British Sitcom 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 peoplenot 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 Roy (Chris O'Dowd), the surly and slovenly comic book fan; Moss (Richard Ayoade), a naive, innocently tactless and stereotypically geeky mother's boy; and the new manager Jen (Katherine Parkinson), a twitchy career-woman who, despite her complete lack of technical understanding and computer skills, almost possesses a valuable ability the two geeks sorely lack — social skills.Frequent guests included Chris Morris as the aggressively eccentric (to the point of complete madness) company chairman Denholm Reynholm, Noel Fielding as reclusive Goth sysadmin Richmond Avenal, and Matt Berry as Douglas Reynholm, Denholm's extremely promiscuous son who takes 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 did 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:
Acting Unnatural: Moss and Roy after Moss shoplifts the Grand Designs DVDs in "Bad Boys". Moss, Roy, and Richmond in "The Dinner Party" in a slightly different variation where Jen tells them to try and look normal to keep up appearances.
Anything That Moves: Subverted by Douglas, who is putting the moves on a woman when she reveals that she used to be a man. He shrugs and says he's doesn't care at all. However, it turns out that he misheard her. He completely loses interest when he realizes the truth.
There is also Jen's bionic arm from the episode "Friendface," though that was, unfortunately, a lie.
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.
Bait-and-Switch Comment: Roy and Moss are pranking Jen into believing she's holding onto The Internet so she can present it to the shareholders:
Moss: I spoke to the Elders of the Internet not one hour ago. I told them about Jen winning Employee of the Month, and they were so impressed that they wanted to do whatever they could to help.
Jen: Wait a minute... "The Elders of the Internet?" The Elders of the Internet (excitedly) know who I am?!
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.
Cuke from the same episode. "It's like heaven in a can!" (oddly enough, later episodes just referenced Coke instead of Cuke).
Jitter from series four.
A lingerie catalog called Penelope's Fancies
Blatant Lies: "I love that you used to be a man! It's your thing! I love thinking about that operation that you had!"
Brick Joke: Several per episode, no reference ever seems to be wasted. "Calamity Jen" probably has the most obvious examples.
In the third series, Jen sues Douglas for sexual harassment. During the settlement meeting Jen is wearing a large pair of sunglasses that cover her eyes entirely causing Douglas to accuse her of sleeping at one point which she immediately denies. In the last episode of series four when Douglas' wife is divorcing him, she wears a similar pair of sunglasses to the settlement meeting. During the meeting Douglas suggests she is wearing the glasses to hide her fear, but it's then revealed she's actually just asleep.
The plot of The Haunting of Bill Crouse is briefly mentioned in the episode The Speech.
Jen: "I've won employee of the month."
Roy: "I thought you had already won that."
Jen: "No, everyone thought I was dead."
British Brevity: Like most UK comedy shows, only has six 30-minute episodes per season.
And will end in 2012 after four of those seasons and a special.
Denholm, who is mad as a box of frogs yet runs a company so large that the takeover of ITV casts barely a ripple and was taking money from the pension fund.
Call Back: Douglas asks Moss to call 999 in Series 3, to which he responds that that isn't the number anymore, and starts to sing the jingle from Series 1, Episode 2.
For Roy: "Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?" - lampshaded in "Bad Boys", when he realises that he says it a lot and starts worrying that it might be a catchphrase.
In one episode they use a old reel to reel tape machine to provide an 'automatic response' to telephone calls; they obviously know what they are going to say.
For Jen: "Taxi!" - usually heralding the end of the episode, or at least her subplot.
I came here to drink milk...and kick ass. And I've just finished my milk.
Church of Happyology: The Spaceologists, whose opposition to massage parallels Scientology's hate of psychiatry. The show's Guy Fawkes mask is very prominently shown throughout the episode, of course.
Cluster F-Bomb: Jen shouted a string of swear words at a Japanese company exec after he stomped on her injured foot with a pair of Doc Martens. After letting out her anger the man stood there confused ... until his interpreter repeated the sentence for him in Japanese.
Played for Laughs even more in that the cluster was almost entirely bleeped - to the characters, not just the audience. This act was apparently controlled by Denholm's subordinate, who operated a literal profanity button. Denholm follows this up by immediately turning to Jen and loudly proclaiming "You fucked up!" The subordinate hits the button. Late.
And in Series 2, Roy's outburst at Denholm's funeral when his phone vibrates so violently that he thinks he's having a heart attack.
Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: Pretty much the case any time a TV critic dismisses the show out of hand because of its production style. Daily Mirror critic Jim Shelley was once asked why he always made snarky, non-specific comments about the show in his column, and replied "I'll start watching the show once Graham Linehan realises it isn't 1995 any more." Even the notoriously Caustic CriticCharlie Brooker has called other critics out on this attitude, despite not actually being a fan of the show himself (which he considers to be decent, but not exceptional).
