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The IT Crowd US Pilot (2007) [video]
- frellus 4y agoI was waiting to see who was going to play Moss's character... and then I'm like, "Oh.. that makes sense. It's Moss."
- baby 4y agoI'm happy this didn't go much further. In my list of successful American remakes: * Wilfred * The Office In my list of awful American remakes: * Dinner for Schmucks * The ring * Old Boy
- DaedPsyker 4y agoThere was a just terrible pilot for a US version of peep show. It amounted to taking the point of view camera and the fact it's two guys. That said I don't honestly think that peep show style of comedy would translate to US without pulling another office and ignoring the source material.
- skellera 4y agoThe IT Crowd is one of my favorite shows. I watched this awhile back and I was really sad to think, “well good thing that wasn’t made.”
- OJFord 4y agoAlthough if there had only ever been a pilot of The Office (US) I would've felt the same way about that, whereas once it got going I could appreciate it as 'different'. (To be blunt, in the beginning it's just the same jokes with far worse delivery.)
- dotBen 4y agoThere were only two series of the UK version made, and a lot of it was unscripted or loosely scripted and a lot of improv on Ricky Gervais's part. The first two series of the US edition of The Office was kind of uncomfortable because it was essentially the scripting and acting of what was previously improvised. I hear the 3rd series onwards was better received in part because it was originally written for the US audience, it was never made for the UK audience, and it wasn't improv'd.
- vlunkr 4y agoThat’s not really accurate. The pilot episodes have nearly identical scripts, but none of the other episodes do. They borrow some episode concepts and character arcs, but the scripts are original. That said, there is definitely a tonal shift away from the UK series in the beginning, most notably starting with season 2.
- autoexec 4y agoYeah, the US office turned into it's own thing pretty quickly considering it started with the same premises and characters. The pilot is painful to watch, but it took the general concept and ran with it until it doesn't seem fair to compare the two anymore. They're two very different shows.
- FullyFunctional 4y agoI agree. I actually didn’t fully enjoy the British version of the office (Gervasi wasn’t my taste), but the US version was brilliant. It really chocked me as I can’t think of many remakes that are better than the original. I think original IT Crowd is perfect and should be left that way.
- mellosouls 4y agoIt really shocked me as I can’t think of many remakes that are better than the original. It isn't better than the original. It's very good though.
- baby 4y agoIf you've watched the pilots of The Office made in different languages they are all different. The US IT Crowd pilot was the exact same plot.
- PedroBatista 4y agoThis is one of those things like an alternate reality where the Nazis won World War II or some fever dream. Thank God it wasn't picked up. I know it's a pilot, but the American actors are even mimicking the UK character's mannerisms.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y agoThat was a bugged me the most. I get that they were lazy and stuck with the exact same script, but they clearly watched the other actors in the original episode, and then just copy that, too, just low effort all around.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dkarras 4y agoThe guy playing Moss did okay.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- djmips 4y agohaha
- worble 4y agoThe Red Dwarf pilot was also similarly terrible, and there's a great mini documentary of the making of it on the DVD bonuses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCmBRAX_V6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCmBRAX_V6o
- quietbritishjim 4y agoThat wasn't nearly as atrocious as I was expecting. Partly because the script is almost the same as the UK first episode, of course, but even putting that aside it was OK. Richard Ayoade is still great but also Joel McHale is a pretty decent choice as Roy. Even the actress playing Jen, although a bit annoying, wasn't too bad. And the twist that the boss actually isn't crazy is interesting. Not like the US Red Dwarf pilot. That actually is tear-your-eyes-out bad.
- ShakataGaNai 4y agoI'd be really curious to find out what Richard Ayoade thought of the entire situation. "So you want me to come play the exact same character, saying the exact same lines and doing the exact same things ... but now it's a 'US' version?"
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI believe it led to him directing episodes of Community and potentially helped lead to him directing his movies. So he probably has great things to say about the experience.
- lostlogin 4y agoThe guy is a legend. Travel Man is excellent and a great format. Rewatched during lockdown and completely recommend.
