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"Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
British Sit Com written by Graham Linehan (of Father Ted fame), set in the fictitious Reynholm Industries, a prominent London-based corporation filled with "a lot of sexy people not doing much work and having affairs". Unfortunately for them, the "standard nerds" who make up the IT Department are not part of this glamorous world - consigned to the squalid basement, they are looked down upon and disregarded by everyone else despite their skills keeping the entire place running smoothly. The series focuses on the three-strong team of the surly and slovenly comic book fan Roy (Chris O'Dowd); Moss (Richard Ayoade), a naive, innocently tactless and stereotypically geeky mother's boy; and the new manager Jen (Katherine Parkinson), an ambitious career-woman who, despite her complete lack of technical understanding and computer skills possesses a valuable ability the two geeks sorely lack — social skills.
Frequent guests include Chris Morris as the highly eccentric (to the point of complete madness) company chairman Denholm Reynholm, Noel Fielding as Richmond Avenal, a gloomy Goth and the fourth member of the IT team, and Matt Berry as Douglas Reynholm, Denholm's extremely promiscuous son who took over the business in series two.
Despite sometimes getting a raw deal from TV critics due to the series being produced in the classic Britcom mode (as opposed to the more naturalistic style popularised by The Office and Extras), it has a loyal following and often does pretty well in the audience ratings. An American remake was commissioned but hasn't seen the light of day yet. The German remake ran for exactly two episodes due to bad actors, badly translated puns and therefore bad viewer numbers.
Provides examples of:
- Adaptation Decay - The German version "The iTeam" remade the British original shot for shot while stretching the show for additional runtime and did their best to be as unfunny as possible.
- All Women Love Shoes
- Bang Bang BANG - Averted when Douglas shoots himself in the leg - it's so loud the ensuing ringing noise drowns out the dialogue for a few seconds.
- Beware The Nice Ones - Douglas may seem like a harmless, if sexually crazed moron, but his memories of his last moment with his dead wife involve her screaming for help because he was trying to kill her.
- Black And Nerdy - Moss, of course.
- Bunny Ears Lawyer - Moss. And Richmond a little.
- But Mostly Denholm, who is mad as a box of frogs yet runs a company so large that the takeover of ITV casts barely a ripple.
- Camp Gay - "Gay! A Gay Musical". Not to be confused with Horrible Camping Trip.
- Catchphrase Interruptus - "Hello, IT, have you tried turn- oh I'm sick of saying that..."
- Ceiling Cling
- Cluster F Bomb - Jen shouted a string of swear words at a Japanese company exec after he stood on her foot with a pair of Doc Martens. After letting out her anger the man turned to his translator who repeated the sentence ... in Japanese.
- And in Series 2, Roy's outburst at Denholm's funeral.
- Continuity Nod - Somewhere between this and Brick Joke is the new emergency services number. Brought up and used for jokes in the first season, then not referred to again for two whole seasons.
- Creator Cameo - Graham Linehan appears in the chaos at the end of Jen's Employee of the Month speech.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny - It may be a toss-up between "The Speech" in which Jen breaks the Internet, or "Are We Not Men?" which gives us the longest Fake Out Make Out in human history... between Roy and Moss.
- I'd go with the "Could he have thought you were a man?" Brick Joke in The Work Outing. And that entire episode on top.
- Crosses The Line Twice: "You wouldn't shoot a policeman, and then steal his helmet! You wouldn't go to the toilet in it! You wouldn't mail it to the policeman's grieving widow, and then steal it again!"
- Dark Is Not Evil - Richmond the Goth, despite wearing over-the-top makeup, obsessing over Cradle of Filth and being banished to the server room by Moss and Roy, is actually quite sweet and friendly. However, more than a few minutes of his company still tends to have a depressing effect on people.
- Delayed Reaction
- Department Of Redundancy Department: "You stole it? But that's stealing!"
- Digging Yourself Deeper: Roy tells the psychiatrist she looks like his mother, and it's all downhill from there.
- Does This Remind You Of Anything? Roy and Moss's 'married' life, and Jen and the smokers being banished to increasingly desolate places in "Moss and the German".
- Dude Not Funny - Roy's reaction to people laughing at his charity work for people with permanently crossed eyes.
- Ear Worm: "Willies, willies, I like willies."
- No, no; It's "I LOVE willies."
- Excuse me sir, could you keep it down, please?
- The jingle to the new emergency number (0118 999 881 999 119 7253) qualifies. So good, someone made a remix of it.
- Embarrassing Cover Up
- Epic Fail: Moss points a fire extinguisher at a fire. The extinguisher catches alight.
- Fake Out Make Out: See also, Crowning Moment Of Funny
- Flashback Stares - Parodied: "What? What IS it??"
- Fridge Logic - Lampshaded in "Are We Not Men"- as the credits are rolling at the end, it cuts back to the scene inside a trailer just after the bank robbery, where Roy asks, "Who closed the doors?"
- Whoever drove the truck there?
- The Fun In Funeral - Douglas burst into his father's funeral ran up the aisle screaming "FATHERRRRRRRRR!" and got into a slap fight with the vicar. This was after Roy's phone went off in his pocket making him think he'd had a heart attack, and Moss had compared the death to losing a pen.
- To be fair to Moss, he contrasted rather than compared.
- A flashback in Richmond's introductory episode shows Richmond attending Reynholm's father's funeral in full makeup (Reminiscent of Alice Cooper) and giving Reynholm's elderly mother a Cradle Of Filth album to cheer her up
- Fun T Shirt - Roy has a wardrobe full of them.
- Gag Sub - The official DVDs of the show have an option for 'l33t' subtitles, which vary from Leet Lingo to ROT13 to Base-64 encoding depending on the episode.
- Geeks and Nerds. Standard ones.