This also partially contributes to numerous accusations that this show is a 'rip-off' of The Office and similar unflattering comparisons, when even a cursory glance at both shows would reveal that aside from being set in a modern office the two are almost nothing alike. Graham Linehan has been known to get very irate about such comparisons for precisely this reason.
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.
The "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?" conversation makes a comeback in series 4.
A minor one, when Jen applies for a new job, she references that she knows and is a fan of Guided By Voices, a band she admits she wouldn't know if she wasn't at the IT. This is a nod to the song "Game of Pricks", by the same band, that appears at the end of The Dinner Party episode.
"Reynholm vs. Reynholm" has a bunch, including a reference to Douglas's fight with his transsexual ex-girlfriend, Roy testifying about getting kissed on the bottom, and the return of Richmond.
Countdown: Moss wins the competition and joins a club of winners, where he takes part in Street Countdown.
Graham Linehan appears in the chaos at the end of Jen's Employee of the Month speech.
Linehan also appears as a member of the Mariachi band in the episode "Fifty-Fifty".
And the "Blind Irish Sorcerer" from "Men Without Women."
The producer makes a cameo at the beginning of series 2 as the gay, disabled man who comes on to Roy. Bonus points because of the fact that he actually IS disabled.
A Day in the Limelight: The season 4 finale "Reynholm vs Reynholm" focuses on Douglas and while Jen is also heavily featured Roy and Moss have only very brief appearances.
Digging Yourself Deeper: Roy tells the psychiatrist she looks like his mother, and it's all downhill from there. Waaaaay downhill.
Digital Piracy Is Evil: An anti-piracy ad compares digital piracy to stealing a handbag, a car, a baby, killing a policeman, then stealing his helmet to defecate in, then sending it to his grieving widow, and re-stealing it from her. The ad ends with a scene depicting an FBI agent shooting a young girl in the head for pirating a film from the internet.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: Roy and Moss' 'married' life, and Jen and the smokers being banished to increasingly desolate places in "Moss and the German".
Also in "Italian for Beginners", Moss giving birth to an iPhone.
Dropped a Bridget on Him: Double Subverted when, in a B-plot, Douglas embarks on a successful relationship with a post-op transsexual — but it comes crashing down when he realises that she was saying "I used to be a man," not "I'm from Iran."
And even horndog Roy doesn't want anything to do with Judy
The Face: Jen is the socially capable Nerd Nanny for the IT Department. She has no computer skills but unlike the rest of the cast, she has social skills.
Fashion Hurts: Jen demonstrates this with a pair of too-small shoes.
Fawlty Towers Plot: Roy uses a handicapped stall and accidentally yanks an emergency signal. He lies about being disabled. This snowballs into him getting loaded onto a bus on a wheelchair.
Jen tells Moss to tell a man she had a bad date with that she's busy in order to avoid him. He tries, but when that doesn't work he tells the man that that Jen is dead. This snowballs until the entire office thinks she's dead, while Jen thinks she's won Employee of the Month
Subverted after a while as everyone else stares in the same direction: "What? What IS it??"
Foot Focus: Jen after trying on shoes that are several sizes too small. Body Horror ensues.
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.
Roy telling the widow that he is sorry and to move on.
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
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.
Genius Ditz: Moss demonstrates extraordinary intelligence, memory and mathematical ability... it's a shame he's a Cloudcuckoolander too.
Getting Crap Past the Radar: In 4x1 ("Jen the Fredo"), the visiting out-of-town businessmen say "Eiffel Tower" a few times while high-fiving. "Eiffel Tower" can mean a high five in a different context.
Gilligan Cut: In "Are We Not Men?" Roy promises Moss he won't go in too deep pretending to be a football fan. Cut to them attending a match.
In "Jen the Fredo", Jen assures Roy that businessmen are different from what they were in the seventies. Cut to Reynholm laughing with a pack of visiting businessmen, apparently having just finished a discussion about their balls.
Girlfriend in Canada: In "Jen The Fredo", Moss talks about a girlfriend he had "on holiday", causing Roy to snap "They're always on holiday, aren't they Moss?".
Go Look at the Distraction: The entire plot where Roy is stuck under an employee's desk. Moss fails at this completely because what he says isn't much better than actually using the phrase "Go Look At The Distraction."
A God Am I: Not quite, but in 2.2, upon hearing the latest incredible profit figures his company has produced, Denholm gives a speech proclaiming himself the greatest man in the world.
Hacker Cave: the office basement where the IT department is located.
Subverted, as most of the equipment is simply being stored there and is not in use or working in any way.
Hair-Trigger Temper: Denholm is normally very friendly with his staff, even the shunned IT department. Just make sure you aren't STRESSED and can work as a TEAM.