- RajT88 4y agoThe formula for Travel Man was genius. The producers just have to pick various people who are a good pick to play off Richard Ayoade being himself, and send them off places to film how they get along with each other. Ideally, picking people who love to travel and have a good time to slightly annoy Richard. TV that produces itself. The curve ball, which defied all expectations, was the episode in Madeira which paired him up with someone with a similarly rapid-fire and dour wit: Robert Webb. In contrast to the rest of the series, one of the funniest things I've ever watched.
- FeistySkink 4y agoThis seems oddly redundant. The laughing track didn't help. I had a strange feeling this was just an extended SNL sketch all throughout watching it.
- bink 4y agoThe laugh track was definitely the worst part. Why would the crowd break into laughter when he doesn't answer the phone on the first ring?
- dotBen 4y agoI'm pretty sure this pilot is the same script as episode 1 of the original UK series. Clearly someone felt the need to recast and reshoot the series with US actors (plus Richard Ayoade), like they did the US Office. I wonder if that's old thinking (or wasn't actually needed) - the amount of UK TV that's now on Netflix and other OTT platforms seems to suggest that US audiences are open to enjoying original UK series without being reshot. Did the UK IT Crowd ever take off in the US?
- danjoredd 4y agoYes, at least in my circles. Most people I know have watched it and like it. My old boss used to have "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" as his ringtone, which got annoying after about a month. Still a good show though
- WorldMaker 4y agoThat kind of thinking still exists. The most recent example I can think of is Ghosts on CBS as the US version of the UK Ghosts. CBS' streaming service (Paramount+) will even recommend the UK original and you can compare them side-by-side. (Another somewhat recent example to mind was FX's Wilfred as the US version of the Australian Wilfred TV show. Hulu picked up the Australian show so that you could compare them side-by-side. For streamers this is easy content recommendations.) TV and Movie executives are always looking for "low risks" and "proven formula" will always be a way to lower risk. Shows and movies from the same originating country get "rebooted" all the time. Doing a fresh take across cultural boundaries is interestingly a higher risk as studios try to figure out if the original premise has legs in the new country. Some of what we see is survivorship bias: The US Office was huge so that gets mentioned a lot. But there were a lot of similar attempts that never made it past the pilot because the risks were too high or it just didn't seem to work or whatever. Off the top of my head, similar to this US IT Crowd pilot there are also "lost" pilots you can find for US Doctor Who and US Red Dwarf. The fascinating thing about both of those attempts occurred during different points of the height of the PBS/BBC partnership. Up until about the late 90s/early 00s PBS was the most common importer of BBC programming from the UK. (That shifted when the BBC decided it could be a stronger revenue stream, starting chasing bigger bids from US cable channels, and then eventually cofounded the BBC America cable channel.) At various points in time PBS' biggest audiences tuned into Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Blake's 7 (among others on the sci-fi side of their programming), so even in the "old" TV era these US attempts knew there was some pre-existing audience familiar with the original UK shows through PBS at the time. So streamers have exactly created that as a "new" idea or new thinking so much as shifted the economics of it. (PBS was public funded and not making a lot of money for how popular its showing of UK shows were. Streamers are all big for-profits that use multi-cultural content for moats around their subscription fees. Including BBC America's current home AMC+.)
- abetusk 4y agoMy opinion is that the original British IT crowd just had actors that were of a different caliber. It's painful to watch all the actors around Richard Ayoade in the American version.
- tgv 4y agoI watched the first bit, but Jen definitely doesn't exude the same weird combination of entitlement and despair. Her entering the basement looks more like an anonymous blonde in a slasher movie, and Reynholm's character is so flat that you start noticing the laughing track. Roy is fine, although he lacks the pent-up anger turned into almost active aggressiveness that made the UK character.
- abetusk 4y agoI think Roy was the worst. They turned him into a smug, entitled American. I think the actor playing Reynholm was the best of the worst but I agree that he didn't manage to get the confident over-the-top intensity that Chritopher Morris had. Jen wasn't horrible but I pretty much agree with your sentiment.
