The IT Crowd US Pilot (2007) [video]
archive.org
archive.org
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.)
By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).
I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back.
Boss asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m milking the data out of this drive!” ;)
After trying it in a couple of different computers I accidentally dropped the drive and it hit a metal table leg.
After dropping it, the HDD started up and worked fine, and I could copy the contents off.
Maybe the liquid nitrogen worked the same way (thermal shock in place of mechanical shock).
This was an infamous fix when your Atari ST's chips were working their way out of their sockets back in the 1980's.
http://info-coach.fr/atari/documents/_myfaq/quickfaq-2.8a/st...
The solution is to use your pinky finger on the stepper motor spindle and twist. As long as you felt the stepper move from home, you’re good, you’re not stuck anymore.
I had a Seagate I had to “twist” start every time it powered up, not often as it ran 24/7. You can do it with the drive in the machine as long as you can reach the stepper.
I’m writing this not so much for you but for the archivists thousands of years from now. Hope you get those Seagates started folks! ;)
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?
A show has to be wildly popular before Americans even get the chance to be exposed to it, which really limits the amount of viewers for UK programing, but that's no reason to assume that shows have to be recast and refilmed before an appreciable number of Americans will be interested in them.
If American producers want to remake shows from the UK I wish they'd do it with panel shows. It's an entertaining genre seen in many countries that just never took off in the US. At least then they'd be more justified in bringing in American talent so guests are more recognizable.
> If American produces want to remake shows from the UK I wish they'd do it with panel shows.
They do, but they are very bad. They just remade Would I Lie To You? recently. It was not very funny. They did a Taskmaster a few years ago. Horrific.
I agree about access though. I've introduced a bunch of US friends to Taksmaster who devour the seasons available on youtube, but are then out of options to see the rest.
While I usually like Reggie Watts' work, his persona on the show was too cerebral. Felt like someone at The CW got afraid of the word 'master' but figured they could balance it out with a nice black guy role playing a psychotherapist for the competitors.
Also Lisa Lamponelli was just 100 percent angry the entire season, as if Alex Horne was personally responsible for all childhood leukemia. As a bit gag during an obnoxious task it can work but if thats all you do it fundamentally rejects the premise.
With all the things competing for our attention, they should really give people more time to find things. I understand that they really really want to force people to watch things on their schedule, but those days are over. They've had some success with forcing people to wait week to week for new episodes, but personally I won't start a show like that until I can binge watch it.
Equally confusing was netflix canceling originals they'd already invested heavily in before the story had concluded. Shows with fans who were left pissed off. Netflix could have had a quality title in their catalogue for those who like it instead of bait for new generations of pissed off fans.
It's probably not in most cases.
How many decades have we heard of shows that were about to be axed because of poor ratings or apparent disinterest, then... somehow they turned out to be megashows? Even something as simple as changing the day it was aired often could make or break a show.
> personally I won't start a show like that until I can binge watch it.
Rewatching some older shows (frasier, right now), my wife and I notice some things that... just weren't an issue 30 years ago. "We just saw this story line last week!" Well... no, it was from 2 seasons earlier, which translated to 2 years earlier back in the 90s. But binging things back to back that were produced for annual serialization ... it's not how they were intended to be consumed.
Are 'shows' now being produced with the knowledge they'll all be watched within a couple of days, not dramatically played out over weeks/months? Will 'cliffhangers' continue to be a thing to get you to 'tune in next time!'?
I think so. They'd have to have been aware of the risk once it was common for TV shows to be released on DVD and anything developed for streaming services should expect it too. It seems like shows really stepped up their continuity game after internet fandoms started pointing out all their mistakes.
Shows do still have cliffhangers, but that crutch isn't leaned on as often outside of season finales. I doubt we'll get many shows that always end on them these days.
Maybe that decision was due to the USA's lack of panel shows?
I love British TV. I would happily pay for a UK television license if I could access iPlayer/Channel 4/etc from the US. I don’t get why they are so hell bent against making more money and insist on region locking content. Instead I have to resort to pirating it or buying import DVDs/BluRays.
