2 out of 5

Director: Graham Linehan

Yyyeah.  The IT Crowd has always been a fairly ‘easy’ comedy, just a slightly more insular spin on the ‘geek’ trend that, admittedly, the show either helped to initiate or was an early supporter of.  The UKness added it a certain cheekiness and by skewing the cast a little older (yes, I’m comparing to Big Bang Theory) and specifically relegating it to an IT basement, the show was more easily latched on to by the tech savvy, even if the subject matter was never really all that far outside of sitcom norm.  But the webcomic and meme references certainly helped.

Unfortunately, the averageness has just built over the intervening years, and without the somewhat pleasing homespun feel that developed over the course of the four short seasons, this special lacks a lot of charm.  It’s also sort of wonky in being unable to decide if it wants to be a true show ender – bringing up references to previous episodes and old characters – or just another tech-lite incident, the episode generally playing off of a viral video concept after Roy insults a short person and is caught on camera doing so.  By 2013, the topic shows its age and since we’ve seen Chris and Richard in other projects since, I couldn’t really shake the feeling of these characters being characters, further invalidating the legitimacy of any dorky claims.

Some funny concepts, and the actors definitely maintained their comfortable chemistry, but the special was almost an embarrasingly middling return, adding a questionable ‘special’ into the lineage that really amounted to too little too late.