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jrockway
HPsquared
On the hard drive thing, I had an old HDD which (after years in a drawer) would not start up (wouldn't start spinning).
After trying it in a couple of different computers I accidentally dropped the drive and it hit a metal table leg.
After dropping it, the HDD started up and worked fine, and I could copy the contents off.
Maybe the liquid nitrogen worked the same way (thermal shock in place of mechanical shock).
CrLf
Dropping an HDD from a certain height was mentioned in an old Sun service manual, IIRC.
cestith
At one point maintenance for desktop workstations from some manufacturers included picking the whole unit up 3 to 5 inches or so and letting it drop onto the desk. This would in theory help reseat card-edge connectors and knock loose some of the dust gathered by static inside the unit.
cyckl
if you dont mind me asking—where can i find this manual?
randombits0
Stuck stepper. Bet it was a Seagate ST225 or similar. The bearing grease would harden, especially if left not running for a while.
The solution is to use your pinky finger on the stepper motor spindle and twist. As long as you felt the stepper move from home, you’re good, you’re not stuck anymore.
I had a Seagate I had to “twist” start every time it powered up, not often as it ran 24/7. You can do it with the drive in the machine as long as you can reach the stepper.
I’m writing this not so much for you but for the archivists thousands of years from now. Hope you get those Seagates started folks! ;)
mkwarman
That's fascinating, I've never heard of hard drive data recovery using liquid nitrogen. Is the idea that the lower temperature prevents the drive from overheating long enough to recover the data? Sounds very cool.
teddyh
I would guess that the hard drive platters seized, and the cooling made it shrink enough to un-seize.
Jaruzel
In older drives, a lot of failures were down to the heads actually getting stuck on the platters.
By freezing the drive, the metal would shrink just enough to unstick the head. Of course the location where the head crash had happened would be corrupt, but the rest of the data would be fine (mostly).
u02sgb
Yes, have used a similar technique of putting the drive in the freezer. Didn't believe it would work, surprised when it did.
randombits0
I literally squeezed the data out of a drive once. 40M Connor, one of the first IDE drives. If I squeezed it too much, “Data Error, Abort, Retry, Ignore”. Too little? Same result. Just right? In like Flynn!
I spent 40 minutes copying that drive, got every bit back.
Boss asks, “What are you doing?”
“I’m milking the data out of this drive!” ;)
rossmohax
How did you battle condensation on a super chilled hard drives?
rcarmo
OC did mention a plastic bag. And I bet any condensation would only happen after the copy happened.
ConchParabola
I 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
Wen 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.
dotBen
I'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?
Longlius
Part of it is simply different television formats. The Office UK specifically aired on BBC One without commercials which meant that it had to be cut down to fit on a major network's timeslot of 20-24 min. Shows like that typically have to go to special TV stations like PBS or BBC America in order to get a commercial-free timeslot or (in BBC America's case) finagled into a less common time slot with weird commercial break timings. Even with shows that have the same length as a standard US show, the break timings are at different points making it more complicated for TV networks to schedule ad space around.
And then there's the larger issue of a lot of British TV actors simply not having the recognizability of their American counterparts which is a major selling point (esp in the pre-web media days). Steve Carrell was a minor star from his time on the Daily Show which made him a good fit to 'sell' the US Office.
>Did the UK IT Crowd ever take off in the US?
It was a minor cult hit, especially among the technologically-inclined demographic. But it's not especially well-known.
rwmj
I learned this is why David Attenborough's nature documentaries now have the obligatory 10 minute "making of" featurette at the end. The first 50 minutes is sold overseas as an hour long documentary (with ad breaks), and the last 10 minutes is for the BBC audience in the UK to fill it up to an hour.
drcongo
Interesting! That's usually my favourite bit.
oakesm9
The IT Crowd was actually aired on Channel 4, not the BBC. Channel 4 is publicly owned (for now…) but is fully funded through adverts. The ad break timings likely don’t match what you have in the US though (at the start and end and a single break in the middle over a 30 minute runtime).
rkangel
If you watch an NFL game on Sky there are a load of breaks where they cut to a UK analysis crew. Every single one of those is an ad break that they have in the US but not in the UK. Sky does still has ads, but clearly far far fewer than the US is willing to tolerate.
NFL is an extreme example but I always found the comparison interesting.
Jaruzel
Fully funded? I was under the impression that they get a small slice of the licence fee?
c4ptnjack
Mostly agree with all you have to say minus the reference as Steve carrell being a safe, reliable pick at the time period. Being on the daily show is a great metric for a casting director as far as quality goes but in reality he had close to zero exposure and public recognition before the office.
That fact is supported by how bad the first season of the US office did ratings wise. People warmed up to it quickly thanks to the quality of writing, but the showrunners and producers clearly didn't feel confident in the future success of Steve carrell as a leading star or they wouldn't have ordered he get hair plugs to make him more look more likable.
