshing before I click anything - https://tvsort.com/show/2490/matrix_01hk2y2csmeg1tdczs12wbz68x
Am using Firefox with uBlock Origin if that affects anything
What you said did not make much sense, if it got poorly remade how can the local one be bad? that would mean the local one is better because the remake is worse.
Most horror remakes are seen as bad and a lot are forgotten, The mist, The Shining, Psycho. Shows imported from britain are bad, like The it crowd, a good deal of panel shows from britain crashed and burned.
Hollywood also has the capability of throwing away movies if they think are bad enough. "Release the snyder cut". There's plenty of bad remakes, I'm not young but a lot of things are remakes from the 50s 60s 70s 80s and we just don't know, apart from the adaptations of foreign movies and films.
Big Train: directed by Graham Linehan - Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd...
(And the guard of the hospital in Darth Marenghi's Darkplace.)
It reminds me of that episode in the IT Crowd where Jen gets the employee of the month award, lets it go to her head, but its revealed that the CEO literally pulled her name out of a large box
Since you raised your doubts, I just re-watched it - series 3, episode 4. And I confirm the view.
The whole episode is about the clumsiness of living, consistently with the project idea ("the IT crowd", outcast specialists with little interface to the public, which is a mass of people thrown into some role "«not doing much work but constantly having affairs»" - confused humans -, with a link which is the portrait of incompetence trying to make a living - trying to live - into something she does not understand). All the characters do is "attempting", trying to fit a role. The difficulties of living roles could be a trigger for the development of the substory involving Douglas Reynholm and April (and the gender instrumental to that). The whole idea climaxes in the "collapse of civilization" when the "stakeholders", as "topmost layer of the role-players", are in front of the catastrophic loss of the Internet, and the "punchline from above" is that of Moss: "It really isn't that funny" - of course, because it is tragic.
While I could see that the "It's over scene" could be to some extent insensitive, given that the writers may have guessed that it would be something lived by a number in such group, it was instrumental to the fight scene, which is a consolidated topos. And the "victory" seems to be on the other side, since the "punchline from inside" is that of Douglas, which ends the episode crying, going "It's not the same!" (It's not the same without her, or him - as she was both the "other half" and the "pal"). So, not only I do not see a phobia, but on the contrary, I see the opposite message, towards seeing people for what they are, and to love that whatever they are (also since the premise of the whole is, as said, that they will be confused imperfect players) - Douglas could not and he is alone crying.
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one; though I don't think the ep should be removed, it is in poor taste and arguably defeats its own comic intentions. I suspect the deeper objection is not to the content per se but how it reads in the context of Graham Linehan subsequently aligning himself as a massive transphobe and making it into a political cause.
I don't know Linehan personally, but grew up near him and followed his career since long before he went into television, when he was writing film and TV reviews in an alt-weekly paper for beer money. He has always been a comic genius, able to turn excruciating social pain into hilarious farce, while also being willing to cheer on success. I remember he once opened a movie review for a film called Eat the Peach with 'At last, an Irish movie that does not make me want to run to the toilets and lick all four walls.'
That kind of self-criticality and emotional nakedness has deep roots in the Irish identity, and it is what makes Roy, an Irish man working for an incomprehensible and irrational corporation in London, such a compelling character. I find the show especially entertaining because I've been that person, doing that exact job, working for those kind of companies in London, often under bosses like Jen or Denholm/Douglas Reynholm. Linehan's character portraits, even for a single episode or scene, are incredibly sharp and truthful. In The Work Outing, where Roy and Moss unwillingly accompany Jen to the theater, there's a scene where Jerome, an extroverted PR guy, is introduced to Roy & Moss. No sooner has Roy diffidently said hello than Jerome exclaims 'Oh my god you're Irish! I love Irish people! They're all mad aren't they! They're just mad!' and the exchange spirals downward into cringe. The whole episode is a comic masterpiece, but this brief scene has a special place in my heart as I've had that conversation hundreds of times in my life.
In this scene but also in general, the engine of comedy is the mismatch between characters who are quirky and self-conscious (like Roy and Jen) and those who are quirky but oblivious (like Moss, Douglas Reynholm, and here, Jerome). When characters go against their 'natural' type they get punished in hilarious ways, by being stuck with the baggage of their transgression which then multiplies itself exponentially. The plot frame for this episode is that Jen tries to be oblivious in pursuit of a date with another oblivious-seeming person, who turns out to be even more painfully self-aware than she is. As in all restorative comedies, the characters who transgress end up feeling worse but wiser, nothing really bad happens, and everything returns to normal.
