Das iTeam - Die Jungs an der Maus Online

You know, those are the moments when I think: "Yes we need a more strict international copyright law!". Not because of piracy, but because of such plagiarisms like iTeam.

Dumont said in an interview that they couldn't just dub the series because the German viewers would not understand some of the British jokes like "Made in Britain". Thus I expected a German series which is just slightly similar to the original series. But what I saw yesterday was a horrible version of the original British series. I could even tell what they will say the next moment because they copied every single joke and sketch... "you think it's a picture of my family? - No it's the A-Team"... Déjà-vu. The only difference is that the series is played by actors not even nearly as good as the original ones.

So I'm asking myself. Was it really worth reinventing the wheel? Wouldn't it have been cheaper just buying the whole series and dubbing it? This series is an evidence of incapacity of German comedy. It's bad on it's own and is even incapable of making a good copy.

Lately it seems to be pretty fashionable to not just copy ideas of shows but even to copy entire episodes.

Here we have the latest copy of a brilliant British comedy: The IT Crowd. Sometimes I wonder: Don't producers watch TV on their own (at least sometimes)? Because if they did they would know what kind of humor their country shares, you don't have to be an anthropologist to know that. And we know that Somalis laugh about different stuff than Indonesians. On the other hand Brazilians don't necessarily find the same thing funny like the Irish do. OK, where do I want to go here? Simple, British humor doesn't work in German, or at least not as effectively. Alright, so far it seems at least logical to dare the experiment. But why translate every sentence almost to its very grammatical core? Sometimes it doesn't even sound German anymore, needless to say that instead of laughing you sit in front of your TV being confused saying "Wwwwwwwwwhat?".

We have seen too many non quality copies of international shows into German (The Office, CSI, etc) but this is proving once more that you should better stick to the Original.

Nice try though... (and sad for Sky DuMont who is a good actor)

"Das iTeam - Die Jungs an der Maus" is a German comedy series from 2008, so this one will have its 10th anniversary next year. It was canceled after one season of only six episodes, so the entire thing runs for under 2.5 hours, which means you can watch it all at once as it is as long as one really long movie. The director here is Heinz Dietz and looking at some of the other stuff he made, you can certainly say that this is the comedy equivalent to Cobra 11 and Hinter Gittern. And quality-wise this means it is a pretty big mess. The first 4 episodes were truly horrible, the final 2 slightly improved, but still weak and had their fail moments too like the Udo Lindenberg impersonator. As for the cast, Sebastian Münster was probably the best from the bunch, Britta Horn had some good and some bad while Stefan Puntigam was a disaster from start to finish. At times I wondered if he was intentionally bad as honestly he isn't an inexperienced actor or anything, but his line delivery could not have been more stale and wooden to be honest. He felt like a robot basically and destroyed the last bit of comedy for a series that honestly really sucked in terms of comedic material. Realism is entirely non-existent here, which is already proved by the fact that a woman who knows nothing about computers gets employed as head of IT and gets to keep her job too. And there are many other examples where this one really fails with its ambition. You can probably find 5 examples in the early episodes and 3 in the final 2 episodes where the approach to humor by the writers here is truly questionable. Oh yeah, Sky du Mont is in it too, but his screen time is minimal and his material is as bad as the rest's, so no chance really to elevate the material for him, even if his screen presence is nice as always. I read this is the German version of the British show The IT Crowd and I have not seen that one, so no talk about similarities and differences. The German adaptation for The Office became a huge success, so I guess this one here became a huge failure. Overall, it's a show not worth seeing at all. It improved towards the end and maybe it would have further improved in a second season, but Horn's looks and Münster simply weren't enough to make up for the horrible writing. Don't watch.