Lastly, there is something to be said, at least regarding comedy, about differences in taste between cultures. British and US comedy have often been quite different over the last 70 years and is evident in the stylistic differences between the british and us versions of the office in season 1.
pram
He was in Anchorman as a pretty iconic character, he wasn't exactly obscure.
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ck425
Is there any actual evidence for the Hair Plugs thing? I've heard it frequently but also heard that it was actually lighting and styling.
mejutoco
We know Ricky Gervais also did not like Steve Carrel. Source: himself during one of the Golden Globe ceremonies he was hosting.
anonymous_sorry
> And then there's the larger issue of a lot of British TV actors simply not having the recognizability of their American counterparts which is a major selling point
Just a note that I don't think any of the actors in the original version of The Office were recognizable in the UK before it aired. So either it is more important in the US to have a big name attached, or TV execs at least believe so, or they remake it for other reasons and the big name is a nice-to-have.
ck425
I think Martin Freeman was semi-established at the time, though obviously not the renowned actor he is now. And Gervais and Merchant had a small following from their radio show.
Longlius
The stakes are high for primetime network television in general in the US. Only about 20% of new shows are renewed for a second season, and showrunners desperately want a multi-season TV show to put on their CV.
To add more perspective - of the projects a network picks up in a given year, only about 18% will go on to produce a pilot that same year. And usually if a pilot isn't greenlit for a project in its first year, it's effectively dead. So the fact that the IT Crowd (US) got a pilot at all is already remarkable.
denton-scratch
There are detective shows called Endeavour and Lewis running (repeats) in the UK; they're offshoots of the Morse series. They have ad-breaks, i.e. the narrative stops and the show titles appear; but there are no ads. I think that's on ITV. And sometimes there are ads between the titles.
There's something I was watching on Sky, that had ad-breaks, but no ads; instead, they showed a still frame saying that normal content would be resumed shortly.
When they do show ads, they are nearly all:
* Motorised recliner armchairs
* No-medical life insurance
* Home equity release plans
* Charity appeals with fluffy puppies and sobbing grandmas.
That is, the ads mostly seem to be pitched at retired people, and the ad slots are being sold to low-budget advertisers. I use a PVR, so I barely notice ads. Most cable and satellite providers these days provide a PVR as part of the service. So my guess is the TV advertising business model is collapsing; only poor people, and people too demented to learn to use a PVR, actually watch ads.
Meanwhile, running an ad slot with no ads in it must be saying something rather loud to potential advertisers: "We can't sell this ad slot, so lowball your bid!".
ealexhudson
Sky paused adverts recently out of respect to Brenda's passing (though they didn't note that on the static logo). Was that what you saw?
I don't watch TV regularly but I've never seen them run out of adverts for slots; with bidding I would doubt that happens much?
LAC-Tech
Let's face it, the US office was a more engaging show cast with funnier & better looking actors. That's really the secret to its success - it was just really good, end season slump not withstanding.
colordrops
It's subjective - I found the UK office to be more funny and authentic. I couldn't watch the US version without cringing at the unnatural sitcom-iness of it.
ck425
Imo the success of the US Office is that it took the cringeworthy hyper relatable observational comedy of the UK Office and made it a little more hopeful. It lost some of the shock power of original but made it far more addictive as comfort TV. It's still really funny and relatable but also slightly escapist in a way the original isn't. Thus 9 seasons vs 2 and a christmas special.
That said it's been years since I watched the original (I've watched the US one far far too many times over the pandemic) and all this chat makes me want to rewatch again.
corobo
I honestly can't remember the UK office. No faces no names no plot lines. I just finished another US office binge.
Going to get my UK passport rejected saying this haha. I definitely prefer the American underlying hope than the British underlying despair. I've already got the latter built in!
rsynnott
Another issue, which we tend to forget about in this age of 4K and so on, was that a lot of these shows were filmed on digital betamax or similar (and before that on analog magnetic formats). For a British show, that would typically mean 576i 50Hz PAL, and it would just not look great on most equipment when transmitted as 480i 60Hz NTSC. Some shows were filmed on film (I think this was more common in the US) and those were easier to deal with, but horrible picture quality would have been a concern.
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jedberg
A lot of people in the US would turn it off because "I can't understand what they are saying with their funny accent". The reason they get away with being on Netflix is that they don't need to be super popular to be worth it for the streaming networks if they pick it up for a cheap price.
Linear TV had a limited number of time slots and had to be very choosey with what they put on. It needed to have massive appeal in all parts of the country.
ninth_ant
The argument is a bit undercut when a staggeringly expensive show such as House of the Dragon is the most watched show to ever debut on HBO, and features mainly UK actors and accents.
Especially when you factor in the pirating audience on top of this, it’s a massively popular show and among the most-watched in the US.