In The Speech (the 'banned' episode), hopelessly insensitive CEO Douglas Reynholm meets an attractive lady journalist, April, and romance blossoms. Despite her repeated advisories that she used to be a man, Douglas thinks he's found the perfect woman who not just tolerates but admires and enjoys his shallow hyper-masculinity, sharing and even exceeding his love of bad action movies, heavy drinking, and competitive sports. But gradually reality gets through even his dense skull and he ends the relationship - briefly taking responsibility for the situation, before reverting to type and deflecting blame back onto April. Mutual recriminations quickly escalate into a fist fight straight out of a bad action movie, with Douglas wins - thereby regaining his 'boss' status - by knocking April out. He is subsequently shown as being vilified in the press and sobbing over the loss of his erstwhile companion, with whom he was actually compatible.
(Roy, Moss, and Jen are relegated to the less-important plot frame story in this episode, which sets up but is peripheral to the emotional conflict of the main story. In dramatic and thriller forms, the emotional conflict sets up but is peripheral to the main plot action; John Wick is the purest distillation of this.)
The Speech breaks two comedy rules in that the climactic suffering is not just emotional but physical, and something really bad does happen (the knockout). While it's implied that April recovers (going on to write a negative magazine article about Douglas) and Douglas actually feels bad, the comedically awkward social conflict of incongruous gender expectations crosses a line into physical violence which writers normally avoid. The violence is also intense; while this is meant to parody the bad action movies both Douglas and April enjoy, most comedy violence involves characters either flailing around, missing their punches, and blundering into the furniture or escalating quickly to absurd extremes like explosions or natural disasters. Though there are multiple comic touches in the fight scene, it's choreographed as a conventional aggressive fistfight, with a lot of punches to the head in both directions.
This was a bit too close to reality for a lot of people, because transgender women do suffer a disproportionate amount of physical violence up to and including murder, and this often takes place in the context of relationships. Perpetrators often defend themselves in court by insisting that they were deceived by a transgender romantic or sexual partner and acted violently out of fear and panic, which many find wildly implausible. Complaints gradually mounted over a 12 year period and in 2020 the UK broadcaster of the show announced they were dropping the episode from reruns.
Graham Linehan, who wrote and directed the episode, reacted badly, announced he was cutting ties with the broadcaster (after years of fruitful partnership), and went on a vicious tirade on social which eventually led to the suspension of his Twitter account - strangely parallel to the trajectory of the fictional Douglas. Rather than compromising or de-escalating, he raised it to the level of a political issue asserting that his civil rights (of free speech) were under attack and going on to attack transgender people in general in the most vituperative terms. In the context of an ongoing trend of escalating violence towards trans people (nearly doubling in the last year) his increasingly strident position has alienated a great many of his former fans.
The story about the pulled IT Crowd episode is covered here: https://screenrant.com/it-crowd-controversy-graham-linehan-april-transphobic-bad/
There are already incidences of this:
The TV show Community is missing an episode on Netflix for some reason (edit: reason was Ken Jeong in what could be interpreted as blackface).
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some - that episode also has the unrelated and hilarious plot where Roy and Moss convince Jen that they're loaning her a "black box that holds the entire internet".
I wasn't aware of the "IT crowd" comedy tv show. It definitely lifted my spirit up, perhaps in a similar way that layoff episode of "office space" would. It is black humor, but humor nonetheless, and some people do appreciate such form. Censoring comedy doesn't seem right.
This is the episode to which the parent post refers: https://youtu.be/TKOrr4XRbg8
Having read this, I now realize a bit in the Abicada-bra episode of the IT Crowd was a parody of this incident.
The stakes are high for primetime network television in general in the US. Only about 20% of new shows are renewed for a second season, and showrunners desperately want a multi-season TV show to put on their CV.
To add more perspective - of the projects a network picks up in a given year, only about 18% will go on to produce a pilot that same year. And usually if a pilot isn't greenlit for a project in its first year, it's effectively dead. So the fact that the IT Crowd (US) got a pilot at all is already remarkable.
With the exception of The Orville, none of these were ever network shows, and only The Expanse aired on basic cable, which does often have ~13 episodes.
IT Crowd USA was supposed to be a primetime NBC sitcom.
That kind of thinking still exists. The most recent example I can think of is Ghosts on CBS as the US version of the UK Ghosts. CBS' streaming service (Paramount+) will even recommend the UK original and you can compare them side-by-side.
(Another somewhat recent example to mind was FX's Wilfred as the US version of the Australian Wilfred TV show. Hulu picked up the Australian show so that you could compare them side-by-side. For streamers this is easy content recommendations.)
TV and Movie executives are always looking for "low risks" and "proven formula" will always be a way to lower risk. Shows and movies from the same originating country get "rebooted" all the time. Doing a fresh take across cultural boundaries is interestingly a higher risk as studios try to figure out if the original premise has legs in the new country. Some of what we see is survivorship bias: The US Office was huge so that gets mentioned a lot. But there were a lot of similar attempts that never made it past the pilot because the risks were too high or it just didn't seem to work or whatever.
