WARNING: If you started Y10 in September 2022, the IT Crowd section does not apply to you. I am working on writing a Modern Family section (which will appear at the bottom of this post) as soon as possible. If you started Y11 in September 2022, then read the sections on Friends and The IT Crowd ONLY. In Section A of your Component 2 Exam, you'll be called upon to discuss Friends and The IT Crowd. For both sitcoms, you'll need to consider their places in their wider industries and how they have both influenced and been influenced by them.
Friends (Series 1, Episode 1, 1994)
Your episode of Friends is known by many titles, but the one that interests us most is that it was also known as The Pilot. All TV series have a pilot episode, and it is the one that a show's creators present to television companies as a sample. Its job is to tell a story that introduces the main characters and gives us a sense of who each one is. While this episode focuses primarily on Ross, Monica and Rachel, it does also give us some idea as to what the characters of Phoebe, Joey and Chandler are like.
What this episode does well is that it works all on its own (Monica's date with Paul the Wine Guy is a story completely told in the episode) while also setting up longer stories for a planned series (Ross and Rachel's budding romance).
It's this first episode that would have been presented to NBC in America back in 1994. NBC would have been looking for a show to replace Cheers (which had finished the year before and been incredibly successful) and match the successes of (while also being different enough to) The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Will and Grace which were both running at the time.
In the UK, we're more interested in the fact that Channel 4 Corporation bought the show from Sky in 1999 as part of a $200m package of American shows that had become popular with British audiences. Remember that Channel 4 has no in-house creation - it pays creators for their show and broadcasts them. It doesn't seem like it a generation later, but Friends in 1999 represented the diversity and presentation of different views that C4C emphasises in its programming. It wasn't just that Friends is an American show, but also that it was one with a cast with gender variety and discussions of divorce and sexuality even in the first episode. In the world of almost 25 years ago, these issues were relatively new territory in the world of TV.
Before the deal with Sky, UK fans of the show had to have a Sky subscription to be able to watch episodes - and at the start, it was seven months between US audiences first watching Friends and UK audiences being able to do so. By the tenth and final season, this gap was down to three weeks. Of course, if Friends had been produced today, this gap would have been eliminated entirely by Internet streaming.
Friends would become one of Channel 4's flagship programmes in a Friday slot, appealing to both men and women - especially as the series' popularity grew in the UK. This was bolstered by parts of the fourth season being filmed in the UK itself. C4C moved the show to E4, as it found that 16-34 year olds made up the show's largest audience. The show would remain on E4 until 2011 when it moved to Comedy Central. In 2018, Netflix paid $100m for the right to stream it for twelve months. Consider by that point that the first episode was twenty four years old.
That seems like a lot of money until you remember that Friends not only continues to draw in viewers but adds new ones all the time. There are now fans of Friends who weren't even alive when the show finished. In the breaks, advertisements can be presented to these viewers, generating a lot of money. To give you an idea, it cost a company ~$450,000 to buy an advertisement slot in the break between sections of a Friends episode - in the finale, this cost rose to $2 million - at the time, the most expensive non-sporting advertisement slot in US television.
The IT Crowd (Series 4, Episode 2, 2004)
Your episode of The IT Crowd is very different, not least of all because it was broadcast ten years later. It's also quite unique in that it is part of a fourth series. While American sitcoms normally run for many series of 20-26 episodes each (Friends had 236 episodes across ten series), UK sitcoms rarely make it past three series of 6-10 episodes each.
There are just 25 episodes of The IT Crowd in total, yet many, more popular UK sitcoms have an episode count even smaller than this.
Remember that Channel 4 takes risks, offering alternative points of view and innovative, new content. The IT Crowd represented many of these things for Channel 4 early on, but one thing it didn't represent was risk: the show's creator, Graham Linehan, had brought two other successful sitcoms to Channel 4 previously: Father Ted and Black Books, which had become cult classics with strong home media (VHS and DVD) sales. The IT Crowd represented a potential commercial success for C4C: a show whose advertising revenue and DVD sales would give the corporation money to invest in other projects. The IT Crowd surely met this goal. Not only did it enjoy viewing figures of 2 million, but became another well-enjoyed show on home media. Consider, too, that the show now also has a home on Netflix, such has been its popularity.
In terms of alternative viewpoints and innovative content, The IT Crowd was also a success for C4C. The show's presentation of geek and nerd culture formed part of a movement that brought them into the mainstream. The show compelled us to change our outlook on these misunderstood and misrepresented subcultures. That was a torch that would be very ably borne next by The Big Bang Theory, which I would go so far as to assert at least partly owes its syndication a few years later by C4C to the success of Friends and The IT Crowd. Likewise, the racial and gender diversity of the cast is of huge attraction to C4C, as is the fact that Chris O'Dowd (Roy), Richard Ayoade (Moss) and Katherine Parkinson (Jen) were all relatively unknown when the show was first broadcast.
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