I've been showing The IT Crowd to my fiancee, and we're coming up on the Season 1 finale soon. I remember from the last time I watched it that the season finale ends on a cliffhanger that is never resolved: season 2 just picks up with a new storyline as if the old one had never happened. Does anybody know why the season 1 finale was never resolved? Also, anybody care to hazard a guess as to why there wasn't more fan protest over this decision? It seems to me that if a show in the US started a new season with complete disregard for the previous season's cliffhanger, fans would be taking to the streets (or at least the forums) in mass protest. Maybe it's a British thing? Thanks in advance!
They didn't know if they'd be making any further episodes so they went with whatever crazy ending they thought would be funny. It's completely dropped from that point on.
I can appreciate wanting to do a crazy ending under these circumstances. But still, why not follow through with it? Why not at least drop in a line of dialogue to suggest that the situation was resolved off-screen? For that matter, how come there wasn't more protest from the fans? Most of the show's fans just seem to take this in stride and not talk about it much. Strange behavior, since most fans usually demand closure from their shows.
I think it just goes to the irreverent mindset of the show. We're not talking about a serialized novel here.
The first series seemed to hint at a possible romance brewing between Roy and Jen, and I believe we were supposed to view the series finale in that light; we were supposed to think Roy and Jen had slept together, but they threw in the funny complication of Jen sleeping with Moss instead. When the show came back for a second series, Graham Linehan seemingly chose to drop any potential romantic storylines between the characters, so writing an episode focusing on the fallout of the series 1 finale would not only have been pointless, it just didn't interest him as a writer. Fans didn't complain because most agreed that romantic pairings between the group wasn't something the show should be doing. Besides, the second series began with The Work Outing, one of the show's best episodes. Nobody was in the mood to complain after watching that.
To paraphrase Jen in the series finale, "things just keep getting worse and worse, and then we stop". Seems fairly typical of each episode, really. Continuity was hardly a priority in this show! Mark