Not saying you have no point at all. Personally I have a harder time with the accents in contemporary shows aimed at UK audiences such as IT Crowd because they can at times speak faster and with more slang. But I don’t think it’s purely about disliking accents.
RajT88
> "I can't understand what they are saying with their funny accent"
This is charitable. Probably a lot of folks here just have a general disdain for all things foreign.
I am not sure anyone has ever tried to put numbers to the distinction between the two groups.
tonfreed
The thing that amuses me as an Australian is the subtitles when a pom, Irish, or Scot is talking. I've not seen it with Australians, but I wouldn't be surprised
baby
It's funny because that show was super popular in France, via subtitles.
louthy
Even this bit? [1]
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jonny_eh
And Netflix made it much easier to enable subtitles/captioning.
googlryas
Not at all. There's a cadre of people who enjoy British television programming in America, but they don't count. I'd estimate that the number of people that have watched for example the UK office is maybe 1% or less than the people that watched the US office in the US.
autoexec
You wouldn't have look very hard to find an American who has seen Downton Abbey, Doctor Who, or Bake Off. The biggest problem keeping Americans from watching UK TV is access, not some inherent dislike or disinterest in compelling television whenever British people are involved.
A show has to be wildly popular before Americans even get the chance to be exposed to it, which really limits the amount of viewers for UK programing, but that's no reason to assume that shows have to be recast and refilmed before an appreciable number of Americans will be interested in them.
If American producers want to remake shows from the UK I wish they'd do it with panel shows. It's an entertaining genre seen in many countries that just never took off in the US. At least then they'd be more justified in bringing in American talent so guests are more recognizable.
Bluecobra
> The biggest problem keeping Americans from watching UK TV is access
I love British TV. I would happily pay for a UK television license if I could access iPlayer/Channel 4/etc from the US. I don’t get why they are so hell bent against making more money and insist on region locking content. Instead I have to resort to pirating it or buying import DVDs/BluRays.
A long time ago I used to pay for a Linux shell account on a UK provider so I could access iPlayer via a SOCKS proxy. (This was long before VPN providers were popular.). It was awesome to see the latest Top Gear or Kitchen Nightmare episode. It’s a shame we’re locked out of such wonderful content.
ck425
Have any of the US talk shows started to copy Graham Norton's "all guests on the couch together" style?
For anyone unfamiliar Graham Norton hosts a late night style talk show but instead of inviting guests out one by one and talking to each in turn he brings them all out together. He still focuses in on each guest at times but he jumps between and encourages them to engage with each other like a good dinner party host. Here's an example of British comedian Greg Davies telling a story while Ryan Gosling next to him dies of laughter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuXGpUR7fXA
It essentially copies the best parts of panel shows and since he started doing that a lot of folk (most notably Jonathon Ross) have started to copy.
pessimizer
During Covid, a lot of atypical British stuff showed up on US network tv. Not new stuff, either; networks picked through the recent catalog to find stuff they thought would work. One example was Dead Pixels.
> If American produces want to remake shows from the UK I wish they'd do it with panel shows.
They do, but they are very bad. They just remade Would I Lie To You? recently. It was not very funny. They did a Taskmaster a few years ago. Horrific.
bckygldstn
There was a US remake of Taskmaster, which is like 50% a panel show. It was exceedingly terrible despite keeping 1 of the 2 UK hosts, and especially compared to the excellent New Zealand and Swedish Taskmaster remakes.
I agree about access though. I've introduced a bunch of US friends to Taksmaster who devour the seasons available on youtube, but are then out of options to see the rest.
ryanbrunner
Comedy is too fractured in the US for panel shows to really work IMO. I think a big part of why panel shows work so well in the UK is you have a lot of camaraderie and familiarity with the relatively smaller and more tightly knit group of UK comedians (it doesn't take long at all watching panel shows to start seeing familiar faces), which definitely helps keep banter running smoothly.
robocat
> I wish they'd do it with panel shows
My guess is that Poms value wit, and the majority of Americans don’t (in my experience). Within most any social class in the UK, wit is recognised: watching say a street cleaner make a sublimey witty comment is comedic fools gold. Also the British colony owerlords relentlessly take the piss out of themselves, maybe just so the French can’t beat them, oooo errr.
Meanwhile us colony exploiters would like to be able to give the BBC money so we can enjoy their terrible programmeing. But those anti-capitalist-royalist-uneuropean-twats won’t accept our livres for their crooked tooth pictures.