A long time ago I used to pay for a Linux shell account on a UK provider so I could access iPlayer via a SOCKS proxy. (This was long before VPN providers were popular.). It was awesome to see the latest Top Gear or Kitchen Nightmare episode. It’s a shame we’re locked out of such wonderful content.
Maybe it has something to do with the license being a tax vs a service charge? Seems like opening the door for anyone with an internet connection would only help fund quality programing. $160 a year isn't terrible. Maybe there are issues with distribution rights too. I'd do it too if I could, but I'm with you and I'll take what options they leave me with.
They may still be making more money by regional licensing than just opening up paid streaming to the rest of the world. The support on that alone might be ... expensive.
My guess is that Poms value wit, and the majority of Americans don’t (in my experience). Within most any social class in the UK, wit is recognised: watching say a street cleaner make a sublimey witty comment is comedic fools gold. Also the British colony owerlords relentlessly take the piss out of themselves, maybe just so the French can’t beat them, oooo errr.
Meanwhile us colony exploiters would like to be able to give the BBC money so we can enjoy their terrible programmeing. But those anti-capitalist-royalist-uneuropean-twats won’t accept our livres for their crooked tooth pictures.
Disclaimer: if English were a race, I’d lose.
For anyone unfamiliar Graham Norton hosts a late night style talk show but instead of inviting guests out one by one and talking to each in turn he brings them all out together. He still focuses in on each guest at times but he jumps between and encourages them to engage with each other like a good dinner party host. Here's an example of British comedian Greg Davies telling a story while Ryan Gosling next to him dies of laughter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuXGpUR7fXA
It essentially copies the best parts of panel shows and since he started doing that a lot of folk (most notably Jonathon Ross) have started to copy.
The UK panel show that I can't miss is Have I Got News For You. It's a weekly 30min news review, by very quick-witted comics. As a review of UK news, it obviously wouldn't travel; and the two (permanent) team captains are very English, and likely unknown in the USA. But there's clearly a market for that kind of satirical news review.
They skate close to the libel laws; Ian Hislop, one of the two team captains, is the editor of Private Eye, a satirical print weekly that has a long history of defending (and losing) libel actions. "Did I just say something libellous? Never mind, they'll cut it before transmission".
Last Week Tonight is kind of valuable, but flawed (unfunny off-topic humor, dishonest in its propagandizing for good causes), but most importantly, John Oliver's Activism Hour stole the name of what should be a very different show.
part of what i've found with something like that is... I've already heard the other context or 'important information'. Something like LWT is a balancing factor, not the primary source of info in the first place (well, for me anyway).
Doesn't name the producer responsible, but "someone" is someone in Hollywood, probably at NBC.
And then there's the larger issue of a lot of British TV actors simply not having the recognizability of their American counterparts which is a major selling point (esp in the pre-web media days). Steve Carrell was a minor star from his time on the Daily Show which made him a good fit to 'sell' the US Office.
>Did the UK IT Crowd ever take off in the US?
It was a minor cult hit, especially among the technologically-inclined demographic. But it's not especially well-known.
That fact is supported by how bad the first season of the US office did ratings wise. People warmed up to it quickly thanks to the quality of writing, but the showrunners and producers clearly didn't feel confident in the future success of Steve carrell as a leading star or they wouldn't have ordered he get hair plugs to make him more look more likable.
Lastly, there is something to be said, at least regarding comedy, about differences in taste between cultures. British and US comedy have often been quite different over the last 70 years and is evident in the stylistic differences between the british and us versions of the office in season 1.
This is not a "UK comedy is has more flawed characters" thing either, IT Crowd, Peep Show were full of terrible, flawed, miserable human beings but there were still some drama & larger than life aspects to those shows that gave it some element of "relief". UK office has no relief, it's just pure misery.
Not sure how you can find this bleak and dull:
Having said that, if you know the context, that is, if you have watched the series, the looks and expressions of the actors are priceless, relatable and advance the story in what could have been a just slapstick moment.
I never know if I love or hate the Office UK as some scenes bring me to tears and others I just can't watch to the end. It is a masterfull piece of TV. I have only watched a few scenes of the US version on YouTube and I find them funny. It is a very different beast.
