The "official" word seemed to change weekly last fall, but now the show's creator, Graham Linehan, says that there will be no fifth season. So far, no one's contradicted him. He said that, instead, the show would wrap with a TV special sometime this year.

"The bad news is no 'IT Crowd' Series 5," he said -- using the British term "series" in place of the American "season" -- in a chat session on social-networking site Reddit.com in October. "The good news is an extended special next year called ... actually I won't tell you the title because you'll end up imagining better storylines than the one I've written."

This was going back on his own word from a year earlier, when he said there would indeed be a fifth season.

As for a movie, Linehan, in the same chat, said, "Maybe." (Actually, as the session was typed out instead of spoken, he spelled "maybe" with 36 Ms, presumably to highlight his uncertainty.)

"It needs to deserve to be a film, though. So it's got to be big on all sorts of different levels."

He said, however, that he was also open to expanding the "IT Crowd" universe with other TV specials. No work has begun on either a special or the movie, though.

"The IT Crowd" ran for four popular seasons, telling the story of the three people who run the information-technology division of the fictional corporation of Reynholm Industries from the dank basement of its office tower.

Linehan wrote and directed quite a few other British shows, most notably the popular late-'90s sitcom "Father Ted."

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