I thought that to completely cover The IT Crowd I might as well endure what I had been told was a trainwreck of a pilot episode for the proposed US version of The IT Crowd. It was never picked up by NBC after the pilot (which was shot 2-3 years ago I think) which is hardly surprising if you watch it, because it is exactly like the UK pilot, and if The Office has taught us anything, it’s that if you want to port a TV show from one country to another, you have to make it your own.
To be fair, it wasn’t absolutely terrible, I have seen worse shows but most aspects of it didn’t feel quite right. For example, and I don’t know how to write this without being offensive, the cast in the American version were too good looking, they weren’t totally stunning but they were a bit too polished, whereas in the UK version the main cast are all attractive, but they aren’t really ‘hot’. That just didn’t feel right. Still, the US version did stick to the idea of giving Roy (Joel McHale in this case, who is a pretty funny fella) a geeky tee, and presumably would have given him other geeky tees if the show had been picked up for a season. I’ve hunted around and can’t find this particular variant of the RTFM t-shirt meme that is presumably very popular with actual IT department folks, so unfortunately this post feels as incomplete as the US version of The IT Crowd.
It should be noted that about an hour after I watched the show on Monday it was announced that there was going to be another attempt at creating a US version of The IT Crowd, which is quite the bit of serendipity, so maybe that’ll give me two shows that I’ll be tee hunting for (as the UK version has been commissioned for a 5th series, huzzah!).
