NBC doing 'IT Crowd' reboot with 'Cougar Town' creator Bill Lawrence

Last year, NBC lost The Office and 30 Rock. It canceled Community, and sometime next year, we’ll see the last of the Parks & Rec gang. The future has seemed bleak for NBC’s once-lauded comedy content, so maybe that explains why it’s digging through old projects to turn things around: Deadline reports that Cougar Town and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence has signed on to produce an NBC adaptation of the popular British sitcom The IT Crowd.

NBC has been here before. It picked up an IT Crowd pilot starring Joel McHale (and Richard Ayoade, from the original British version) in the 2006-2007 season, but no more episodes were filmed. Lawrence will be joined by the writing team of Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, who started on Scrubs and served as executive producers on Community from 2009 to 2012.

The IT Crowd follows the misadventures of two socially inept male computer nerds who work at a big company, and their interactions with their female boss, who’s computer illiterate. The original version starred Ayoade, Chris O’Dowd, and Katherine Parkinson.

Lawrence is a busy guy these days. He’s also working on a primetime adaptation of Rush Hour, although a network has yet to pick up the project.