- JamesSwift 4y agoExactly my thoughts. The UK cast really was a special combination of talent. Jen, Moss, Roy, Richmond, both Reynholms... 6 people who completely nailed their role at once.
- pryelluw 4y agoMaybe it could have worked if it were about Moss getting a job in an American company after Reinhold industries went broke. But not a redo of the same script.
- frellus 4y agoHonestly I didn't think it was that bad. It certainly wasn't its own creation, like the difference between the UK Office and US Office. Not sure either show would have worked without Moss though.
- bee_rider 4y agoThe cast seemed a bit off. Actually, I bet they could literally have dropped in the cast of Better Off Ted and tweaked it a bit to Americanize this show.
- tus666 4y agoYe gad.
- everyone 4y agoWhy ye do this has always been utterly baffling to me.
- david_allison 4y agoI love 2:58's reference to the Sony rootkit scandal: > It’s never safe to unload a driver that patches the system call table since some thread might be just about to execute the first instruction of a hooked function when the driver unloads; if that happens the thread will jump into invalid memory. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights-management-gone-too-far/ba-p/723442 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/...
- popmatrix 4y agoThank you, that was a great read.
- anderfernandes1 4y agoI loved it! They kept Moss!!! That was surprising.
- guidedlight 4y agoThere was a failed US pilot of Outrageous Fortune, a hugely popular comedy series from New Zealand about a crime family trying to go straight. Like IT Crowd, poor casting was the likely culprit. https://imdb.com/title/tt0461097/ https://imdb.com/title/tt0461097/
- molotovh 4y agoIt looks like they only updated one character model in the intro animation. Roy is still very much Chris O'Dowd. :-)
- radley 4y agoI feel like I'm watching a Community dream sequence (with Ayoade as guest star) in which Jeff Winger has to take a computer class to graduate, so he's freaking out.
- ImpressiveWebs 4y agoI thought it was good, but Joel McHale as Roy doesn’t work. Dude is too chiseled for that role, even though he does a decent job with the acting.
- ck425 4y agoIt's funny you say that because since The IT Crowd ended Chris O'Dowd has been cast multiple times as the relatable normal but still handsome hunk in comedies.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoIt's really hard for me to imagine any alternate scenario where the IT crowd could be improved upon. It was kind of a perfect storm - Richard Ayoade during the only time he ever was or ever will be likable or funny, Christopher Morris back when was one of the funniest people on earth, Matt Berry just being absolutely brilliant and completely stealing the show, the cultural "geek" zeitgest of the time, etc etc. It's not a repeatable experiment, and there's no point trying.
- idk1 4y agoYou sort of forgot Jen existed there. I'd say she was a core part of the show and pretty fantastic too.
- YPPH 4y agoHave you seen Richard Ayoade's other work? I can't agree with you there. His appearances on 8 out of 10 cats are hilarious. To be fair, I'm sure if Richard Ayoade were here, his response would be you are plainly incorrect in that he has never been and never will be likeable or funny or any other positive social trait.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoyeah I have. his panel show appearances really wear on me. It's just Moss but more depressingly realistic and belligerent. Without the humour he's just irritating. I guess that's not a unique issue with panel show regulars - you could argue that say David Mitchell is still just Mark Corrigan - but he manages to be more likeable than his famous onscreen persona, not less.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoHe's quite good as Professor Marmalade in The Bad Guys, which is the most stylish kids' movie I've ever seen.
- Apocryphon 4y agoAyoade was on Garth Marenghi's Darkplace two years before IT Crowd came out, though maybe that overlaps with the time you're talking about.
- irsyad 4y agoIrsyad
- exabrial 4y agoOoof. The UK version better in every way
- pooper 4y agoI watched it in full this time around. Maybe it should have been titled a screen test instead of a pilot, only for people who haven't seen the original. I have never seen the UK Office and I love the Office (US).
- was_a_dev 4y agoThe two versions of the Office are fantastic for different reasons. I find everyone loves the US Office, the humor is much more accessible by the wider public. The UK Office tends to be lost with those that haven't worked in an office environement. The comedy is much more tuned.
