Community, the tv show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNrPr-UCtog

lol?

Seems like it could be funny, but man do I dislike Chevy Chase.

just read the review in the nytimes, will give this a go

i work at a community college
not sure how i feel about this

have lots of funny stories, but not sure i want to see them dramatized for prime time larfs

ugh this

ok i'll be honest. i am quietly hoping this show fails.

i'm a Soup stan so i'll hope for the best but if it's not great then i hope it dies quietly, because of all people McHale doesn't get to contribute to the mountain of useless TV he makes good TV ridiculing

OTM

how about this -- he goes back to ridiculing people on tv instead of people in community colleges

you must go to community college to be a person on TV

(w/ a few exceptions like Chevy Chase, who went to Bard with Steely Dan)

And Mindy Kaling, who went to Dartmouth with gbx.

But other than those two, that's pretty much it.

fwiw La Lechera i just read an interview where McHale says:

Many reporters are like, “So are you guys going to make fun of community colleges?” It was such a weird, hostile attack approach. Just like in M*A*S*H, they were like, “Are you making fun of the Korean War?” “No.” “Are you making fun of doctors?” “Uh, not really…” Or like Cheers, you’re like, “You making fun of people that go to bars?” So what did they think our show was going to be? So a community college is somewhere that is a huge cross-section of America, and I thought it ironic that you have to have about as diverse a cast in television history if you want to do a show about community college. I’m just amazed that we’re all English speakers.

I don't think it's that weird for people to think that, though. Community college is not as widely represented in American pop culture as hospitals and bars are, and when it is, it often does have a mocking or derisive undercurrent to it (cf. Adam Carolla rants). So I totally see why someone would expect that the show would be more of the same.

yeah, true. i mean it'll be interesting to see if he's right and the show doesn't laugh at its setting or they end up making the easy jokes after all.

Many reporters are like, “So are you guys going to make fun of community colleges?” It was such a weird, hostile attack approach. Just like in M*A*S*H, they were like, “Are you making fun of the Korean War?” “No.” “Are you making fun of doctors?” “Uh, not really…” Or like Cheers, you’re like, “You making fun of people that go to bars?” So what did they think our show was going to be? So a community college is somewhere that is a huge cross-section of America, and I thought it ironic that you have to have about as diverse a cast in television history if you want to do a show about community college. I’m just amazed that we’re all English speakers.

Uh ...

It's been said that community college is a ‘halfway school’ for losers, a self esteem workshop for newly divorced housewives, and a place where old people go to keep their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity,” reads a network description of the show. “Well, at Greendale Community College ... that's all true.

As a community college student, I'm annoyed.

yeah yeah i know
i realize he is not out to ridicule earnest students, but he may wind up doing that anyway.

i just...i dunno. i smell yuck.

Uh ...

It's been said that community college is a ‘halfway school’ for losers, a self esteem workshop for newly divorced housewives, and a place where old people go to keep their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity,” reads a network description of the show. “Well, at Greendale Community College ... that's all true.

As a community college student, I'm annoyed.

― etaeoe, Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:53 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

those are lines from the trailer, said by a character. i don't think ur meant 2 b "yes, he is right, lol." but nor is it "oh he is awful, that is so wrong."

The pilot is good. It's chiefly about McHale's character being an arse.

ok just watched via torrent the pilot and i give it an unambiguous: yes, lol!

the main thrust of the show does not seem to be making fun of community college - and where it does the jokes are not abt the people associated w/the being omg total retards - so dont worry yalls

I don't think there is anything wrong with poking fun at community colleges - there are a lot of jokes to be made on this subject. if this show becomes popular, if anything, it's just gonna help make ccs seem like a more normal part of american society (which they already are obv, but are non-existent in pop culture.)

it's just gonna help make ccs seem like a more normal part of american society (which they already are obv, but are non-existent in pop culture.

I have not seen the show. But from the promotional material I've seen does not reflect the most predominate characteristic of community college students: poverty. Therefore, I believe it would do little for normalizing community colleges.

im glad weve gone straight tot he hand wringing - enjoy the show!

xp

that seems like a generalization to me. I live in CA and significanttt numbers of middle class students go to our local cc instead of straight to a 4 year school. I took about 10 classes there in hs and there is a v. large variety of people and incomes.

of course, my local CC looked like this:

http://www.starshineroshell.com/images/logos/SBCC_lg.jpg

One only needs to look at how "Good Times" normalized the way people view welfare and tenement housing to see how badly "Community" has dropped the ball before it even airs.

