'The IT Crowd'
TELEVISION REVIEW
The British import, a workplace sitcom with a raucous, surreal edge, may be the best comedy on the domestic fall schedule.
That the funniest straight-ahead sitcom of the American fall television season is a 2-year-old British import airing on a basic-cable network is because of a few things: a dearth of new American sitcoms, the availability of road-tested foreign product, and the ongoing expansion of the vast tracts of basic cable into the kind of programming that has traditionally defined broadcast television.
There is a small but growing rage in those precincts for "original" scripted series, even if the series are not technically original, and licensing series from other English-speaking countries is a way to get in that game.
“The IT Crowd,” about three people stuck in the literal/metaphorical basement of a skyscraper office full of "a lot of sexy people not doing much work and having affairs," has aired two six-episode seasons in Britain. It isn't the first comedy acquired or produced by the Independent Film Channel, where it premieres tonight, but it is possibly the best. Last year, NBC floated an Americanized pilot (with Richard Ayoade reprising his role as Moss), but it sank during a regime change. In any case, the genuine item has now arrived.
It comes with a high pedigree, Britcom-wise. (This will matter to some of you much, much more than to most of you.) Creator Graham Linehan also co-created the wildly funny "Father Ted" and "Black Books" and wrote for the news parodies "The Day Today" (in which Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge first appeared) and “Brass Eye,” whose guerrilla-interview methods Sasha Baron Cohen borrowed for "Ali G," and whose mastermind, Chris Morris,(satirist) also appears in "The IT Crowd" as frightfully intense boss Denholm. Ayoade comes out of the horror parody “Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place” and appeared as well in the cult-popular "The Mighty Boosh" and “Nathan Barley.” (Clearly I am one of those people to whom this matters.)
Focusing as it does on a pair of technologically adept but socially inept "standard nerds" and a woman who is basically their opposite, it's vaguely reminiscent of CBS's "The Big Bang Theory" but more raucous and even less mindful of reality.