- jrockway 4y agoToo bad they didn't make it to episode 2. I feel like "they're not just THE emergency services, they're YOUR emergency services" is one of the most British things I can imagine. (I say that as an American, though, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.) The IT Crowd always impressed me with their set design. I was working as "IT" at the time, and our office was nearly identical to the one in Season 1. We had O'Reilly stickers everywhere. There were an infinite number of desk toys all over the place. We spent 99% of our day screwing around. It just felt so authentic to me at the time, and still does to this day. (Some of that screwing around was legit office stuff, though. Our air conditioner's drainage pipe was blocked, so we rigged up a fish tank pump to pump the water out of it into a giant bucket. We'd then dump that in one of the many floor drains that our office had, because of course our building's hallway had floor drains every 3 feet. The other 1% of the day was screwing around under the guise of helping people. We were the computer support team for the Physics department at the University of Chicago. People who had recently won the Nobel prize would come to us with things like "my hard drive died", and we would just put it in a plastic bag, immerse it in liquid nitrogen, and copy off their files. Worked every single time. Did we ever try copying the files before freezing the thing? Absolutely not. We weren't the scientists, we were a bunch of random idiots trying to help, and we had an unlimited supply of liquid nitrogen in the building.)
- ConchParabola 4y agoI made an account just to say thank you for your work. And also that I was an undergrad at the time and once used the liquid nitrogen to freeze-dry some cheese fries.
- mikmeh 4y agoWen didn't have liquid nitrogen, but a overnight in a freezer worked too. I just did that last year for a friend's external drive.
- rossmohax 4y agoHow did you battle condensation on a super chilled hard drives?
- KingOfCoders 4y agoI'm with Douglas Adams, "Please don’t let anyone Americanise it".
- danjc 4y agoIT Crowd being one of my all time favorite series, it’s impossible for me to be objective but it seems they would need a different script - the way of speaking is just so quintessentially British
- Jaruzel 4y agoHe was right. Hitchhiker's the movie is a travesty.
- FiniteField 4y agoThat film always seems like 2 films interleaved into 1 to me. Most of the British cast are great, and really capture the style and humour of the book - Stephen Fry as the narrator, Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Alan Rickman as Marvin, even (IIRC) Bill Bailey as The Whale. Then you have the American-cast characters and their writing, and it's just so cliche and dull. It feels like they split production of the film up by character and handed it off to two separate companies, one British and one American.
- bena 4y agoI think the Hitchhiker movie suffered greatly from Adams's death. I think out of respect for the author, they didn't want to change the script too much. But that was never Adams's style. The draft of the script they got would have likely not been the version of the script used to make the movie. There would have been changes and alterations all the way up to the point the cameras started rolling. Adams tinkers. He writes something. Then reads it. If it's not funny, he rewrites it. Then reads it again. Then takes a bath. Then reads it again. Write. Read. Bath. Tea. Bath. Bath tea. Write. Read. A bit of the telly. Etc. So I don't fault the movie for going astray from every other version of Hitchhiker. It would be weird if it didn't. The movie wound up being too average overall. And I don't think Mos Def is a good Ford Prefect.
- sylens 4y agoThis reminds me that they also had a US version of Skins that I think I saw the pilot (or a clip of it) somewhere and thought it was awful. There’s some jokes in the IT Crowd that are clearly for the home audience (the fire extinguisher that doesn’t work having a big “Made in Britain” label on it) but I think a lot of it is just universal technologist stuff. Fooling your boss into thinking the internet all comes from a small box at the top of Big Ben, navigating a dinner party, dealing with inter-office politics…there’s a lot there to relate to.
- zeckalpha 4y agoNow if they could track down the US version of Spaced!
- thefz 4y agoThe same thing for Whose Line Is It Anyway?. UK version was hilarious, and every host fit in perfectly, while the US version was atrocious.
- thewileyone 4y agoI don't know if it was atrocious ... Richard Simmons with Colin, Ryan and Wayne is TV gold.
- thefz 4y agoDrew Carey missing for example, as he was a magnificent host and the show rested on his shoulders.