Off the top of my head, similar to this US IT Crowd pilot there are also "lost" pilots you can find for US Doctor Who and US Red Dwarf. The fascinating thing about both of those attempts occurred during different points of the height of the PBS/BBC partnership. Up until about the late 90s/early 00s PBS was the most common importer of BBC programming from the UK. (That shifted when the BBC decided it could be a stronger revenue stream, starting chasing bigger bids from US cable channels, and then eventually cofounded the BBC America cable channel.) At various points in time PBS' biggest audiences tuned into Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Blake's 7 (among others on the sci-fi side of their programming), so even in the "old" TV era these US attempts knew there was some pre-existing audience familiar with the original UK shows through PBS at the time. So streamers have exactly created that as a "new" idea or new thinking so much as shifted the economics of it. (PBS was public funded and not making a lot of money for how popular its showing of UK shows were. Streamers are all big for-profits that use multi-cultural content for moats around their subscription fees. Including BBC America's current home AMC+.)
I think they probably realized that the success of the series were due to the characters, and not so much the writing. So if its going to live/die based on the audiences response to the characters then why spend time working on the script?
And I have to say, this episode of the US IT Crowd just wasn't the same for me. This version is quirky and forgettable. The cast of the UK version is _so_ good that it elevates it to a hilarious classic.
Too bad they didn't make it to episode 2. I feel like "they're not just THE emergency services, they're YOUR emergency services" is one of the most British things I can imagine. (I say that as an American, though, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.)
The IT Crowd always impressed me with their set design. I was working as "IT" at the time, and our office was nearly identical to the one in Season 1. We had O'Reilly stickers everywhere. There were an infinite number of desk toys all over the place. We spent 99% of our day screwing around. It just felt so authentic to me at the time, and still does to this day. (Some of that screwing around was legit office stuff, though. Our air conditioner's drainage pipe was blocked, so we rigged up a fish tank pump to pump the water out of it into a giant bucket. We'd then dump that in one of the many floor drains that our office had, because of course our building's hallway had floor drains every 3 feet. The other 1% of the day was screwing around under the guise of helping people. We were the computer support team for the Physics department at the University of Chicago. People who had recently won the Nobel prize would come to us with things like "my hard drive died", and we would just put it in a plastic bag, immerse it in liquid nitrogen, and copy off their files. Worked every single time. Did we ever try copying the files before freezing the thing? Absolutely not. We weren't the scientists, we were a bunch of random idiots trying to help, and we had an unlimited supply of liquid nitrogen in the building.)
There was a failed US pilot of Outrageous Fortune, a hugely popular comedy series from New Zealand about a crime family trying to go straight.
Like IT Crowd, poor casting was the likely culprit.
https://imdb.com/title/tt0461097/
I'm pretty sure this pilot is the same script as episode 1 of the original UK series. Clearly someone felt the need to recast and reshoot the series with US actors (plus Richard Ayoade), like they did the US Office.
I wonder if that's old thinking (or wasn't actually needed) - the amount of UK TV that's now on Netflix and other OTT platforms seems to suggest that US audiences are open to enjoying original UK series without being reshot. Did the UK IT Crowd ever take off in the US?
We could say not just banks for rich people but most companies where software is not a product (money-generating part) are bad at IT (general trend: cost-centers are neglected).
The IT Crowd TV series are representative.
Jesus Christ that's hilarious! I suddenly get an IT-Crowd vibe about a sitcom taking place in a photo lab.
For context: The IT Crowd - Series 1 - Episode 2: New emergency number https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWc3WY3fuZU
Reminds me of this episode from IT Crowd :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc
Grandma’s Boy and Office Space for movies.
Various aspects of The IT Crowd, Silicon Valley and Mythic Quest for TV shows.
I'm sure you're aware, but there's an episode of the great show The IT Crowd whose plot revolves around your website
Made me think of the Red Door episode in the IT Crowd
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0609852/
Not a hacking movie, but for a good comedy TV show about IT, I would recommend The IT Crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
It feels like there is the premise of an incredible TV show in there somewhere.
Unfortunately, at first glance, there doesn't appear to be much overlap between the cultures of Silicon Valley and Westminster, which we might call "two nations divided by a common language", or the difference between "move fast and break things" and "move slowly and break things".
Having said that, if the Dominic Cummings plan of a "British ARPA" goes ahead, that could prove to be a comedy gold mine for some good satirists. Such a TV series would only need to take some inspiration from "The IT Crowd" and the "Q" character from James Bond, and it would become an instant hit.
Perhaps S3E4 of [IT Crowd](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487831/episodes?season=3)? from 2008.
https://theitcrowd.fandom.com/wiki/The_Internet
"The IT Crowd is a British sitcom originally broadcast by Channel 4"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
Fundamentally, a large "do not unplug" sign is just like any other failsafe system. Nuclear missile silos, probably the most "do not touch this switch" systems in existence, are only slightly more refined, and have red covers over all the important switches instead.
