An article I read in the New York Dying Media Times angered me so much I'm firing off a post to defend one of my favorite TV shows from the UK.
I love America. I love mom, Apple Pie, and freedom. I love the freedom of the press we have in this country. I hate the fact that some of the people writing for our oldest, most-respected outlet that reports "all the news thats fit to print" can be unrepentantly lazy idiots.
If I could Find+Replace the New York Times' recent review of The IT Crowd with what I'm about to write below, I would. NYT's Ginia Bellafante not only wrote a hastily-compiled "review" of the show in advance of its premiere on IFC, there's little evidence she did more than watch a promo trailer before baselessly calling it a rip-off of The Office. Judging from her other recent writing, she's a fan of bland Bravo network design competition shows and emo-soaked primetime drama. I'm probably making baseless assumptions myself, but that's only in the tradition of her infuriatingly childish IT Crowd review.
The show concerns the basement-bound denizens of a corporate IT department and is indeed a workplace sitcom, but it is not remotely comparable in form to the single-camera, docu-com that The Office is and always will be. The show follows Jen (Katherine Parkinson), an upward corporate climber who makes the mistake (she finds) to list "computer experience" on her CV, getting her sent to manage the IT department, which is staffed by wisecrack-slinging slacker Roy (Chris O'Dowd) and his socially-awkward compatriot Moss (Richard Ayoade). All three and their supporting castmates are fantastic and pop up occasionally in things Americans see now and then or after they get imported by HBO. This weekend, you can see both O'Dowd and Parkinson in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People with Simon Pegg.
Thanks to the wonders of region-free DVD players and shows hitting DVD in the UK well in advance of them premiering on US channels, I've seen all of The IT Crowd as it's aired thus far. In fact, thanks to that same technology, I'd previously seen creator Graham Linehan's other work, best known among it Father Ted (a mother-fucking classic...note the use of a hyphen) and Black Books. Linehan's work excels in sarcasm, silliness, and absurdity (and that's a sincere compliment int he form of a list). These are the same qualities that make The IT Crowd wonderful. It balances sometimes surreal silliness and geek reference jokes with sharply-written situational comedy and doesn't smash you over the head with any of them. It's quite a perfect stew.
The IT Crowd is more enjoyable than all of the new shows that US networks put on the air this fall...combined. It is more precisely scripted and expertly performed than the vast majority of the abortions they've paraded on the air in recent memory either. Perhaps that is why NBC (or whoever) failed miserably doing a pilot for a US version of the show. I've not been able to track down a copy of that pilot that was panned by a number of people in early 2007, but I'm sure it was as badly-done as McG's "reimagining" of Spaced would've been had it not been killed before production.
Do not brush aside The IT Crowd because someone with a predisposition against situation comedy who writes for the New York Times only felt like spending 5 minutes pretending to review it. The DVDs exist, and there's no reason (especially in New Yawk) that one couldn't do the "watch more than one episode" degree of research on a highly-acclaimed British show that's about to start its third season (series) on the air.
Wait a minute...she mentions something from an episode later in the first season, so it appears she did watch more than a clip. Maybe she's just launching a takedown campaign on anything remotely concerned with nerds, geeks, and the socially allergic. Maybe she copy/pasted the wrong review template into Word. Maybe she was too busy livejournaling about feelings and didn't feel like the oppressive act of laughter and the tyrannous nature of having fun.
My wife, who is decidedly not geeky and watches the Style network's How Do I Look? and Clean House considers The IT Crowd one of her favorite sitcoms. She also likes Bravo's Top Design, and I'll repeat: she loves her some IT Crowd. The only logical conclusion my horribly under-developed American brain can suss out of all this data is that Ginia Bellafante is a blockhead of epic proportions.
I have now added Black Books as well as the long-neglected Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner DVDs to my already overrun queue of Region0 projects. I think I'm less angry about this whole sordid ordeal now, so I should write a sincere apology letter due to the embarrassment I've caused here. Please see it below if you read (or Google Translate) English and reside in Europe. Americans, please carry on being irrationally afraid of having a black President.
Dear Enlightened Europe,
My dear friend, I regret to write you once again in this fashion. It pains me that the vast majority of our correspondence is limited to these sad apologies.
Please assume my entire country is peppered with uncultured, lazy bastards like an American steak is peppered with...pepper. I will endeavour (that is how you prefer it to be spelled, yes?) to correct these egregious errors of "critical" judgment as soon as I notice them, but lordy lord...there are so many idiots here, and only so many hours in the day.
Despondently,
M. W. Chiullan
American Yahoo Cowboy
Texas, US of A