Community, the tv show

pierce being abused and underutilized all season = me sympathizing with chevy chase and feeling he's been hard done by, which is not something i ever anticipated feeling.

this episode had some good jokes, but the troy/britta relationship has been so blankly written all season that the breakup felt like bad fanfic. annie's reaction to the dean pretending to be jeff was clownish, as was jeff's plot-driven anger and heartfelt resolution speech. i'm starting to feel the full disappointment of this show's decline, the good really isn't outweighing the bad anymore imo. jim rash was good, tho.

I liked this episode! I did think the Troy-Abed body swap was a bit of a conceptual mess but rather than assholeness I think it's a nice point of progression for Troy, as someone who is basically childish realising that he is basically childish and trying to deal with it. Though I do wonder how Troy and Britta had managed to be together for a year under those conditions.

Even though it was a bit sitcom-y (I suppose I don't really know why I think that should be a bad thing though) Jeff persistently calling bullshit on all that was going on around him was funny, and Jim Rash's Dean-Jeff was great.

I'm kinda wishing they'd made Jim Rash showrunner.

If it survives, he should definitely be a main writer. I gave up a couple of weeks in, but checked this out for his writing, and liked it a lot.

pierce being abused and underutilized all season = me sympathizing with chevy chase and feeling he's been hard done by,

Ganz and Bobrow have said that Pierce would be written into his own side-stories / lock himself into a trailer / etc so frequently, so that Chevy couldn't disrupt the whole week's work for the rest of the cast and crew.

That was not a bad episode at all. If only the other writers this season knew how to use Jim Rash as well as Jim Rash.

dean-jeff was amazeballs. i liked the overall premise too -- playing with "doing a bit" vs. the not-so-hidden subtext in a decent way. felt very confident in the relationship of community to genre as something that's not just from outside, imposed by writers doing gags, but also drawn directly from how the characters operate within and relate to broader culture.

the throwaway gag about 'murder mystery dinner' or whatever was also cute.

That episode actually made me angry.

Yeah the mistake was folding the body swap in with the breakup. It was funny enough in its own right, but Troy and Britta as a couple has never worked in any context.

Troy doing Abed was much funnier than Abed doing Troy, which I put down to writing as much as performance. Abed did a much better Troy in the gay disco episode. The Dean doing Jeff was amazing though.

Character growth (or whatever it is) needs to be more than everyone realizing they are friends and they have to stick together at the end of every episode.

The Troy/Abed/Britta thing is super disturbing. Maybe Britta got involved in that mess in the first place because she knew there would be a bunch of chances to flex her psychiatric skills.

I'm putting it down as weak writing, which yes has been popping up over the course of the show. It is still a funny show, I still like the characters (as characters, not as fictional people), etc. But I can't tell sometimes if the recent stories are just dumb or MEANT to seem dumb because meta. No, it's the former.

For instance, Annie and Shirley are super smart nerdy Valedictorians, yet they spend this whole episode not doing their work and trying (in vain) way harder to get the rest of the study group to do the work for them. Pierce's bit at the end shows how that assignment wasn't supposed to be necessarily a group project, cos he did all the work and they are all saved and get good grades. Again i guess you can argue Annie and Shirley aren't really super smart, it's a Community College LOL, dumb old Leonard was Valedictorian ahead of them, etc. but again it's just more difficult to take those characters or their arcs seriously.

Character growth (or whatever it is) needs to be more than everyone realizing they are friends and they have to stick together at the end of every episode.

Especially when there's so little to build up to it or back it up, which was related to what I was getting at re the puppet episode. Troy's explanation of how he weaselled out of breaking up a relationship that we barely saw any evidence of inspired that Winger speech about commitment? Really? And Britta's totally OK with it? The stories weren't so lame before.

And you're right about Annie and Shirley. Annie used to have a lot of integrity about work and studying! It's getting really hard to care about her character.

"is related"

I don't even think Big Bang Theory or Modern Family get this weak about basic writing.

xp ime valedictorian has never been "the smartest" or really the most anything, it's always been the person who really wants to be valedictorian and has spent their entire time in school primping up their credentials, so that part makes sense to me

no, valedictorian is the person with the highest gpa? which just sort of happens if you work hard to get good grades?

They keep bringing up that they got a C+ on that last thing.

fuck this show -- *totally* unrealistic portrayal of community college grade point averages

That's not anyone's criticism, though.