The alternative is to epoxy the keyboard in. But then when you legitimately need to unplug it, you need to find a hammer.
As an aside, that XKCD strip feels heavily inspired by an episode of the IT Crowd [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
Oh god, this sounds so much like an IT Crowd episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRMBWxfA2OM
Anyway, the Taboo aspect is interesting. It's funny to see that in Pakistan they have troubles with shopping underwear, if I recall correctly the guy who created Victoria's Secret had similar issues(which made him create the company in first lace).
Take a ticket to Istanbul, an ancients city in a muslim-majority country and you would be surprised to see that underwear is not a taboo there. Yes, the current islamist government banned women in bikini to be on billboards but even in conservative neighbourhoods things like bra are traditionally sold using the words like "hats for twins", waving the bra and announcing their amazing price.
It's even a theme in local sitcoms, for example? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUh1eJtzIeQ
You can even find sexy underwear in the catalogues of discount supermarket chains with islamic affiliations.
Not a movie, but the IT crowd is definitely a series in that spirit and a must see!
I don't remember the details, but I think that season 2 kind of retroactively ruined season 1. They used to have all those O'Reilly and EFF stickers, and working at a help desk at the time, it felt very authentic. Then everything got super nice in season 2 -- leather couches, people were dressing nicely, etc. It kind of lost its charm. You can't rewatch it because you know Denholm is just going to randomly jump out of a window.
(Having said that, I think "Fire" was a memorable episode that is still amusing. The 0118911881999119 song, "it's off, so I'll turn it on... AND JUST WALK AWAY".)
It might have been ahead of its time. Silicon Valley was well received and is as nerdy and intricately detailed as Season 1 of the IT Crowd. "Normal people" thought it was far out and zany. People that work in tech have been to all those meetings. And, a major character was named PG!
I think there was a PET in the Hulu series "Devs", but I'll need someone to help verify. It was in one of the lobby sitting areas.
It's also in almost every episode in "The IT Crowd", behind where Moss sits.
Ha fair enough, I think it would be a good set up for an insane adventure (or at the least a very morbid comedy... not to make light of such situations but I think my favorite IT Crowd episode is the one about the cannibal)
Let me guess, you don't follow sports? I know many, many people who do daily. Have you seen the episode of the IT Crowd where the guys get sports blurbs from. some website to recount to their coworkers to make them more popular? It's even been enshrined in pop culture how much the regular people is concerned with sports compared to the average "nerd". Just because you don't care does mean it's not enormously popular.
- One hour of walking (I walk fast). - Two to three episodes of Community, Seinfeld, IT Crowd, The Office, Parks and Recreation or Brooklyn 99 (I bought them online so I can do this anywhere I have internet). - A nap of at least 30 mins.
Sometimes I do two of those options.
I think this was from an episode of The IT Crowd.
There's a great episode of The IT Crowd about this (and how it backfires horribly)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKHyqjHqQLU
The first season of IT Crowd on DVD has subtitles in "l33t". What this actually meant was each episode had a different subtitle gimmick. One of them had the "HEY EURAKARTE" quote http://www.bash.org/?23396
(and get off my lawn kids, : I remember when that quote's votes were in the hundreds :p)
Ah, that is problematic. I saw a documentary on Netflix about the British IT crowd. They were not an impressive bunch.
> I closely with the fashion industry in the UK, and one of the things that surprised me a lot was finding out that "Made in the UK", at least for clothing, meant lower quality. While we used to have great manufacturing expertise, that has all been lost over the last 50+ years as manufacturing was shifted overseas.
Reminds me of the IT Crowd episode with the fire extinguisher made in Great Britain. As an American, I didn't realize "made in the UK" had that reputation before watching that episode.
I Am Declaring War on STRESS! Denholm The IT Crowd | Series 1 Episode 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZTvMYQSl_w
The opening line from the IT Crowd [0], one of the cult British sitcoms and a favorite of mine. Highly recommended :-)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
Holy cow that is one of the single saddest things that I have ever heard. I've known some cowardly heartless bastards in my career but no one that low.
There is a local tech company here that used to have a yearly event where they'd invite the entire tech community in for beer, popcorn and a screening of either Office Space or a bunch of episodes of the IT Crowd.
I can never get over how ahead of its time the IT crowd was. I just went back and watched a couple episodes and it still nails many things right on the head
Maybe it's just because I read a lot of books and have been doing so for many years (I'm 45, so I've been reading a long time), but I don't feel like I've lost the ability to focus on reading. I still frequently pick up an interesting novel and read it in one or two sittings. A new novel by one of my favorite authors (say, Daniel Silva or David Baldacci) I'm quite likely to sit down and read in one single 8 hour session.