(and is probably less representative of ccs than the show. but still, main idea, you really can't generalize + it's probably good that they're getting *some* sort of pop culture rep)

xp

I spent a summer at a community college getting a few credits out of the way, and I must say that I did not have a favorable impression of the experience. Sorry guys!

ownd

I also went to a community college in CA for the first two years of my degree! Now I work at a community college in OR, and people cry when I tell them I was paying $11 a unit compared to the $81 a unit they're charging here.

two years off cc for the basics seems like not a bad idea - also watching and discussing this show - it is funny

I trust ice cr?m's taste; going to dl

did u see any 'glee' yet ice cr?m?

Glee is 50% good, 50% terrible, sometimes at the same time.

that's what I'm into

I'm sort of embarrassed about currently attending a community college, not because I'm attending a community college, but because when people ask me what I'm learning I honestly have to say "not much." If I didn't need something official looking to put on my resume, I could've saved a lot of money just teaching myself at home.

It's for this reason I will not only be NOT offended if this show skewers the community college experience, but I was actively derive joy from it!

was=will (der)

Is it "not learning anything" because the classes are poorly taught, or because they require you to take a bunch of general ed bullshit before you can get to your chosen subject? I have students complain to me all the time about the uselessness of general ed, but ultimately they'd be taking the same classes for way more money at a four-year.

the classes are poorly taught

I'm in the digital media/tv production program, which is basically run by two instructors at different campuses who absolutely hate each other. Whatever one teaches, the other debunks. After all that is through, it's basically playtime when it comes to studio production and editing projects. Basically, they tell you how to turn on the computer and open up Adobe Premiere (which isn't even industry standard software) and then advise the best they know how, which is limited in all respects.

The worst thing is, the college has a completely digital hi-def PBS station right there, and they won't let students anywhere near it. We're using a studio with equipment that's, no lie, from the 1970s.

in my experience (classes at a pretty well funded california cc) there was a large spectrum of teacher quality. but overall, what you get out of a class also sorta depends on the students (teachers often teach to the lowest common denominator + you learn through class discussions / study groups.) and this is where the cc classes I took were significantly worse than the classes at my srs 4 year school. they tended to be worse than my public hs AP classes too.

xpost Ugh, that's awful. The students I work with gravitate toward the humanities or medical/nursing programs, which run really well at my CC, but I've heard similar accounts of, like, blind incompetence in certain Computer Science classes.

part of the problem (not to get all shop talk on you, but...) is that cc teachers are usually people who have other jobs and teach "for a little extra cash"
adjunct instructors (sometimes up to 75% of the instructors at a CC are adjunct) are often blase because:

they are not teachers by trade
are often not given the training or tools to be effective teachers
are not paid very well for their time/expertise
are often required to do things that are beyond their range of skills, like writing a syllabus*

that said, there are a lot of great teachers out there at CCs (ahem), but there are a lot of craptacular ones too for the aforementioned reasons

*note: this is not always true, but it's true more than more than most students at CCs realize

Ok I'm watching the show and this bears no resemblance to my life at all aside from the woman who referenced her babysitter.

These people all talk to each other. As iatee referenced above, almost nobody in my classes talks to each other.

It must be said, John Oliver is the funniest thing in this show.

It must also be said that whatsherface really doesn't look all that much like Elizabeth Shue.

Where are the nonnative speakers? Sorry but if this is what passes for funny on tv I'm not impressed. My real life is funnier than this. I have a student whose name is Porntip, but she prefers to go by her nickname: Nooky.

Ass-burgers.

Nice touch ending with "Don't You Forget About Me."

I give it a B+ (ish).

I laughed a little at the menengitis joke.

Didn't watch Mad Men, so didn't have a problem with Annie's on-screen age. OTOH they were sexualizing her even in season 1, tons of Jeff/Annie jokes on that wavelength

Debate episode is one of my favourites.