- Genius Ditz - Moss demonstrates extraordinary intelligence, memory and mathematical ability... it's a shame he's a Cloudcuckoolander too.
- Go Look At The Distraction - The entire plot where Roy is stuck under an employee's desk.
- Gretzky Has The Ball - "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
- Hacker Cave - the office basement where the IT department is located.
- Hollywood Nerd - Averted; Roy and Moss are more like the reality than usual.
- Homemade Inventions - Moss has a knack for these, from his own Stress Machine to the perfect bra.
- Ho Yay - Played for laughs in the episode 'Moss And The German'.
- I Am Not Shazam - To quote Douglas: "Well, I'm the boss, head honcho, el numero uno, Mr. Big, the Godfather, Lord of the Rings, the Bourne Identity, er... Taxi Driver, Jaws..."
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming - or Series Naming at least: Versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0...
- I'm A Humanitarian - An ad reading "I want to cook with you" is not what it seems.
- Incredibly Lame Pun - "Or perhaps that should be bree-liant."
- Its A Small Net After All - It's just a small black box.
- Its Not You Its Me - "No actually, it is you"
- Large Ham - Both Reynholms. "FATHERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"
- The Loins Sleep Tonight
- Looks Like a Magician
- Love Potion - Subverted, in that the "potion" is actually just Rohypnol, and lampshaded in The Previously, where the narrators points out that Rohypnol doesn't cause arousal - just tiredness.
- New Media Are Evil - Parodied here, where in a spoof of a common anti-piracy advertisement an FBI agent shoots a girl in the head for downloading films.
- Hilariously enough, the linked video is not available in "my country" due to copyright restrictions.
- Nor mine. And I'm in the UK. Whose country is it available in?
- Nice Guys Finish Last - Which Roy attempts to prove.
- No Periods Period - Played for comedy; a first series episode focuses on Jen experiencing an angry period, with Roy and Moss demonstrating sympathy symptoms and eventually culminating in worldwide computer technician riots.
- Only Sane Woman - Jen, relative to the two manchildren she works with. Sometimes.
- Overly Long Gag - 0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3.
- "Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure?..."
- Roy's introduction, ignoring the phone as he eats.
- Reynholm eating an apple...on the end of the video he has made to be played at his funeral.
- Perky Goth - Richmond.
- Public Exposure - In the third season finale, the company decide to do a sexy calendar to raise money for a charity for the "boss-eyed". Roy's original attempt to use the ladies from Floor 7 is stopped by Jen, the attempt to do grannies fails and the "geek" calendar produces unattractive male geeks, instead of the Tina Fey sort.
- Pun Based Title
- Put On A Bus - Richmond, after filming clashed with the tour of The Mighty Boosh. Would be Brother Chuck were it not for one throwaway reference. He got scurvy, apparently.
- Rape As Comedy
- Reset Button: If it wasn't for Richmond's later appearances, "The Red Door" would be a textbook example. Jen finds Richmond in a room off the IT office, to where he had been banished from the office mainstream a few years before. She encourages him to rejoin the office; Reynholm reinstates him, then capriciously changes his mind and sends him back to IT. Moss has taken Jen's suggestion to clean the basement's window and let the daylight in, which makes Richmond retreat back behind the red door.
- Ripped From The Headlines: Moss's appearance as a guest on a BBC current affairs program, probably inspired by Guy Goma.
- Rule Of Funny - When it come's to Jen's towering ignorance about computers.
- Everything is back to normal.
- Sadist Show - Arguably. A lot of the series's best moments come from this aspect of it.
- Shout Out - to every piece of British 80s computer gaming nostalgia ever. The range runs from an Underwurlde poster on the wall to huge piles of Spectrum ZX81s to the menus from the DVD release being ripped off from Head Over Heels.
- Slow Loading Internet Image - lampshaded, with Roy harking back to the days of dialup.
- Sorry I Left The BGM On
- Sound Effect Bleep - Subverted mercilessly. A character's vitriolic tirade is full of bleeped-out swear words... then Denholm congratulates an employee on "being so quick on the Profanity Buzzer", which we see is a labelled button mounted on Denholm's wall. Later in the episode, another F-bomb is dropped, and the employee is a second too late on the buzzer.
- Snap Back - The cliffhanger of Series 1 (which even ended with "To Be Continued...") was never continued in Series 2.
- Springtime For Hitler - Moss and Roy feed Jen a bunch of ridiculously nonsensical IT 'facts' to use in her Employee of the Month speech, in an attempt to utterly embarrass her. Too bad that nobody in attendance at the speech is computer-literate enough to notice anything remotely wrong.
- Stock Sound Effect - there's a surreally justified version in one episode, where Moss has a concussion and has lost his memory. When he knocks his head again and regains it, there's a close-up on his eyes opening, accompanied by the most hilarious possible choice of music: the standard Windows log-on music...
- Talk About That Thing
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That. Would you expect anything less at the funeral of a character played by Chris Morris?
- Three Amigos
- Too Dumb To Fool - Why Roy and Moss's plan to humiliate Jen backfires - none of the senior staff know anything about computers either.
- Training From Hell (nerd-style). In series three, Moss is having trouble with some bullies in the park he walks through to get to the office. Roy tries to help him with some roleplay, upon which Moss bursts into tears as it was "too realistic." He eventually solves the problem when he finds Douglas's grandfather's old service revolver...
- TV Genius: Averted with Roy, played straight with Moss. Possibly justified with Moss actually having Aspergers Syndrome, although that's just fanon.
- Unusual Euphemism - "I've got a motherflipping gun!"
- Video Wills
- Wicked Cultured
- The Woobie - Jen trying to present Moss's invention on Dragon's Den. Roy during the holdup and the getaway drive.
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