OTOH, what I do absolutely struggle with is watching video content. I think it's largely to do with the fact that I consume most of my video content on my laptop, so the lure of another browser tab (with, say, Hacker News or Reddit) is always there. I'll start watching a ~30 minute episode of "The IT Crowd" and it'll take me 90 minutes to watch it because I'm obsessively hitting "pause" every couple of minutes to check my email, check HN, etc. :-(
"You wouldn't download a car" is a reference to an IT Crowd skit which parodies the anti torrenting campaign you linked. IT Crowd is a wonderful British sitcom, I recommend any techy would enjoy it.
There are couple of differences between law/medicine and tech which makes attracting women to tech jobs more challenging. I will do here some generalisations, I know there are exceptions.
The traditional job of women in the household was care taking and value transference, meaning the husband brought the money and the woman distribute it and used it. That's why it was only natural for women to work in care taking jobs like medicine, teachers, social worker and such. Jobs like law or banking are value transference, they move money from one person to another without creating any real physical value. Tech generates value so it is subtly but determinately different from what women used to do before going into the work force, it was always the men domain, at least conceptually.
Medicine and Law are very certificate oriented jobs, they are safe jobs. The moment you got the certificate and got into the system you can practice and the experience you accumulate usually path your way to a better position. Tech is something that is valued by your results and innovation, you can be a programmer without any certificate, you must learn new things endlessly and your experience amount to almost nothing when your specific knowledge become obsolete. Women are not innovators in any fields, even in art and music, they hardly create new companies in any field. Law and Medicine doesn't require you to create anything new, you just slot in to the system, the tech world is all about innovation and new value creation.
In the western world women have options and they can do whatever they want. If they are smart and has good intuition, they would rather be lawyers or doctors, if they are not smart they would rather be a teacher and have a stable job for life with benefits. In non western countries like India, Russia or even Israel you will find more women in tech roles because there are not too many other options to earn decently and government jobs like teaching don't pay much. If you give women the options they will go after their hurt, which is not in tech.
Women are attracted to doctors and lawyers and want to be in this environment. That's why you had countless of shows about law and medicine featuring the George Clooneys of the world. Compare it to the IT Crowd and you got a very solid reason why those jobs attracted women in the first place. Women want to be around the highly valued guys of their high school and the same go for society in general. An average white woman will never date an Indian software engineer, that's the sad reality. Women started to look at the tech world only after its status was elevated a bit, they will still rather have a doctor husband over some geeky tech guy, all else being equal.
Bottom line, tech people are not different to any other industry in the way they treat women or minorities or any other group in society. If anything bankers, lawyers, movie producers and to less extent doctors are much more status and class oriented. They invented sniffing coke from strippers butt cracks long before Mark Zuckerberg got his first kiss from his average looking wife. Still a woman will rather work in those environments than in tech from the reasons mentioned above and it is not going to change.
I find this sentiment interesting. I find BBT hilarious and identify with the characters. I often drag my wife to watch a specific BBT episode to get her to understand the way I think or understand the way I was in the past before I met her. I don't find it demeaning at all. I often find it hilarious and say, "yeah, that's me right there!" I see myself in Sheldon, Leonard, and Howard all of them. Raj, not so much. I haven't watched enough of The IT Crowd that people here on HN cite as being a better show to know what I think of it. The few clips I've seen on YouTube, I've only seen the IT Crowd characters being bullied more than I ever saw BBT characters get bullied. It's probably a biased sample, maybe those clips are at the top of the list because people like to watch nerds get bullied? I don't know. All I know is that I don't get all the hate towards BBT.
I live in the UK, and I'm also surprised to see it so high. The TV series "The IT Crowd" used "made in the UK" as a joke explanation for faulty products, which is closer to how I perceive it.
I love that site. I first found it when I googled a license plate from an IT Crowd episode, which led me to another movie (love and other disasters) where the exact same car was used:
https://imgur.com/a/So1m6
So cool. :)
That's some IT Crowd TV show level bizareness.
I was watching the DVD commentary of The IT Crowd recently (which is really fantastic). Graham Linehan in an episode talked about this at length in an episode where Douglas says "Fuck off". He talked about the decision behind making him swear in what's a family show, where to draw the limits, how to make it have the most impact etc. It was great.
He also mentioned that "then again, probably nobody cares". It is a UK TV show. In the US, it would've had to be bleeped and everybody would have gasped if it hadn't.
I saw a news article a few weeks ago during the Women's March about how Madonna said fuck "not once, but twice!" on CNN. I'm familiar with US TV censorship rules and it still took me a solid minute until I connected the dots and realized what was "so shocking".
It's pretty f*ing ridiculous.
This is reminiscent of at least one IT Crowd episode (I forget the title), and so typical...
