Community, the tv show

good article. kinda surprised they didn't mention the whole deal with Sorkin, which was pretty extreme (he wrote the vast majority of almost every single script during his West Wing run, in additional to all the other crazy responsibilities)

http://sakarisingh.deviantart.com/art/Community-World-Map-302989170

that was a good a.v. club article, thank you!!!

they alluded to sorkin, right, without getting into it.

VanDerWerff knows about Sorkin and all that, and I think he might have addressed it in the previous thing he wrote about Harmon leaving.

oh, ok. i tend to wonder about those personalities in general. don't know much about the Moonlighting guy, besides the obvious changes to the show on screen.

or even someone like Pamela Fryman, who's credited as director on about 90% of all How I Met Your Mother episodes, certainly has a hand in that show's consistent style and tone, if not the quality of the scripts which seem to vary wildly from season to season despite having the same showrunners/creators since its inception

i found it interesting that the simpsons changes showrunners every few years. i wouldn't credit any aspect of the show to this. it's gone downhill, but so have a lot of shows with more consistent personnel.

uh, disagree. I blame Mike Scully and solo Al Jean, who have each run the show for several mediocre to shitty years, for a lot of that show's downfall. I would agree, however, that comparing the Oakley-Weinstein years to the Mirkin Years to the Jean-Reiss years, you see a show that entered distinct yet consistently strong eras under different leaders

i just meant that i wouldn't NECESSARILY blame a shifting roster of showrunners for a show's decline. don't know the specifics re. the simpsons.

a lot of these shows (the office, simpsons) that lose their show runners replace them with people who have been working on the show for years. even the guy who took over for sorkin had been a west wing producer since the beginning. I'm trying to come up with another show that had a complete creative turn-over.

not a complete turnover but the closest example to that I can think of is maybe Heroes? iirc NBC didn't get rid of its creator, but did fire its two showrunners, after ratings plummeted between the first and third seasons, and then fired another producer a few months after that.

They then brought back in Bryan Fuller (creator of critically-beloved, audience-kryptonite shows like Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me) who had written for the show in season 1 - a lot of fans believed his scripts were the reason the show was so strong in the beginning. At this point though he had just come off the end of Pushing Daisies and hadn't worked on Heroes for two years. While he wasn't credited as a showrunner, he ended up taking over most of the main writing duties for the end of s3 and the start of s4.

I think he even managed to push the show's ratings up slightly when he came back - but the damage was done by then.

the Simpsons case seems like a particular kind of extreme to me, in that the decline was so rapid despite what looks like very few major changes in creative personnel. Listening to the DVD commentaries it's pretty clear that while the first few groups of showrunners had very strong and clear ideas about what they wanted the show to be, Mike Scully let it be much more of a free-for-all, and the result there is deviating towards all of the show's worst tendencies. I don't know how much we can parallel that with Community - which seems to me to already be looser with any kind of overarching principles - but I can certainly imagine a caricature version of Community getting very bad very quick.

actually Bryan Fuller would prob be the best possible person to take over Community, and i'm totally not kidding

He would be great!

iirc Frank Darabont was showrunner and head writer on and developer of the Walking Dead TV adaptation, with Kirkman writing one episode; at the end of S1 Darabont fired the entire writing staff and planned to write S2 with freelancers; then six months later, with this new work perhaps not having eventuated, AMC fired Darabont.

actually Bryan Fuller would prob be the best possible person to take over Community, and i'm totally not kidding

Would support this 100%. It would still likely be a different show with a different sensibility, but it's at least a sensibility I trust.

i think his ear for dialogue and characterization and his appreciation of genre conventions could easily be tuned to the show's sensibility

iirc the Walking Dead "fired the entire writing staff" thing turned out to be greatly exaggerated

the Simpsons case seems like a particular kind of extreme to me, in that the decline was so rapid despite what looks like very few major changes in creative personnel.

It may, perhaps, be instructive to read the list of Simpsons showrunners below, keeping in mind both the show's original "two-season showrunner" formula and the point at which The Simpsons began its decline:

• Season 1–2: Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, & Sam Simon
• Season 3–4: Al Jean & Mike Reiss
• Season 5–6: David Mirkin
• Season 7–8: Bill Oakley & Josh Weinstein
• Season 9–12: Mike Scully
• Season 13–present: Al Jean

every time i think 'oh Community will attract a bunch of new writers who are fans of the show and want to keep it as great as it's been' i think about what's happened with The Simpsons and feel pessimistic again

i think his ear for dialogue and characterization and his appreciation of genre conventions could easily be tuned to the show's sensibility

Oh, I think I'd trust him completely to get the tone of the show and understand the characters and the rhythm of the show, etc. I just think he'd bring a whole different perspective to the endeavor. I haven't seen a lot of indication in his work, for example, that he's anywhere near the pop culture obsessive that Harmon is, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the genre pastiche fall to the wayside.

I'm veering awfully close to "backstage at Community!" fanfiction now, though, so I'mma just pull back on the ol' reins.

iirc the Walking Dead "fired the entire writing staff" thing turned out to be greatly exaggerated

still ended up with everyone except Kirkman turning over in the space of like two eps though?

yeah but i mean -- cable shows have small writing teams, people moving onto other projects, etc. it seemed like typical stuff sensationalized into "they fucked up and they're gone, let's start over"

what IS that thing next to martin sheen? or is that emilio estevez?

