Apparently the US version of the IT Crowd may well be on hold. This is a pity because as much as I had a soft spot for the UK IT Crowd, I always thought it fluffed its concept slightly. Perhaps there was not enough demarcation of characters, it lunged into surreality without mining the rich vein of its own characters and felt it needed more time to develop. Which hopefully it still will, but i wondered how a hothoused, longer run in the US whilst maintaining the key comic central act of Richard Ayeode’s Moss. Graham Linehan, the creator fo the show, also acknowledges a few of these problems, and has some suggestions about how they can be fixed.
One place they clearly have not been fixed however is in the German version: Das iTeam.
This useful compare and contrast video shows the first episode of both IT Crowd, and Das iTeam in a shot to shot comparison. In particular note how the very first joke in the very first episode is completely fluffed in the German version. Also note how the German Roy is wearing EXACTLY THE SAME T-Shirt. Much like the artistic failure that was Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, the Germanified IT Crowd seems to lack something. (ie English subtitles). None of these things are necessarily bad things of course, I am sure the German version spins off in its own particular direction very soon much like the US version of The Office (whose first episodes were very close to the UK version and criticised in a similar way). By the way, Das iTeam has the subtitle die Jungs mit der Maus: the men with the mouse, which is probably some sort of German pun or something. Or at least it would be if only Stewart Lee hadn’t told me years ago that puns didn’t work in Germany.*
[Daily Mail joke alert]
Of course what I am really looking forward to is The Indian version the IT Crowd, about an outsourced IT Team!!!
*Actually thinking about it, the title is actually a pun on the German version of the A-team: Das A Team: die Jungs mit der Van.