Just heard “Evil Woman” in the supermarket and immediately thought of the debate episode.

so good! i love that one too

HE WAS HORNY, SO HE DROPPED HIM. Man is evil!

Re: F&G music- Wikipedia sez some of the songs were replaced with generic music when reruns ran on Fox Family

I watched the S6 “We gave a dog a degree?” episodd and found it p funny esp everyone saying that line allthe time, it cracked me up

S6 so far not too bad! It’s not early season giddy heights but still v enjoyable & often funny.

at this point I’m thrilled at anything that is an improvement on the nadir of the puppet episode, my bar is maybe too low idk

oh and the s6 episode where Dean does virtual reality filing was also *hilarious*

Yeah, for me it's:
S2>S3>S1/S6>>S5>>>>>>>>>>S4

S2>S1>S3>>S6>S5

nah

I'd rate S1 higher if it didn't take so long for them to de-center Jeff and figure out who Troy and Britta were. Granted, to me the show's peak is the trampoline story.

rewatching s2 and it's striking what an utter over-the-top asshole pierce becomes. (the d&d game and the one where he pretends he's dying, specifically.) and not in a funny way or a way that can be reconciled at the end by hopeful music and shirley and annie going 'aww'

sort of wonder if the writers made pierce worse than necessary because everyone hated chevy? i don't feel like he needed to be this awful simply for comedic effect

By S2 they were largely writing Pierce's dialogue by putting things that Chevy actually said to his coworkers into the scripts. The plots were probably similarly motivated.

Even at the time the wheelchair felt like a device to physically keep Chevy apart from the rest of the cast as much as possible and he has way fewer scenes when he's physically in the room with them.

Even some of the study room scenes tend to film Pierce separately and on his own. Like you can just see in all those scenes where they're all supposed to be round the table together and Chase just isn't there except when he absolutely needs to be.

Granted, to me the show's peak is the trampoline story.

I've been rewatching the DVDs with the commentaries, and someone (I think McHale) talks about how Donald Glover and Matt Walsh (janitor who made the secret trampoline garden) would do hilarious improvs with each other. When he shows the swastika tattoo, "It's going to be a maze" was improvised. An alternate line for that reveal, which was Donald's idea, was, "It's the original U2 logo."

Ha!!

We made it up to the episode where Troy leaves to go sailing on Pierce's yacht last night, Season 5 was like an immediate uptick again in quality after S4.

Being able to binge these seasons made me realize just how much darker S5 in, and I don't just mean the tone. The color is more muted and everything seems filmed with less lighting or something. I saw a few reddit threads that mentioned it was due to the lower budgets by that point, but that seems to be a weird specific place for the budget to impact.

Back half of S6 is proving to be weird as hell

There was a great ep on Grifting 101 with Matt Berry guest starring, super funny

But we just watched Giant Hand/RV episode which was about as bad as you can get without puppets + singing

I saw a few reddit threads that mentioned it was due to the lower budgets by that point, but that seems to be a weird specific place for the budget to impact.

Production design overall takes huge steps down as the series progresses. It's probably that they were no longer lighting to make sure 43 background jokes were clearly visible on a fifth rewatch, than that they couldn't afford the same bulbs as before.

(Harmon paid props and design staff overtime out of his own pocket on the first two seasons, partly out of appreciation for the incredibly great job they were doing, and largely because his own constant rewriting and rewriting of the scripts meant that they weren't able to do such a great job on regular schedules. In the third year, he stopped doing this and bought a house instead.)

Interesting, that makes sense about the background stuff. Had no idea he paid so much out of pocket.

But we just watched Giant Hand/RV episode which was about as bad as you can get without puppets + singing

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, July 29, 2020 1:05 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

That was where I bailed. I was pretty hopeful up to that point, but this episode just felt so desperate. I never saw any of S6 after that.

the next episode is the final paintball episode though!

yes we watched that last night & it was fun!

Wait, there’s a paintball in season 6?! OK, will revisit.

I’m about halfway through rewatching season 5, and it’s much better than I remember. Jonathan Banks’ reaction to the Meowmeowbeenz presentation is one of my favorite moments of the whole series. And the darkness pointed out upthread is only in the first episode and the Ass Crack Bandit episode.

We just got the Ass Crack episode, was ok.