Stars of these programmes were just making their way into celebrity, like Jeremy Spake and Maureen from Driving School, and the people on slightly later shows knew their fame could be a path to them 'making it'. David Brent falls right into this category.
The Office was so incredibly well observed and authentic, it's a work of art.
The US one had other goals, it's just an American sitcom with a nod to mockumentary and zany unbelievable antics.
> [..] has no relief, it's just pure misery.
That's kind of the entire point mate. There is plenty of relief, but it's not your typical American sitcom relief.
The usually involve some "loser" character getting hit with unfortunate circumstances over and over.
The TV execs evidently don't agree with you; Friday Night Dinner is currently on its _fourth_ attempt at an American remake. I can't imagine it working out well.
Michael Scott not being David Brent is what saved the US office, and going in a wildly different direction is what allowed it to become what it ultimately did.
I say this as someone who loved both shows.
That said it's been years since I watched the original (I've watched the US one far far too many times over the pandemic) and all this chat makes me want to rewatch again.
Going to get my UK passport rejected saying this haha. I definitely prefer the American underlying hope than the British underlying despair. I've already got the latter built in!
[0] https://www.channel4.com/corporate/about-4/what-we-do/channe...
https://www.channel4.com/corporate/about-4/operating-respons...
There's been a fair bit of misunderstanding around Channel 4 since Nadine Dorris (ex Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) aanounced plans to sell off Channel 4. A lot of people never reaslised it was publicly owned and then assumed it was the same model as the BBC, but with some adverts.
NFL is an extreme example but I always found the comparison interesting.
How many breaks this works out to varies by show, since they try to cut it at strategic points. Usually 2-4 per 30 minutes.
If anyone has actual data on this I'd love to see it. Especially historical data.
Other ways television advertising has increased over time:
Number of ad breaks. In the 1950s and early 1960s ads were aired before and after shows, often with the host of the show doing the ad reads for one or two products that were billed as the show's "sponsors". A break for ads in the middle of the content was added in the mid-1960s, and the number of breaks per hour increased at least into the 1990s. https://ibuzzle.com/television-advertising-history
Number of ads per break. Television ads have gotten generally shorter over time. 30 seconds became the norm during the 1970s. From 2009 to 2019, the percentage of ads that were 15 seconds long increased from 35% to 42% (https://time.com/96303/tv-commercials-increasing/).
Amount of paid product placement inside the shows. In 2009, product placement occupied between 5.5 minutes and 19.25 minutes per hour, with unscripted shows the highest (https://www.marketingcharts.com/television-9434). Spending on television product placement has increased since then (https://www.marketingcharts.com/cross-media-and-traditional/...).
Addition of advertising to previously ad-free platforms. I recall that most cable networks originally did not air ads but cannot find the data to back that up. In 2021-2022, streaming services have increasingly added ads: https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-advertising-22... In a 2022 survey, 41% of American TV-watching adults felt there were too many ads on television vs. 18-25% for various streaming platforms (https://hubresearchllc.com/reports/?category=2022&title=2022...).
There was service years ago--maybe it's still around--from one of the TV networks that would cut a whole game into 15-20 minutes, mostly be not showing any ads during the game, and cutting out all of the commentary/standing around.
The NFL GamePass service that you can subscribe to (how I mostly watch the NFL from outside the US) offers 'Game in 40 minutes' (sometimes called Condensed). It just cuts from play-to-play-to-play. It's a great way to be able to watch a couple of other NFL games in a given week (fits nicely into a lunch break), but I do actually miss the proper commentary. Good commentary teams are very helpful in breaking down what happened in the blur of action that is each play.
Just a note that I don't think any of the actors in the original version of The Office were recognizable in the UK before it aired. So either it is more important in the US to have a big name attached, or TV execs at least believe so, or they remake it for other reasons and the big name is a nice-to-have.
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.
There's something I was watching on Sky, that had ad-breaks, but no ads; instead, they showed a still frame saying that normal content would be resumed shortly.
When they do show ads, they are nearly all:
* Motorised recliner armchairs
* No-medical life insurance
* Home equity release plans
* Charity appeals with fluffy puppies and sobbing grandmas.
