The creator of Father Ted has produced a new sitcom about sysdamins for Britain's Channel 4 called "The IT Crowd," and the first two episodes had me howling with laughter.
Yesterday, I blogged about The IT Crowd, and the fact that Channel 4 has the vision to put the first two episodes online in advance of the show as a promotion, and the foolishness to lock them in a proprietary streaming Microsoft format that meant that I couldn't watch them. I've now successfully downloaded the episodes through the Bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, and I can't remember when I've laughed so much.
Creator Graham Linehan has produced a cast of characters who exemplify everything I loved about Father Ted: complete, over-the-top silliness, likable villainy, and great comic foolishness. The setup for the show is as silly as Father Ted's: two IT geeks in the basement of a large, abusive corporation get a new boss, a woman who lied about her IT experience on her resume. What follows isn't funny because of its intricate plotting, but because of its willingness to lard absurdity on absurdity, so that each episode gets progressively weirder as it progresses (for example, in episode two, there's a screamingly funny running gag about a fire that's broken out in the basement, which has to be hidden from the abusive CEO when he comes down to check on everyone's morale).
I'm so glad that this show exists. I've waited all my life for a truly geeky comedy, and I think that this is it.
