12 TV Sitcom Remakes That Completely Bombed
4. The IT Crowd (NBC, 2006)
A personal regret of Richard Ayoade (who described the experience as “a bit like a play where everyone else had left”), this 2006 pilot starred a pre-Community Joel McHale as Roy alongside Ayoade reprising his role as Moss. And since it’s another NBC pilot from the 2000s based on a much loved and (at that time) still running Britcom, you can probably guess what happened.
Like Coupling, The IT Crowd suffers from the fact that it’s basically word-for-word the script of the original first episode. But apart from the copy and paste script, some of the better jokes (including pretty much everything involving the characters' unstable boss Denholm) are either stripped out or poorly performed, to the point that it’s more a poor shadow of the original than a legitimate remake.
Creator Graham Linehan’s (who wasn’t involved with the remake) take on things is that The IT Crowd is rooted in a very British tradition of surrealist sitcom. And as he put it: “a weird British sitcom with taped-on American accents is not going to buy any shoes.”
Despite NBC advertising a full series, the American IT Crowd’s future was cut short by a change in management, with The Hollywood reporter claiming that it “didn’t quite spark” with new NBC chairman Ben Silverman. More recently, a second attempt with Linehan more closely involved was announced in October 2014. Whether or not that one will work out better (or even happen) remains to be seen.