> Denholm Reynholm in the stress episode of The IT Crowd may have been hilarious in London, but he wasn't too far off the mark in Portland.
He wasn't too far off the mark for Reading (boring town west of London, where it's set). That was entirely the point of that episode.
I lived there too and would see people show up and start work fully kitted out in what I call their "TRON gear" (though they would take the helmet off indoors).
Denholm Reynholm in the stress episode of The IT Crowd may have been hilarious in London, but he wasn't too far off the mark in Portland.
That reminds me of the IT crowd episode where Moss sends an email to the fire department to report a fire.
If you want to see first hand the image Londoners have of techies, watch the hilarious sitcom The IT Crowd.
Searched for "Best Iron Maiden album" and it was smart enough not to pick one. Then I tried "Seinfeld" and it returned Seinfeld as the 10th result behind some other sitcoms, including IT Crowd (that was an oddball!) :)
Reminds me of that IT Crowd episode.
"Cavort!"
Well I was hooked on Dare Devil, The IT Crowd, House of Cards and Firefly on the first episode, but these shows pander to me beyond just plot, I'm sure you can detect the theme for most of them. I'm sure there is a key point for most shows that most who watch up to that point end up watching the whole thing. BSG I remember took 10-12 episodes before I really got into it, and I only went that far because people wouldn't shut up about how good it was. There are also shows I really liked but either dragged on or I just lost interest in or was just frustrated by the characters (The Killing, Buffy, etc)
Your comment reminds me of the "Stress" episode of the IT Crowd... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmN_tisl9M
And also Four Lions[0], a satire about terrorism
And you may know him as the first Denholm from the IT crowd.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1341167/
I was watching an episode of IT Crowd, and thought this would be a fun idea. So I spent some time putting together this MVP. Feedback is welcomed.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWJIQm9qH-w (for people that don't know IT Crowd, go watch it, it's excellent, and not that many episodes were made)
Must be made in Britain. Their fire extinguishers have a tendency to ignite on use. (According to the IT Crowd tv series)
I searched for 'the IT Crowd' and it got something that 'the IT Crowd' guy was in and not the actual IT crowd. Looks like a good idea. I am sure I saw something like this for movies but for TV shows is an excellent idea. Keep up the good work.
That was an episode of the IT Crowd[1] showing a character on Countdown, like a character from The Big Bang Theory appearing on Jeopardy in the storyline of the show. As for the actual show, I am partial to the BBC "mashups" mixing "8 out of 10 cats", a comedy panel show, with Countdown.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1676563/
Actual Countdown Episode:
http://youtu.be/d1L8uBzW6hQ?t=45s
8 out of 10 cats does Countdown:
http://youtu.be/cu4chThprVk?t=8m6s
I think it is very possibly a result of culture in America and to a lesser extent, Europe, showing people working in technology as unglamorous, lonely nerds with questionable personal hygiene.
Witness the many TV shows making fun of STEM-concentration people, The Big Bang Theory, The IT Crowd, etc. In any film, the hacker will typically be shown as the over-eager, quirky, physically weak character (think Charlie Day as the kaiju scientist in Pacific Rim). Unless the film is something edgy like the Matrix, people always expect to see computer professionals as low-status individuals.
In my opinion, this results in women being afraid to enter these fields, because they are painted as having low social worth even if they have high economic worth. (BTW, if you live in Silicon Valley and are used to coffee-shop discussions about your favourite JS libraries, remember that it is a distorted reality field; if you are male and work in tech elsewhere in the States, the most people will come up with is "Do you work in IT? Oh, I see...")
On the contrary, in the former Soviet Union, scientists and technologist had a high social worth. Boom, 58% of engineers were women, as the article says.
>but its possible that the way the laugh track is mixed makes it more obvious than other shows, such as 90s sitcoms.
It isn't. It is exactly the same as any other sitcom that was filmed in front of a live audience. No better, no worse.
It is just that some people won't give BBT a pass on that usage.
And in a dramatic twist, most people who hate BBT loooooooooove The IT crowd. Somehow I have never heard any of those fans to criticize them for using a laugh track. Weird right? Cause that show does not only use one, it is completely canned laughter as they do not film in front of an audience. Just think what the BBT bashers would have to say if BBT did it like that and The IT crowd would use a live audience. They would go mental over this.
I agree with this. Insofar as you're supposed to laugh at the characters, I think it's true of pretty much all sitcoms. Sitcoms are almost always about broad stroke "laugh at yourself, because you are funny" kind of stuff.
But more interestingly, often people who hold up this argument are fond of bringing up The IT Crowd as a counterpoint to BBT on this front and... I just don't get it. The people in IT Crowd are basically awful human beings I can't sympathize with, in spite of existing in a vaguely similar world as they do. The characters on BBT feel much more sympathetic to me. They're mostly trying to be good people at least.