This was mostly funny, although it's super telling that Abed impersonating Troy had more chemistry with Britta than actual Troy.

Dean was episode MVP

xp yeah but highest gpa doesn't mean smartest

is that the normal standard/definition for valedictorian? i always thought it involved an application process and stuff

Dean was episode MVP

It was a really good acting performance but I'm pretty burned out on his obsession with Jeff - and this was an especially weird way to express it.

xp yeah but highest gpa doesn't mean smartest

It doesn't have to but Annie's character was previously established as smart, hard-working, and pretty honest.

I swear that episode last night was very reminiscent of an episode of My Little Pony. This is what happens when I watch an episode of Community now.

I had a hamburger the other day and suddenly I'm not cold all the time.

that one was sort of vintage. i'm getting used to laughing once per episode.

Yeah, one real banger per ep this season. Yogurts-burgh is up there, too.

They gave Britta a Kieslowski reference.

Yeah, that was good. She totally Britta'd the pronunciation.

Thought the concept was pretty good but it wasn't funny enough. Also you get the feeling that old Community would have done more to make the Troy and Annie origin stories tie in with the others a bit more.

Also the substitute Pierce was lame.

Incidentally I hope Chang's "they'd give a degree to a monkey" line was foreshadowing the season actually ends with Annie's Boobs graduating from Greendale.

rip

Last night's was...ok. About as decent (if sometimes forced) a wrapup as you could expect at this point. It was written and directed by Harmon-era vets (Ganz and Shapeero), which probably accounts for most of the jokes landing, even if going back to the multiple-timelines well was a bit cheap.

I'm assuming they didn't announce cancellation yesterday because the finale hadn't yet aired, but if this was being renewed it probably would have been announced along with Parks & Rec

This was the dumbest fucking thing

When Abed announced that none of it was real and it was all happening in Jeff's head I went "oh thank god" because I really couldn't take it anymore, and then they had fucking "6 seasons and a movie" written on the chalkboard in the graduation scene and I wanted to scream "nooooooooo"

Watching that felt like being forced to watch how much someone else is enjoying jacking off

6 seasons and a movie is literally the most annoying meme ever propagated via television

otm. Like I love Arrested Development to death, I've rewatched those three seasons over and over so many times it's ridiculous. But there's really no way you could do 6 seasons and a movie of THAT show and not have a ton of duds in there.

I also really like when bands play a song live and it's a minute or 30 seconds long, then they stop and immediately go into the next one, and it's also a minute long.

Haven't watched this ep, but read the AV Club eulogy last night. As long as it makes me laugh as much as usual it's fine w me.

I laughed exactly once

And it's not even that I require every episode of every sitcom to be a nonstop laugh riot; this particular episode was a gigantic pile of irredeemable bullshit top to bottom with little humor, no emotional resonance, and a fuckton of "Ooh look remember this? You liked this! You liked this, too! The Cape, lol! Annie is sexy! Let's get Jeff naked! Wooooooooo oh shit we forgot to write an episode"

It was the Community Farewell Tour. They played all the hits, the performances were spirited, got to see them one last time, and hopefully that's the end of it.

The show went out as the gigantic animated GIF it aspired to be, having abandoned plots and dialogue and likeability for the most part.

Last week's episode ends with Chang signing on for actual friendship and the City College dean laughing maniacally about an alternate plan...except whoops! We only have 30 minutes of season left, so forget you ever saw that. No time to carry that story out.

I really wanted the (likely) final episode to be a good and make me laugh a lot, but tbh it's probably fitting that it was mostly terrible and not very funny.

I really didn't like the sound design for evil Troy's voice.

In retrospect I feel like they rang a bell with Remedial Chaos Theory that ended up destroying the show

I liked that episode but, yeah, I've groaned inwardly any time they referenced it since then.

The descriptions of the last two episodes have not inspired me to check them out.

Bring on an Alison Brie sitcom!

ha ha haaaa they renewed this jfc

and then cancelled Goon? I thought that was a "hit"

I never thought I'd be annoyed by news of a Community renewal, but it should be put down like Old Yeller.

def needs to be taken to the back of the woodshed

My main reason for half-wanting it to be renewed is so that I can still see Yvette Nicole Brown on my tee vee, because I fear she'd be dropped back down to working bit parts and Nickelodeon/Disney shows and I <3 her.

http://hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/nbc-renews-community-for-season-5