IT Crowd (UK) Coming Back For Season 4 165
sammyF70 writes "Every geek's favourite non-sci-fi show (the original UK one, not the abysmally bad German and US remakes) is coming back for a fourth season! According to the IMDB's message board, it should be on the air 'Juneish.' While you wait, you can check out what kind of vintage hardware will be on the show this time, and remember: if you illegally download movies, you will face the consequences!"
Favourite? hardly, it's awful (Score:1, Insightful)
One-dimensional, cliched characters that portray IT people as social inadequates. Tacky sets and embarrasingly bad plots (well from a sample size of 2) and utterly forgettable dialog. No thanks.
Always amuses me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people like it. Some people don't.
Re:Never found it funny (Score:2, Insightful)
I found it quite funny, but have the same objection. I wonder if the presence of laugh tracks is a preemptive move; later, they can offer a "regular" version for download, or, for twice the price, one with the laughtrack stripped out. My hopes on that front have dried up, though. I actually like certain sit-coms, but unfortunately for sit-coms they generally include it by default. (Arrested Development in one exception, but not the only one.)
Related aside: I used to watch the show MASH a lot -- it was my favorite show from a young age (I remember seeing it when the re-runs weren't yet re-runs ...), but seeing the movie on which the TV show is based unfortunately ruined it for me. Not just because I liked the movie's cast better (the show's cast is still well-suited), but because the notably absent laugh track suits the actual mood of the film; the TV version suddenly felt tacky and cheap.
Now, the IT Crowd is not a socially ponderous, lessons-of-life type show, as MASH tried to be (and, despite it all, succeeded) -- it's a light-hearted farce, comedy of errors and lack of manners, etc. But even so -- no laugh-track should be an option, just like "laugh track" should *not* be an option on The Godfather, Schindler's List, Black Beauty ...
timothy
Re:Favourite? hardly, it's awful (Score:5, Insightful)
Brilliant. If I had to guess, I'd say you were offended by the programme's portrayal of "IT people as social inadequates", which perhaps means you missed the point a little
Re:I'll be sure to set the VVCR (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds more like a typical *nix user setup, you did know that OS X is a UNIX system, right?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every geek's favourite non-sci-fi show ? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:WIsh the show had more bits like that piracy ad (Score:4, Insightful)
One thing that surprised me was the difference between takes. There'd be different styles, sometimes different dialogue (a lot is improvised, at one point Chris O'Dowd was clearly just making it up on the spot and reducing the writer to fits of laughter let alone us in the audience) - the point of the scene stays the same but there's much more variation than I was expecting to see.
Perhaps, if they do cut'n'paste laughter from take to take, that's why it sometimes seems out of place? There were a couple of takes I can think of that were for a purely technical reason (shadow was falling in the wrong place) and they repeated that three or four times. Perhaps if they use laughter from take one where it's fresh to us, but then use video from take four where it's technically right then that's why it sometimes sounds out of place. I've no definite knowledge they're doing this, but it would seem to make sense.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
At least it's funnier than The Big Bang Theory.
Thank god.
My roommates like BBT. I saw an episode and it baffled me. It seems more appealing to people who like to pretend they're not geeks, watch lots of TV, and laugh at "real geeks" for being socially inept.
Not my cup of tea.
Re:Favourite? hardly, it's awful (Score:5, Insightful)
I watched one episode of this garbage when it first came out. A few weeks later I accidentally watched a small portion of another episode. Never again.
If you have no sense of humor, why were you watching a comedy? I mean, how can anybody not enjoy the character Moss? Forgettable dialog? Yeah right. "You there, computer man. Fix My Pants." is not forgettable dialog.
Re:Favourite? hardly, it's awful (Score:3, Insightful)
One-dimensional, cliched characters that portray IT people as social inadequates.
I'd say The IT Crowd takes these cliches to absurd levels, which actually makes them less cliche and more just parody. I believe that if you see through it, they actually make fun of the cliches you mention it, instead of embracing them.
Now, if you want to see real cliched characters (and storylines), try watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory.
Re:There isn't one (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't care if the laughter is real. I don't need to be told if something is funny. And shows that feel the need to have something "funny" every 10 seconds to justify the regular canned laughter (and yes, it's canned even if it's from the same show but edited and moved around) are invariably as funny as an air-borne Ebola virus outbreak.
Laughter tracks are hideous plain and simple, and should have died sometime in the mid 1980s.
Re:Favourite? hardly, it's awful (Score:3, Insightful)
Although satirising the socially inept seems a bit like priding yourself on your skill at boxing against quadriplegics.
I've demonstrated social ineptitude in the past and I think one of the healthiest things to do about it is to laugh at myself and not take my fuck-up so seriously. Consider social anxiety: this is often caused by people being told that they should behave in a certain way and take trivial social rituals as of high importance, when in fact there's always the option to play along and not really care - or even not play along and not care.
As long as you've played fair and tried your best, who cares how you come across? Laugh at the guys who talk the bullshit talk, and laugh at yourself when you try and fail at it - you're fine and those worth being around will not judge you!
Re:Favourite? hardly, it's awful (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that a WHOOSHing sound that i hear?
Why yes, yes it is.
The whole point of the show is to poke fun at clichés and 1D character personae.
Surely you weren't offended by the portrayal of IT types as idiots?
Tacky sets? That was only the basement set, which was a mess on purpose due to being built around the personality of the characters.
It showed other IT people as perfectly normal people going about their day as well, in perfectly decent sets in office buildings.
You can't form a solid opinion on something with such a short exposure time to it, which you admitted.
All shows also have their "bad" episodes too. Of course, the level of badness is defined by the viewer.
People like some humor, some hate it, blah blah etc.
Re:There isn't one (Score:4, Insightful)
Laugh tracks are done because laughter is a communal thing - other people laughing at something can make you find it funnier than it otherwise would be. So it's not to tell you that it's funny, it's to make it funnier.
Of course, none of that excuses bad laugh tracks, or ones done to try to disguise a poor quality programme.