- 01100011 4y agoMaybe it says something about my maturity level, but I miss Code Monkeys... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UFYpnE_Ob0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UFYpnE_Ob0
- sniglom 4y agoSo do I. I liked both shows, very different though.
- Curzel 4y agoWell, we didn't get this one, but at least McHale was free to work on Community!
- TedShiller 4y agoTerrible casting
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoI wonder if anyone ever tried to do a US version of Father Ted, as that would certainly have been an atrocity for the ages. Although I can't imagine Mathews and Linehan getting on board with such a thing.
- rsynnott 4y agoThere have been at least three attempt; thankfully they seem to have sunk without a trace.
- denton-scratch 4y agoThree? I'm astonished that anyone ever got budget to try it once.
- pvsukale3 4y agoGlad to see Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) here. That said Joel McHale stars in another show called Community. It was created by Dan Harmon (Rick and Morty). It is a highly underrated show. Has a lot of existential and meta commentary on show itself. Highly recommend if you are looking for a new sitcom.
- jagermo 4y agoThere was a German version, too. It was. Bad. Really, really bad. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_iTeam_%E2%80%93_Die_Jungs_an_der_Maus https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_iTeam_%E2%80%93_Die_Jungs_...
- dividuum 4y agoIt really was. Here is the first episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-uSD9Ci9Zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-uSD9Ci9Zc
- snarkyturtle 4y agoYou either do single-cam and a laugh track, or a multi-cam with no laugh track. They made the poor choice of mixing the two.
- Hublium 4y agoI'm sorry, what? Single-camera, no laugh track has been an extremely common format for sitcoms for the last twenty years.
- pantalaimon 4y agoWait they made more than 1 episode?!
- izacus 4y agoOh wow this is... this is... beyond amazing/cringe. I now need to wash my eyes.
- Aissen 4y agoI just started a rewatch recently, and it seems it's not an exact copy of the original show's script. For example, in the US version, Denom makes a second call to "disregard" firing the entire floor that doesn't work as a team; and the joke about the voice-activated computer is gone.
- tumetab1 4y ago> Denom makes a second call to "disregard" firing the entire floor that doesn't work as a team Yeah, that part was weird because Denom in the US remake is portrayed as a manipulative manager instead of a crazy manager. Maybe the writers had a different character in mind.
- mrfinn 4y agoAs an absolutely fan of the original show, this hurts. E.g. Denholm Reynholm was SOOO good that I always had the impression that he got replaced for another type of character because someone up there felt personally attacked lol
- fyvhbhn 4y agoSo good, it makes me sad
- Jaruzel 4y agoOut there somewhere are 2 different pilots of an attempt to make a US version of Red Dwarf. They are much, much, worse.
- Lapsa 4y ago0118 999 881 999 119 725 3
- jrootabega 4y agodem glasses is shit innit
- Gnarl 4y agoAmerica destroys everything - either with b0mb$ or remakes.
- richrichardsson 4y agoCoincidentally the YouTube recommendation algorithm showed me an American guy absolutely destroying the pilot by way of comparison to the UK original [1]. Most of the points he made are also being made here. [1] https://youtu.be/PBxy3rKoOOU https://youtu.be/PBxy3rKoOOU
- rbanffy 4y agoI find it awesome they couldn't recast Moss. Nobody else can be Moss.
- forinti 4y agoOne of the worst cultural crimes the US has committed (hyperbole for comic effect but a touch serious) is to remake Nueve Reinas, the wonderful argentine movie. Certain things just have to be left as they are.
- siquick 4y agoHowever bad this is, it won't ever top the US pilot of Peep Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yredc3ayOE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yredc3ayOE
- rspk 4y agoA while back, I made live versions of all the fictional sites mentioned on the show for fun: https://moss-archives.netlify.app https://moss-archives.netlify.app. Feel free to send pull requests here: https://github.com/rsapkf/moss-archives https://github.com/rsapkf/moss-archives
- bitigchi 4y agoThere is a easter egg in the stock Android dialer app, that flashes colours when you enter the new emergency services number.