Wednesday 4 March 2009

The germ-metaphor ends here.

One show I have never mentioned before is "IT Crowd", a British sitcom. Sadly, embedding is disabled for the clips but here are two dealing with the internet (which, by the way, "doesn't weigh anything", duh)

Friendface.
The Black Box.

It is a bit like "The Big Bang Theory", with the premise that some people are so painfully awkwardly geeky that they are unable to lead a life anywhere outside the physics department or the underground IT offices.
You can watch clips of the show and possibly entire episodes (I am no sure about that and too lazy to try it out, sorry) here.
Also, I am starting to get into teen comedy/drama series "Skins", because just like the sadly discontinued "Sugar Rush", for some ominous reason British depictions of growing up are much more truthful and edgy than the American family-friendly version (or rather, drugs and sex are not issues, but part of the everyday life, and there isn't a Public Service Announcement sticker on every freaking things, since you figure out that some things might not be such a good idea entirely on your own). Also, a show that has songs by Electrelane and Cat Power really can't be bad, right? I might be a bit less afraid of the future if more people got into this than "OC California". I would be even happier if, at some point in the future, something like this could happen in Austria. But then, there is no tradition in making good tv shows in this country, and the ORF certainly won't go there now, unless it can make this happen with about the same amount of money I spend weekly on groceries (considering that the closest they got recently is "Tschuschenpower", a five-parter that was delayed until March 30, this isn't even a bad thing).
This feels like an odd argument to make: that European shows can actually risk more and be more edgy in their depiction than American ones when everything is different here (I had the same problem when considering the effects of the Proposition 8 debacle - because even repealing gay marriage is already one step further than we ever got here) .

2 comments:

? said...

This is really interesting. I studied IT (sotftware engineering) as one of my degrees but managed to run away or should I say delve into other things and I know the feeling. But you are a geek when it comes to global finance and economics or arent you? In a very nice way :) Great clips

flame gun for the cute ones said...

:) oh, I am a geek when it comes to many things. But I'm never quite able to focus on only one thing (which must be obvious following this blog, though I admit that the focus has been global finance lately...), which is probably necessary to qualify as a real geek.
I didn't believe that you would be the "IT Crowd" kind of software engineer - although there is a soft spot in my heart for every kind of paralizing social awkwardness.