I ended up stopping my rewatch at the My Dinner With Abed episode, I remember being...not confused...but taken aback by it. Obviously it's very tonally different from the average episode, but also iirc the previews of the episode were focused on all the Pulp Fiction costumes and all the online chatter was dedicated to theories re: what kind of Tarantino homage Dan Harmon was doing to do. Then of course you watch the ep and realize the episode has absolutely nothing to do with Pulp Fiction. Am I making that up or does anyone remember that?

Anyway all that said just makes me think about what the show would have been like if Dan Harmon had direct access to the viewership through twitter...an important part of being self-aware is making sure that everyone else is aware of how self-aware you are.

Am I making that up or does anyone remember that?

I honestly have no memory of those promos, so I went into the episode blind. I believe I shouted out loud, "THEY'RE DOING MY DINNER WITH ANDRE?!" I mean, of all the referencey stuff the show had done up to that point, this was not an expected reference. iirc, Danny Pudi had neither seen nor heard of the film, so he had to watch it a couple of times in preparation.

But TV promos were notoriously misleading. The promos for the Simpsons episode where Bleeding Gums Murphy dies were, "BART GOES TO THE E.R.!" (implying some kind of E.R. crossover).

Harmon did have twitter, but was always very self-aware of the difference between a general audience, dedicated viewers, and the kind of microniche of super-dedicated fans who track down offscreen communication from the uncredited writer of a TV show.

He talked about twitter all the time on Harmontown

he incorporated the term "streets ahead" in an early episode because some Tweeter claimed that Modern Family was "streets ahead" of his "meta-bullshit", so of course he had Pearce trying to coin the term.

I know episode promos are either misleading or totally uninformative (shout out to the Mad Men previews) but they really seemed intent on playing up the Pulp Fiction angle. I guess as I watch less and less TV in the traditional week to week format I forgot that preview promos used to be pretty disconnected from the material.

“Critical Film Studies” has been sold as “the Pulp Fiction episode” of Community. Even NBC, which often doesn’t promote the show all that heavily, has run many, many promo slots for the show playing up the crazy costumes and situations involved in the Pulp Fiction-styled B-plot.

(I tried expanding the comments in this post to find old discussion too and I broke firefox so never mind)

all the online chatter was dedicated to theories re: what kind of Tarantino homage Dan Harmon was doing to do

although it may have come from dumb decision-making in the promo dept, preserving the surprise of the Dinner With Andre-ing is a great result of this tactic

That's very true! That's why it made me wonder about how else the show could have played with/subverted expectations if Dan had been showrunner and on contemporary Twitter (and not 2009-era Twitter which hardly counts) at the same time.

Considering the swirling cesspool that 98% of Twitter is right now, I can only imagine how much worse it would have made the show. Harmon would have gotten in huge arguments with fans eight episodes in and/or canceled in real time for the Chang Drow gag and never would have even finished the first season, imo.

(yes I know the D&D episode was in season two, but still...)

I think he would have gotten through season 1 but by season 2 he and the show would be literally and figuratively cancelled for sure

almost suffocated watching danny pudi's nic cage impressions

I still think the (first season?) "Goldbluming" joke is one of the funniest things ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv6mA0qyOo4

Well there ya go

.@alisonbrie @kenjeong @dannypudi @YNB @donaldglover @GillianA @peacock @SonyTV @CommunityTV pic.twitter.com/ynVqgaPuQD

— Joel McHale (@joelmchale) September 30, 2022

Amusing oops

Lmao just realized he tagged Gillian Anderson instead of Gillian Jacobs

— Preeti Chhibber 🔜 NYCC (@runwithskizzers) September 30, 2022

Hooray!

Will Chevy return tho?

The lack of tag says it all I think.

Ha, good point Ned!

six seasons and no Chevy!

happy birthday jesus

MERRY HAPPY

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/5/5c/Subway.png/revision/latest?cb=20211104122237

https://www.foodandwine.com/subway-change-name-free-food-for-life-7565780

Subway is looking for one true sandwich fan to change their first name (for real) to "Subway." The brave soul who agrees to do so will be rewarded handsomely with a lifetime of free Subway food and beverages. Whether a legal name change is a large or small price to pay for such an offer is up to you.

Jared would do it.

Santa invented Spielberg and microchips