Expanded upon even more in this series of phone conversations:
"Hello? What? Well if you can't work as a team you're all fired. That's it, you heard me, FIRED! Get your things and go."
"Hello, security? Everyone on floor 4 is fired. Escort them from the premises. And do it as a team. Remember, you're a team and if you can't act as a team, you're fired too."
"Dom, get on to recruitment. Get them to look for a security team that can work as a team. They may have to escort the current security team from the building for not acting like a team."
Have I Mentioned I Am Sexually Active Today?: Moss does this when he has to pretend to be married, several times going out of his way to mention all the frequent and amazing sex that goes on in his marriage.
I Need a Freaking Drink: Done by Jen (without words, she just rapidly gulps down her glass) in Friendface while Delena is going on about how awesome her life is and how perfect her marriage is.
I Like My X Like I Like My Y: "I like my women like I like my toast. Hot..." "And consumable with butter, you don't have to remind me."
I'm A Humanitarian: An ad reading "I want to cook with you" is not what it seems.
Juggling Loaded Guns: Douglas opens a random drawer and finds a unloaded revolver. Whilst attempting to conceal it, he accidentally shoots himself in the leg after putting bullets in it, and spends the rest of the episode trying to hide his injury from his staff. Amusingly, that happens after he checks if it's loaded by putting the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger five times. He is supposed to be Too Dumb to Live, but damn.
Kavorka Man: Douglas, who has a pretty good record with women, with Jen and some court cases being the exceptions.
Left the Background Music On: Twice in "The Haunting of Bill Crouse" Moss seems to have a dramatic epiphany accompanied by a DUN-DUN-DUUUN!, only for the music to turn out to be his mobile phone's ringtone.
Love Potion: Subverted, in that the "potion" is actually just Rohypnol, and lampshaded in The Previously on a later episode, where the narrators point out that Rohypnol doesn't cause arousal - just tiredness. Pre-lampshaded (and possibly making the later example a Hypocrisy Nod) when Moss asked Jen if she was drinking it because she was having trouble sleeping.
Denholm: I am declaring war... what am I declaring war on? Stress. Stress is a disease people, and I am the cure. ...I'm a doctor with a cure. No! I'm a general, and it's still a war! ...a war on disease!
No Periods, Period: Heavily averted; an episode from Season 1.0 focuses on Jen experiencing an angry period, with Roy and Moss discovering the male period and that theirs are psynching up with Jen, demonstrating sympathy symptoms and eventually culminating in worldwide computer technician riots.
Noodle Incident: In the second episode of the first series Moss and Roy reference an incident in which a unattended soldering iron caused a golf... I mean fire.
One of Roy's girlfriends told him, in detail, how her parents were killed in a fire. At a Seaparks, while watching a sea lion show, in an outdoor ampitheatre with at least a dozen exits. Roy spends most of the episode trying to figure out how it's possible. Eventually he does, after building a scale model of the ampitheatre - but before he can tell anyone, the model burns out of control, putting him in hospital, and he refuses to talk about it.
Obfuscating Disability: Roy in 2.1 does this to avoid getting in trouble for using the handicapped toilet.
Otaku Surrogate: Jen may be building up to be a subtle or soon-to-be uncloseted example, judging by the decorations in her office (the most obvious being the poster on the wall to the right of Jen starting in late Series 3, but a Freeze Frame Bonus shows a few significant examples on her shelf).
Out Of Order: Series 3's episodes were changed in broadcast order; especially noticeable when the episode resolving the series 2 cliffhanger that opened with a recap of said cliffhanger was broadcast third in the run.
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.
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.
Refuge in Audacity: Douglas' fight with his transgender girlfriend, which takes the Unfortunate Implications inherent in a man beating up a transwoman and turns it into a knuckle down action movie brawl in which both smash up a laboratory in an effort to completely knock the shit out of each other.
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.
The German Cannibal was also inspired by actual goings on just prior to the second series being aired.
RPG Episode: Very surprisingly given the the setting but the one time an RPG is a major plot element it is an old fashioned 'pencil and dice' Tabletop Game (implied to be Dungeons & Dragons itself) rather than a computer game.
The packaging for the limited edition Season 1-4 DVD boxset is designed to look like an RPG rulebook.
Prime: "The first rule of Street Countdown is... that you really must try to tell as many people as possible about it! It’s a rather fun game and the more people we tell about it, the better."
Rule of Funny: When it comes to Jen's towering ignorance about computers.
Rule of Three: Played straight, as Linehan's other series all feature three main characters. Averted, as it's the first of his Channel Four sitcoms to make it to a fourth series. But it's his third sitcom for the channel! My head hurts.
