Episodes
All four series have run for 6 episodes each. The first series premiered on 3 February 2006, the second on 24 August 2007, the third on 21 November 2008 and the fourth on 25 June 2010.
In a first for Channel 4, each episode of the first series was available for download from the station's web site for the seven days preceding its initial television broadcast. Downloads were only available for UK and Ireland viewers and were supplied in Windows Media Video format. All but the first two episodes were encoded with DRM restrictions.
The opening episode of series 4 was released by Channel 4's online service 4oD a week before the television broadcast, though in order to protect the programme this was only available to registered and logged-in viewers, whereas much of 4oD's post-broadcast output is freely available.
A fifth series had been commissioned for 2011. In May 2011 Graham Linehan was quoted as saying that he intended the fifth series to be the last as he wanted "one more series to really say goodbye to the characters and the fans" and did not want it to become "a zombie series where the show is dead but its body is still moving around."
In October 2011, Graham Linehan stated that there will not be a fifth series – just a one off special in 2012. However, in March 2012, actor Chris O'Dowd said the special was yet to be made, citing availability issues.
In August 2012, in response to fans' tweets, Linehan himself replied, stating that the script was already written but Parkinson (Jen) was having a baby and other cast members were busy so it had yet to be filmed.
In May 2013, Linehan confirmed that a 1-episode finale would begin filming in a few weeks.
Read more about this topic: The IT Crowd
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)