That is, the ads mostly seem to be pitched at retired people, and the ad slots are being sold to low-budget advertisers. I use a PVR, so I barely notice ads. Most cable and satellite providers these days provide a PVR as part of the service. So my guess is the TV advertising business model is collapsing; only poor people, and people too demented to learn to use a PVR, actually watch ads.
Meanwhile, running an ad slot with no ads in it must be saying something rather loud to potential advertisers: "We can't sell this ad slot, so lowball your bid!".
I don't watch TV regularly but I've never seen them run out of adverts for slots; with bidding I would doubt that happens much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_and_organisatio...
You may enjoy Private Eye, worth buying a trial copy.
The image was that the PE journalists basically spent their working day hanging out in Fleet Street bars, shooting the breeze with journos from mainstream papers, and collecting gossip. I have no idea how accurate that picture is.
The line doesn't land half as well without the entire 45 seconds (no exaggeration, I counted on the seek bar) of Roy licking his fingers and drinking tea while the phone rings first.
Linear TV had a limited number of time slots and had to be very choosey with what they put on. It needed to have massive appeal in all parts of the country.
This is charitable. Probably a lot of folks here just have a general disdain for all things foreign.
I am not sure anyone has ever tried to put numbers to the distinction between the two groups.
Then I realized I wasn't sure what "pom" means (not a native speaker, and from the northern hemisphere) either, so had to look it up [2]: "(Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, mildly derogatory slang) An Englishman; a Briton; a person of British descent". It's more of the rhyming slang, didn't know that was a thing for Australian slang.
Indeed. Derogatory would be "Pommie bastard."
We tend to be "direct" and generally have no fear of speaking truth to authority: the whole "OMG we can't indict the former President" issue with Trump is confusing down here: politicians and people in positions of responsibility are held to a HIGHER standard of behaviour, not lower, and they'd be the first to be tapped on the shoulder (or we expect them to be, and would be asking why they haven't been yet).
You don't say it if you're over at mums for lunch on a Sunday, but hanging out with the boys? For sure.
"What's with this cunt?" etc is common venacular.
Among my friends and family, only the really thick UK accents aren’t understood very well. Glaswegian, Scouse, etc. The more common (on TV) RP, upper class Edinburg, and Highland accents are mostly fine.
Especially when you factor in the pirating audience on top of this, it’s a massively popular show and among the most-watched in the US.
Not saying you have no point at all. Personally I have a harder time with the accents in contemporary shows aimed at UK audiences such as IT Crowd because they can at times speak faster and with more slang. But I don’t think it’s purely about disliking accents.
As in, the cost of reshooting is less than the cost of syndicating the original and re-cutting it for American ad time slots.
From my childhood, the only place I remember seeing unedited British shows was on my local PBS affiliate which doesn’t show ads (maybe once every hour).
Indeed, there were 4 series each of 6 episodes, plus one special, so only 25 shows in total.
IIRC in one of the series extras this is talked about: because a series is just 6 episodes, producers are willing to give a wider range of ideas a chance, and if they do well, a second season (of six more episodes) isn't a big stretch. Notably there wasn't a fifth season because they all felt the concept had gone as far as it need to: they didn't want to "jump the shark".
Like the scene where he called back after firing an entire department to say "I was just keeping the IT-department in line", suggesting that he knew what they where up to all along.
The UK boss wouldn't do that. He would keep doing things that only made sense to his insane brain, until something went down hill enough that he just jumped out of a window in the middle of a meeting.
Irregularities in the pension fund.
I think this remake could've gone well if they changed up the script a bit and maybe alter the characters some more. Except for the views and some change of wording, this felt like a fan remake featuring Richard Ayoade more than it felt like a serious attempt to get the show to America.
IT Crowd USA was supposed to be a primetime NBC sitcom.
I think there is room for British comedies in the US, as long as they're open to adaptation. David Brent was a terrible boss and awful person, but Michael Scott had to at least be a good salesman to be believable as middle management. Little differences like that made the show work.
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.
The UK and US The Office are both great shows in their own right. But they aren't very similar, outside of the setting.
(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+.)
