Thursday, July 29, 2010

The IT Crowd



My new favorite TV show is a sitcom called The IT Crowd. It is currently a popular show in England--still airing--but you can buy the recently aired seasons here in the US in a DVD boxed set.

It's about two nerdy IT guys who work in the crummy basement of an otherwise posh office building that houses a company run by a crazy CEO. Because he's kind of crazy and random, he assigns newly-hired Jen to manage the IT guys, even though she knows nothing about computers.

The description on the back of the boxed set calls Jen a "go-getter" but I think that's inaccurate. While she desperately craves the outward appearance of success, she has little actual drive. She's more the type of person who sits around and complains and hopes that success will magically happen to her. In other words, she's very relateable. She doesn't manage the guys so much as she pretends to manage them when someone important walks in the door. For their part, they tolerate her with a mixture of affection and exasperation. They don't respect her very much, but they do like her.

It's a show about people who aren't really making it and who don't really have what it takes. Maurice Moss is the most lovable nerd to appear on television since Ed Grimley. Roy is less socially maladjusted than Moss, but being slightly cooler tends to mean that he just finds that many more ways to humiliate himself.

I wanted to post a scene from the show here, but of course the embedding was disabled on YouTube. Damn those computer nerds!

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