Having explored the incompetency of an IT department on Earth, The IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan now wants to explore similar workplace dysfunction in space. According to The Guardian, Linehan has joined forces with British comedian Adam Buxton to write a sci-fi sitcom pilot set on a space station orbiting the Earth. Frequent IT Crowd director Richard Boden is on board to produce and direct the pilot, which has been commissioned by the U.K.’s Channel 4 and starts shooting this spring.
The Cloud follows the less-than-genius employees of a company that protects the data (mostly selfies, kittens, and porn, of course) on mankind’s mobile devices from a space station orbiting the Earth. In addition to creating the series, Buxton will also star as one of the eclectic crew members charged with running an unreliable voice-activated ship called Cloud Station 13. (Hopefully when things go wrong, the crew will be able to turn the ship off and on again.)
Linehan and Buxton have reportedly been talking about tackling a sci-fi comedy since 2013. Perhaps they just needed some time to work out the production questions of setting a show in space, the biggest of which is the lack of gravity on real-life space stations. It remains to be seen whether the series will employ that big spinning wheel from Interstellar, those gravity boots from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or whether it simply won’t give a fuck about the actual mechanics of space travel and will risk the wrath of Neil deGrasse Tyson should the pilot be picked up to series.