> It’s never safe to unload a driver that patches the system call table since some thread might be just about to execute the first instruction of a hooked function when the driver unloads; if that happens the thread will jump into invalid memory.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/...
Not like the US Red Dwarf pilot. That actually is tear-your-eyes-out bad.
The producers just have to pick various people who are a good pick to play off Richard Ayoade being himself, and send them off places to film how they get along with each other. Ideally, picking people who love to travel and have a good time to slightly annoy Richard.
TV that produces itself.
The curve ball, which defied all expectations, was the episode in Madeira which paired him up with someone with a similarly rapid-fire and dour wit: Robert Webb. In contrast to the rest of the series, one of the funniest things I've ever watched.
Terry Farrell got role of Cat in the 2nd attempt for pilot, a year before arriving in Deep Space Nine as Jadzia Dax
But I think it suffers the same problem as the US Red Dwarf and the early episodes of the US Office, you can't expect to clone the characters. You have to deviate. Hew to the spirit, but not necessarily the letter.
It's painful to watch all the actors around Richard Ayoade in the American version.
I think the actor playing Reynholm was the best of the worst but I agree that he didn't manage to get the confident over-the-top intensity that Chritopher Morris had.
Jen wasn't horrible but I pretty much agree with your sentiment.
To be fair, I'm sure if Richard Ayoade were here, his response would be you are plainly incorrect in that he has never been and never will be likeable or funny or any other positive social trait.
I guess that's not a unique issue with panel show regulars - you could argue that say David Mitchell is still just Mark Corrigan - but he manages to be more likeable than his famous onscreen persona, not less.
But that was never Adams's style. The draft of the script they got would have likely not been the version of the script used to make the movie. There would have been changes and alterations all the way up to the point the cameras started rolling.
Adams tinkers. He writes something. Then reads it. If it's not funny, he rewrites it. Then reads it again. Then takes a bath. Then reads it again. Write. Read. Bath. Tea. Bath. Bath tea. Write. Read. A bit of the telly. Etc.
So I don't fault the movie for going astray from every other version of Hitchhiker. It would be weird if it didn't. The movie wound up being too average overall. And I don't think Mos Def is a good Ford Prefect.
The first two series of the US edition of The Office was kind of uncomfortable because it was essentially the scripting and acting of what was previously improvised. I hear the 3rd series onwards was better received in part because it was originally written for the US audience, it was never made for the UK audience, and it wasn't improv'd.
That said, there is definitely a tonal shift away from the UK series in the beginning, most notably starting with season 2.
It really chocked me as I can’t think of many remakes that are better than the original.
I think original IT Crowd is perfect and should be left that way.
It isn't better than the original. It's very good though.
Yeah, that part was weird because Denom in the US remake is portrayed as a manipulative manager instead of a crazy manager. Maybe the writers had a different character in mind.
Actually, I bet they could literally have dropped in the cast of Better Off Ted and tweaked it a bit to Americanize this show.
Like IT Crowd, poor casting was the likely culprit.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_iTeam_%E2%80%93_Die_Jungs_...
There’s some jokes in the IT Crowd that are clearly for the home audience (the fire extinguisher that doesn’t work having a big “Made in Britain” label on it) but I think a lot of it is just universal technologist stuff. Fooling your boss into thinking the internet all comes from a small box at the top of Big Ben, navigating a dinner party, dealing with inter-office politics…there’s a lot there to relate to.
Thank God it wasn't picked up.
I know it's a pilot, but the American actors are even mimicking the UK character's mannerisms.
I get that they were lazy and stuck with the exact same script, but they clearly watched the other actors in the original episode, and then just copy that, too, just low effort all around.
I find everyone loves the US Office, the humor is much more accessible by the wider public.
The UK Office tends to be lost with those that haven't worked in an office environement. The comedy is much more tuned.
Certain things just have to be left as they are.
That said I don't honestly think that peep show style of comedy would translate to US without pulling another office and ignoring the source material.
They are much, much, worse.
In my list of successful American remakes:
* Wilfred
* The Office
In my list of awful American remakes:
* Dinner for Schmucks
* The ring
* Old Boy
Not sure either show would have worked without Moss though.