I.T. Crowd Series 4?

d3moliti0n

d3moliti0n

d3moliti0n

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Chris Morris' character was always my favourite, Denholm. Shame he left after the first series (although his cameos were great of course).

It is a great series, and I do agree that as time goes on it's getting a bit old now, still worth watching though. I did enjoy last nights episode, the whole Countdown thing was great and the Roy 'I'm not a window cleaner' story.
 

THMRK

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alexhull24 said:
I can see my opinion might go against the grain here (it seems to often!), but I think that the latest episode was not as good as the last, and is nowhere near the best, perhaps almost one of the worst. I'll tell you why.

I have always enjoyed the IT crowd because you have great comedy derived from a lot of normal situations, but with the slightly eccentric characters. This usually results in them walking blindly into a difficult situation as a result of their slightly alternative take on their world. This latest episode instead gave us rather normal characters but forced into a crazy situation (more namely the story following Moss, the Roy window story was classic Linehan but still not great, I'll get onto that). The introduction of the Countdown club I found very strange, and the sections with 'minus 1' were at some points almost cringeworthy for me, rather than flat out amusing. This still delivered some great lines from Moss, but they felt a lot more forced than we're used to.

The Roy story in the latest episode was enjoyable. We get to watch him stumble around in his own awkwardness and ultimately end up looking stupid and causing the wrong impression. The only thing that ruined it was the terrible joke at the very end of the episode. It felt like the whole thing had built up to that and it was a disappointment when it came, very cheesy. I prefer something more subtle, which is how the previous series have presented a lot of the best short jokes like that.

The other strange thing about this episode was the Jen story. It didn't really go anywhere useful or particularly amusing, and rather disappointingly it played no part in the other stories of the episode. Graham Linehan is usually the master at weaving in all the plots at the end to come together in an extremely amusing and sometimes unexpected climax. The end was instead a disappointment for me and not as clever as we should expect.

With all that said however, even just on that episode, it's still one of the best comedies on TV, without a doubt. I eagerly anticipate the rest of the series!
Click to expand...

Well put. Good comedy comes from character conflict, that's where the best shows get their laughs from. The character conflicts might lead into bizarre, outlandish or absurd situations but that only serves to enhance the comedic value of those characters.

Where as you can see the show is starting to wind down now. The conflicts between the three main characters are all played out - the audience now know that these three people don't really work well together, so it's perhaps difficult for the writer/writers to come up with more new, interesting and funny ways to have these characters go into conflict to result in primo comedy.

It's always a bad sign when comedy shows start relying on the situations they get into (and the latest episode is particularly bad for this because all of the situations each character gets into is on their own, not via something that's happened through someone else) for the comedy rather than on the characters themselves.

Sure we get the whole idea here, Moss is the savant like social outcast who finds solace in Countdown, Roy is overshadowed by a much more successful person and Jen is experiencing angst about not being invited to a meeting but none of this situations really involve the other characters in anyway and when that crossover ceases to happen, so too does the good comedy and that's when you can see the writer is struggling for fresh ideas. So instead of the three main characters being funny off of each other, each of them is relying on conflict from characters we know nothing (or at least very little) about.
 
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TS7

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I thought it was a great episode. Both episodes of the new series so far have been good. I agree with what's said above but something a bit different to the norm is good and stops the show getting stale and predictable.
 

DJMK4

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Best quotes ever from the IT Crowd :)

"You better put seatbeats on your ears Roy, cos im going to take them for the ride of their lives"

and

"Prepare to put mustard on those words, for you will soon be consuming them along with this slice of humble pie, that comes direct from the oven of shame, set at gas mark 'egg on your face'."

:D

Enjoyed episode one and two of season 4, looking forward to the rest.
 

whitecrook

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I get the feeling a lot of people are taking this waaay to srsly. Calm down, each episode is different, some are good, some are very good, some are poor and so on. And each person has their own opinions on which category each episode fits into.

Personally, I've found every series to have a mixture of good and bad, and I preferred S4E1 to S4E2, but E2 was alright, and E1 was very funny with some great lines.

The criticisms of the storyline/plot on E2 above are fair, but I think some folk are tarring the whole IT crowd with the brush of that one ep.


My fav ep of all time has to be the 'leg disabled' one.
 

afoster

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I agree with those saying that the countdown episode wasn't that great.. I still enjoyed it, but the first episode was much better. This latest one just seemed a bit too forced at times. Definitely not the best that the show can offer.

I second d3moliti0n as well in that Denholm was the best character... Some of his scenes were great.



 
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