Critic Reviews

There is a universality to "IT" that makes at least some of it instantly relatable. Ayoade, O'Dowd and Parkinson are terrific as employees who want only to keep their jobs but not let them interfere with their personal lives.

It’s old-school silly, filmed--defiantly, in these laugh-track-less days--in front of a studio audience, rich with sublimely broad performances, appreciative of the well-timed one-liner and the pratfall, in love with jokes of camera placement and confident in the healing power of a running gag.

That the funniest straight-ahead sitcom of the American fall television season is a 2-year-old British import airing on a basic-cable network is because of a few things: a dearth of new American sitcoms, the availability of road-tested foreign product, and the ongoing expansion of the vast tracts of basic cable into the kind of programming that has traditionally defined broadcast television.

I suspect anyone who's ever called a "help" desk seeking actual help, only to be asked, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" won't need a translator to laugh themselves silly over The IT Crowd.

This funny U.K. import's premiere introduces snobbish techie Moss (Richard Ayoade), his luckless-in-love buddy Roy (Chris O'Dowd), and their pretty but computer-illiterate new boss Jen (Katherine Parkinson).

So far, so good, but while writer-director Graham Linehan (working with "The Office" producer Ash Atalla) has created a vivid trio of oddball characters, his ingenuity doesn't extend to finding consistently amusing situations in which to put them.

The IT Crowd packages feeble stereotypes and then hits the send button.

This story of two computer I.T. guys and their computer illiterate boss is overly obvious and plays on stereotypes in an over-the-top way that may have been au courant in the '80s but feels woefully dated today.