Running Gag: It is never made explicitly clear exactly what Reynholm Industries does.
Sanity Ball: Depending on the episode, it can be held by either Roy or Jen, and in some very specific situations, even Moss. Generally speaking, Roy and Moss tend to lose it over geeky things or matters of social interaction they are ill-equipped to handle, while Jen will go completely crazy over something which is seemingly more 'normal' but which she just goes way overboard in taking seriously.
Scrabble Babble: Moss plays the word "TNETENNBA" during a game of Countdown and wins.
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.
The menus of the DVDs are also shout outs in their own right:
Season 1.0 menus have animations of the cast in ZX Spectrum graphics.
Season 3.0's Episode Selection menu has a Grow Cube-style, IT Crowd themed animation.
Season 4.0's menus feature "levels" identical in design and gameplay to Vectorpark's Windosill.
In one episode, Roy tries to break up with an old girlfriend who wears a lot of make up which melts when she cries making her look like The Joker. The episode ends with Douglas hitting on her in the same manner as Heath Ledger's Joker hitting on Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight Saga, scars and all.
Peter File's unfortunate name is a call back to a similarly named person in the infamous Brass EyePaedogeddon special.
The IT department's set is decorated with various alternative comics and their related merchandise:
Small Name, Big Ego: Judging by Denholm and Douglas, this is a Renholm family trait.
Jen also displays some qualities from this trope, being neither quite as competent, upwardly mobile or deserving of being such as she seems to believe she is. It particularly kicks in after she wins Employee Of The Month in "The Speech", however.
Snap Back: The cliffhanger of Series 1 (which even ended with "To Be Continued...") was never continued in Series 2.
Snowball Lie: Moss telling an unwanted suitor of Jen's that [spoiler: she was dead] to keep him away from her.
Also seen when Roy says that he's disabled, and Moss' circumstances in the same episode
Snub by Omission: An Overly-Long Gag during a company meeting where the Boss goes around thanking all the departments, such as the lawyers and the accountants and even the janitors, but not our titular heroes. Upon each announcement, he describes something that could potentially describe IT, only for it to be another department.
Taken to extremes when he's filling the champagne glasses of Roy, Moss and Jen while talking about "these three people," - and then turns to the toilet cleaners. One wonders if he really had been trying to praise them while messing with them. He later sincerely thanks Roy in the corridor later in the episode, so it's possible.
Inverted at the end of the episode, when the three unexpectedly show up at a work party at a glitzy nightclub, and the boss immediately ditches who he's with in order to hang out with them.
Sophisticated as Hell: "Jorg... such fire! I am too tired for revolution. And we've walked f***ing miles!"
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.
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. It ends up working out for them when she breaks 'the Internet' and sparks a major panic, however.
Status Quo is God: The three will never escape their basement office ghetto or get any respect from the rest of the company.
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 Windows XP log-on tone...
Straw Feminist: Jen in "Calendar Geeks", who convinces the girls on seventh to make a nude calender featuring unemployed men or grannies instead of them, arguing it's "oppressive" and "sexist". Of course, when Douglas tells her she'll be accountable if it's not a success, she immediately tells Roy to use them, calling it "empowering". It appears to be a combination of jealousy, and screwing Roy over by forcing him to photograph old women until she is made responsible for it.
Stylistic Suck: Douglas's Star Trek-inspired sex tape; the acting is bad, "female Spock" puts on her ears just as she comes into frame, and the boom mic is briefly visible in a shot.
Technobabble: The very first time we meet Moss he gives us an earload ("You see, the driver hooks the function by patching the system call table..."), which is an accurate description of how a driver works in Windows.
Played straight with the recorded phone response of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?", even in cases where the problem is slightly more complicated.
This Isn't Heaven: In one episode Douglas has a near death experience. His father is welcoming him towards a big white door, and it's all very white and glowy. Then Hitler pokes his head out, and Renholm tries to explain that "we're having a fancy dress party in Heaven".
Token Trio: Defied Trope. One of the Male characters is black and the other is Irish, but, aside from a few token mentions of the latter, ethnicity never really comes into play. Unless Nerd is an ethnicity. Jen often tries to be The Chick but fails miserably.
Too Dumb to Fool: Why Roy and Moss's plan to humiliate Jen backfires - none of the senior staff know anything about computers either.
Some of them do know a bit more then Jen (or at least are less gullible), as none of them bought that when you type Google into Google, it breaks the internet.
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.
Jen pronounces "computer" with the emphasis on the first and third syllables (rather than as more commonly on the second syllable). This serves to highlight her lack of expertise and interest in the area.
In series two, when discussing Jen's boyfriend Peter File's unfortunate name, Moss mentions the US pronunciation "peh-duh-fahyl" in comparison to the UK's "pee-duh-fahyl".
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