Disclaimer: if English were a race, I’d lose.
rsynnott
Downton Abbey in particular was _designed_ for export (and I'm pretty sure is more popular in the US than the UK). If it was designed purely for a domestic market, it would probably have been a lot less... naive?
umeshunni
But is that 1% number higher now (e.g shows like Bridgerton or the Crown) because of Netflix and other OTT platforms?
p1necone
The Office is a bad example in this context though, because it's the one show where the US version was (arguably) an improvement over the UK version, and way more popular than the UK version even outside of the US.
pksebben
if there's an exception that proves this rule, it's gotta be top gear. I know plenty who have watched every episode with the Clarkson gang and not sat through a whole episode of the American port.
iopq
How many people watched House of the Dragon in the US?
oogali
I wonder if it really just comes down to chopping it up for ads.
As in, the cost of reshooting is less than the cost of syndicating the original and re-cutting it for American ad time slots.
From my childhood, the only place I remember seeing unedited British shows was on my local PBS affiliate which doesn’t show ads (maybe once every hour).
WorldMaker
That 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+.)
itsoktocry
>like they did the US Office.
The UK and US The Office are both great shows in their own right. But they aren't very similar, outside of the setting.
will0
The first episode of the US office is pretty much a shot-for-shot remake of the first episode of the UK office. After that they diverged a fair bit.
krade
no, they've changed quite a bit, only the first scene is sticking somewhat with the original version. 5 minutes in at least half the dialog has been rewritten. and all the changes are for the worst.
ALittleLight
I watched the scene where they first introduce the IT guys and was disappointed to see they cut the finger-licking for some reason.
addingnumbers
They completely undermined the first establishment of "have you tried turning it off an on again?"
The line doesn't land half as well without the entire 45 seconds (no exaggeration, I counted on the seek bar) of Roy licking his fingers and drinking tea while the phone rings first.
yaddaor
The pacing and joke delivery is completely shattered.
macksd
It has been quite popular in my circles, but then I have a disproportionate concentration of British-empire immigrants and IT folks in my circles, so... Maybe?
david_allison
I 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/...
popmatrix
Thank you, that was a great read.
frellus
I was waiting to see who was going to play Moss's character... and then I'm like, "Oh.. that makes sense. It's Moss."
quietbritishjim
That 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
I'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
I 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
The guy is a legend. Travel Man is excellent and a great format. Rewatched during lockdown and completely recommend.
RajT88
The 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.
KerrAvon
I’d watch Richard Ayoade in just about anything. Travel Man was absolutely brilliant. I keep trying to find a way to watch his Crystal Maze episodes — what little I’ve seen of them has been hilarious.
bena
See, I didn't like Joel McHale as Roy. He's too charming and attractive. I think the key difference is that O'Dowd played Roy as tired of this shit while McHale plays it as annoyed with this shit.
But I think it suffers the same problem as the US Red Dwarf and the early episodes of the US Office, you can't expect to clone the characters. You have to deviate. Hew to the spirit, but not necessarily the letter.
icodestuff
Agreed. Seems like a miscast. Feels like any of the protagonists of Silicon Valley could have played the character better. Well, maybe not Kumail Nanjiani, for the same reason as McHale.
gibspaulding
Roy is even wearing a less conspicuously political version of the same RTFM shirt that he wears in the UK pilot!
pndy
> the US Red Dwarf pilot
Terry Farrell got role of Cat in the 2nd attempt for pilot, a year before arriving in Deep Space Nine as Jadzia Dax
denton-scratch
Why would they re-cast Cat? In the UK version, he spoke with a US accent. (Maybe that's it - Cat was a stereotype of a black american street dude, and perhaps that stereotype only works for brits).
pndy
I guess they thought they wouldn't sell this show in the US if it would have all-males cast
pryelluw
Maybe 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.
abetusk
My 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
I 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
I 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
Exactly 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.
LAC-Tech
It'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.
YPPH
Have 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
yeah 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.
thefz
Yes, completely agree, there's no point remaking it. If you enjoy the IT crowd's atmosphere, check out Garth Marenghi's Darkplace as well. Same-ish cast and humour.
baby
What's wrong with Ayoade? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wePK__NJ3uw
Apocryphon
Ayoade was on Garth Marenghi's Darkplace two years before IT Crowd came out, though maybe that overlaps with the time you're talking about.
idk1
You sort of forgot Jen existed there. I'd say she was a core part of the show and pretty fantastic too.
TulliusCicero
He's quite good as Professor Marmalade in The Bad Guys, which is the most stylish kids' movie I've ever seen.
KingOfCoders
I'm with Douglas Adams, "Please don’t let anyone Americanise it".
danjc
IT 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
He was right. Hitchhiker's the movie is a travesty.
FiniteField
That 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
I 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.
radley
I 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
I 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
It'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.
rsapkf
A while back, I made live versions of all the fictional sites mentioned on the show for fun: https://moss-archives.netlify.app. Feel free to send pull requests here: https://github.com/rsapkf/moss-archives
skellera
The 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
Although 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
There 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
That’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.
FullyFunctional
I 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
It 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
If 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.
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Too 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.)