Except "House of Cards" was a political soaper (west wing) with a charismatic anti-hero (the shield, etc.)
"The IT crowd" as a goofy farce had no American counterpart and was pretty much doomed to failure. Better translation examples would be the American "The Office" (based on other office-based comedies) and the American "Coupling" (a "Friends" clone.) "Coupling" failed because the first American episode was nearly a shot-for-shot remake. You might have been able to get away with that in the 90s, but not in the Netflix/Bittorrent era.
I'm just not sure I buy that. Maybe it's because I DO know non-nerds that like The IT Crowd; like all sitcom, the situation is merely a vehicle for the humour on top of it. in just the same way that you can find Father Ted funny without being a catholic priest. And there are plenty of non-nerds who would get the 'Internet as small black box' joke. And there ARE gags in BBT that non-nerds wouldn't get (not a huge number, but they are there)
Well, I don't hate it. Its a funny show. What you must understand is that is it not a show for nerds, but for regular people. The IT crowd is for nerds. Otherwise you would not understand the humour. Take for example the episode where Jen is fooled into thinking a black box with a blinking red light is "the internet". Everyone believes her, because he is the head of IT (which itself is quite funny, given how she is clueless about IT, something many IT managers have in common). Watch the episode. On the other hand, BBT humour seems to be about nerds. But look at the main characters. A somewhat functional genius (sheldon) with the social skills of a rock, a socially shy astronomer (or is it cosmologist?), an engineer (portrayed as being smart but puny and weak), and Leonard which is the bond that ties nerds between normals (his relationship with Penny portrays this). He constantly explains the context of the situation or of the characters. And let's not forget the comic book shop owner ( I forget his name). He is portrayed as a weak loser who has no other option in life. All of them stereotypes. Real to some extent, but stereotypes.
The IT Crowd has 24 episodes, BBT has 134 and is still running. IMO that makes them kinda hard to compare.
And weren't the earlier episodes of BBT a bit different? I seem to remember they had more "hard" science/tech jokes that actually made sense (jokes that seemed like they would be quite obscure without an exact/tech background).
So, what if BBT had squeezed their ideas into a smaller amount of episodes?
Of course one could say that it was exactly that choice, that makes the one better than the other. And I'd have to give you a sort of kind of "yes, maybe". Because I don't know, sometimes the UK format series are a little bit too short (indeed, like The IT Crowd!!), but some US format series go on for way too long[0]. I would hope there is some optimal middle road.
(but then maybe not, the first example that came to mind of mixing US/UK serial styles was Torchwood: Miracle Day, the worst of the series, IMHO. There may be better examples I'm not thinking of right now, though)
[0] How I Met Your Mother being a prime example. If only they would push it a little bit further, and then some more still, so it would turn back upon itself in a somewhat post-modern sense, by actually making the viewers just as bored as the "Kids, ..." at the beginning of each episode, their inner voices silently screaming at Ted to get to the bloody point and finish up the story already. This would of course kill the ratings, but they could sell the show to Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries where anti-humour is still appreciated :-P There is time ...
The IT crowd, for me, is one of those happy accidents in television where the writers, producers, and actors all manage to capture the humor of a subculture without patronizing it. When I saw the first episode, I knew that these folks had done something special and I'm quite tickled that they are bringing it back for even a single episode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ
Nice quote: Graham Linehan, the writer of sitcoms The IT Crowd, Black Books and Father Ted, also signed the petition. He said: "It just seems to me that people like Richard are being punished for being able to navigate the modern world. The internet has changed everything. They're doing what comes naturally in these new uncharted waters and suddenly they're getting their collars felt by people who still have Hotmail addresses."
I am reminded of the IT Crowd episode, "Moss and the German".
Distribution isn't the only issue. The biggest issue is funding. I'd love to be able to fund, directly, my TV and movie entertainment. Right now I feel like I'm at the mercy of anyone with a Nielsen box or the time/money to go the movies every weekend.
Perhaps what there needs to be is kickstarter-like project to initiate some project and a corresponding store to keep it going. Probably TV shows would be the easiest to produce this way. Imagine something like The IT Crowd paid for directly by viewer. Or one-off shows like Louis CK's recent comedy experiment. You could get established entertainers and new talent all in the same place if you did it well.
This just seems really odd to me because you are skipping a number of "social requisites" for inviting someone into your home and furthermore for cooking/eating for strangers.
I just see this turning in to another craigslist. Starts off with good intentions, then it becomes exploited and ruined by people with spurious motives.
You may also want to watch the IT Crowd episode "Moss and the German" as to what else could happen :)
>Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing. >Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.
That's it! We need the IT port of House!
Even if you disregard who you work with, what else do medicine and law have that compsci doesn't?
