From the waves of unintentional (and intentional) antisocial behavior, the awkwardness, and the countless in-jokes (watch Chris O’Dowd’s shirts closely), everything about this series screams ‘underground hit’. The second season is airing now and is just as fantastic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_it_crowd#Cultural_references

The DVD start-up sequence and subsequent menus are designed to resemble a ZX Spectrum game, even to the extent that the loading sequence features the famous striped border. Games similar to Jet Set Willy and Head Over Heels play while menu choices are made; characters are replaced with representations of the characters in the TV show. Also included on the DVD are subtitles in leet. The leet subtitles, for the first episode, are not a direct translation of the show and include many references to geek culture that were not included in the original episode. The second episode has the subtitles ROT13 encoded, episode three has all the words in the subtitles sorted in alphabetical order, episode four has the text base64 encoded and the last two episodes are direct leet translations.

Lovely. Apparently, like The office, it will also be remade for the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd_%28US_TV_series%29

It might not rank amongst the best television series, but the 16 color CGA graphics in the menu alone were worth the price of the DVD. I watched mesmerized for nearly ten minutes before even getting around to playing the first episode.

After watching this, I think I’ve got the skills necessary for a job as an IT technician:

“Have you tried switching it off and back on again?”

“Are you sure it’s plugged in?”