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, May 21, 2012 12:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

its robert z'dar!

I don't know why but the idea of a Community episode where all of the actors play caricatures of themselves as imagined by their characters (ie, Jeff Winger does a Joel McHale imitation, etc etc)

This has nothing to do with the current conversation, I just wanted to share.

That was the issue I had w/the av club article, the claim that the Walking Dead has improved after Darabont was fired. I would say it's been the same consistent level of awful since maybe the 3rd or 4th episode?

it seemed like typical stuff sensationalized into "they fucked up and they're gone, let's start over"

the dude that fired them and adapted the series and was showrunner subsequently getting fired is the most pertinent part here!

yeah, that's beyond the typical writers room turnover. plus it was pretty heavily publicized, considering what a huge ratings success Walking Dead has been for AMC - beating Mad Men and Breaking Bad - it seemed bizarre that the network would get in this fight

actually Bryan Fuller would prob be the best possible person to take over Community, and i'm totally not kidding

lol I wrote that post abt Heroes and this totally didn't occur to me but YES. Can someone make this happen?

(last I heard he's working on a Munsters reboot, which also sounds like something by him I'd watch tbh.)

The presence of a creator I respect is the only thing that might get me to warily check out a Munsters reboot.

note: it is supposedly a "darker", "edgier", "sexier" reboot for our modern times. prime remake material!

well at least it's not a Ryan Murphy reboot of the Munsters

I think the world's been clamoring for a sexier Herman Munster. Generations of people who've been unsuccessfully trying to use pictures of Fred Gwynne as j.o. fodder will be relieved.

the world is just not ready for lingering shots of Herman Munster's bare ass

I think the world's been clamoring for a sexier Herman Munster. Generations of people who've been unsuccessfully trying to use pictures of Fred Gwynne as j.o. fodder will be relieved.

http://slog.thestranger.com/files/2008/09/this%20ain%27t%20the%20munsters%20box%20cover.jpg

*de-tumesces*

*pours denatured alcohol into eyes*

take it to the 50 Shades of Grey thread

I'd watch if Herman had Fred Gwynne's accent from _Pet Sematary_

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=64424

Re: Simpsons show-runners

Whoever mentioned them, have you listened to the commentaries for the years it started to get bad? Do they think it is awesome? I presume they try to forget how much the episodes suck and instead spend 20 minutes talking about how they got Tony Hawk or Billy Joel to star in that episode.

I didn't post about the Simpsons showrunners, but I've listened to a few commentaries from the craptacular seasons. They were all filled with long, awkward silences, occasionally broken by "Oh, I remember this." Nothing remotely like the exciting and informative Mirkin commentaries.

so SOLELY due to the urging of a few ILXORS i finally tried community again last night: the 8-bit episode which might as well have been made for me as much as it tried to hit my sweet spot of interest
and nothing. I find the sensibility to be like a trying-but-failing Better Off Ted... which, admittedly I love. But the acid and zip in BOT is missing and this wallows instead in Family Guy style "hey everybody i'm making a joke! look at the joke i'm making! Look, I made it! >>quick cut to next scene<<" or (even worse) the office brand of making jokes that are less about being funny and more about your awareness of what a character would or wouldn't do and isn't it funny to see Dwight doing a crossword puzzle with a quill? i also think it's the lead writer's sensibility just not jibing with my sense of quality and humor; i made the mistake of looking at that guy's blog and he's an idiot.
It seems better than outsourced or whatever that other fucking thing was that started at the same time and that I always assumed was basically the same show. it's even better than most current network sitcoms. but i'm not entirely sure i get the overwhelming nerd love.
allison brie can get it tho

8-bit episode = "Digital Estate Planning", where they play a video game to win Pierce's inheritance? If you didn't like that, you should probably avoid the show altogether.

i didn't like that and i should probably avoid the show altogether.

but i DID like the unspoken joke that the childish gambino character goes everywhere in the game by endlessly jumping rather than ever walking.
that was about the best bit for me.
otherwise they even wasted giancarlo esposito which i didn't know you could do

disagree w/ Sund4r, that episode was not representative or one of its best at all

that's like the absolute last episode I would show to someone to try to convince them to like Community except maybe for the chaos theory episode

IMO you'd have been better served with the billiard episode from season 1, and even that would be a stretch

not that the comedy universe of forksclovetofu is something i can claim to understand (xpost)

otherwise they even wasted giancarlo esposito which i didn't know you could do

can't really argue with that, but better him wasted here than wearing a genie costume on once upon a time

haha was gonna say the same thing

Whoever mentioned them, have you listened to the commentaries for the years it started to get bad? Do they think it is awesome? I presume they try to forget how much the episodes suck and instead spend 20 minutes talking about how they got Tony Hawk or Billy Joel to star in that episode.

i've only gone as far as season 10 with the dvds, but yeah, in the mirkin / oakley & weinstein years you get lots of earnest discussion of the thought processes behind episodes, the kind of debates they had about what was and wasn't right for the show, while in the scully years you get barely related chat, awkward silences, etc etc. the closest you generally get to the earlier meta-commentary is when they're sheepishly regretting individual jokes (less often than they should) or noting how they were concerned about something being too outlandish or stupid... before they went for it anyway.