* your family & friends will be able to grasp what you do
* on average, in those fields you can have a much greater positive impact on other people than you can employed developer
* your field is insulated by the need for education - you don't have to worry about 16-year-olds who think working 20 hour days is fun
* codes of professionalism (whether or not they're slavishly followed)
* regulatory boards that can and do eject bad apples
* very hard to outsource to India or other destination du jour
* law firms and medical practices don't go boom and bust as often as tech firms do
I'm a female developer and I honestly don't care... but then again, I've made myself impossible to compete with. I'd also gnaw off my own leg before working in a corporate tech environment.
Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing.
Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.
And maybe the funniest episode: Season 2, Episode 1.
Part 1: http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/the-it-crowd-the-work-outing/ZJyWjeDJi7dB4fTr_ut-LQ
Part 2:http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/the-it-crowd-the-work-outing/v5tFhgt4pGD93FbwdDCkEA
I was looking at Father Ted for the first time some months back on More4, and it seems very dated. I like Black Books a lot because of the wry humour. IT Crowd episodes are pretty random (especially series 4), but when they get an episode right, it's stunning.
Yeah I forgot about things like spaced. I just like my comedy a bit more cutting witty obscene bizarre etc rather than "This is a funny situation isn't it". The IT crowd has been a mixed bag for me, moments of genius mixed with whole episodes of 'this is a sitcom for really old/slow people who need their jokes explained over an entire episode'.
does anyone else not find the it crowd funny at all?
i have had it recommended to me over and over, but i simply do not find it funny at all. yes, it has geeky jokes, but as a comedy and an overall tv show is utterly appalling imo.
compared to something like black books, which is just brilliant
FWIW I find IT Crowd funny, but it's not on my 'must have' list. - Office, Green wing, Alan Partridge, blackadder, brasseye, day today, extras, league of gentlemen, psychoville, police squad, 30 rock, etc would all be above it.
IT Crowd is great, but I wish it was a bit more cutting/daring rather than settling into a formulaic sitcom.
I was going to try to find a YouTube clip of it, but I couldn't, so let me just recommend The IT Crowd episode 2.5, in which Moss invents the best bra ever known, except for a few fatal flaws which cause their pitch at the end of the episode to fail miserably.
This is really horrible, but i can't help but be reminded of the episode of "The IT Crowd" Where the lead character goes on a date with Peter File. Just goes to show how much value all societies place on titles, no matter how un-deserved.
I've gone my entire life without TV, at least on a regular basis; I've visited friends with TVs, had roommates with TVs, etc, but never have I or my immediately family owned one, and even my roommates with TVs didn't watch much.
I resented it a bit when I was a kid, since my friends would talk about shows they watched that I couldn't. By the time I hit my teens I had realized what a waste of time it is, though, and I haven't wanted one since.
I occasionally watch a show or clips online, usually when my girlfriend wants to; there are a few shows that she likes. I do watch movies. I will also occasionally watch the Daily Show or something similar online.
Of course, as time wasting and mind-dulling as a lot of TV is, I find that I waste as much or more on the internet, so I'm not sure it's a net positive. The problem is, I can almost always find content that interests me on the internet, that is even plausibly useful, so it's hard to get myself away from it. The social aspect of posting to the internet and getting comments, feedback, upvotes, and the like also helps to suck me in.
On the whole, I think a lot of the reason I don't like much of TV is the ads and the mass-market homogenization. Some niche content appeals to me, so I tend to get a lot more out of internet videos that would never be popular enough to be on TV (people swapping juggling videos online, small foreign productions that will likely never make it to the US like the IT Crowd, stuff like that). As TV and the internet converges, with more channels added, premium channels that are free of ads, and so on, it might be that more of the "TV" content will appeal to me, but for now, I just don't have much interest in a lot of the content that is out there.
OMG: It's the Internet, only wired.
("The IT Crowd" Series 3, Episode 5.)
A/C is a luxury not a necessity
This strikes me as a false dichotomy, or, perhaps, an overly narrow definition of necessity.
The excluded middle is a range of technologies whose utility may easily outweigh any luxurious indulgence value on one end (hot water, flushing toilets, shoes) to items whose extravagance outweighs utility (mercury-filled and/or gold-plated audio cables, "The shoouhz"[1]).
The question being begged is whether AC has a significant effect on ones productivity or overall quality of life, and I posit that those asking "What about AC?" obviously believe that it is. I certainly do.
Disclaimer: I was raised to encourage the formation of brown adipose tissue during my early years, as a hedge against Russian continental climate winters. The rest of my life has been in Sunny California.
[1] The IT Crowd http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0609850/
I'd say so - its definitely become more socially acceptable to be a bit of a geek in recent years, I first started noticing it between the first and second Lord of the Rings films.
We've seen shows like Big Bang Theory and the IT Crowd have popped up in recent years aswell - which shows theres a stronger following towards this culture.
I think the adoption of more geek centric technology is just a natural progression :)