Community, the tv show

i think there should be a rule that people refer to television episodes "friends"-style ('that one where they...') rather than use their actual titles cuz i never know those.

Some fall-off, not unsalvageable. They should have picked a funnier subject than Biology.

Ha, I forgot that they were taking biology together! Has that class even come up since the first couple of episodes?

im probably the 20th person to say this in this thread but besides the occasionally funny pun they pretty much ruined chang eh

I think it was more "lack of self-consciousness is attractive".

i was talking more about the one-nice-text-from-nice-guy-troy-immediately-turns-britta-off thing and then annie becoming a writer mouthpiece even though she's in love with jeff.

anyway does anyone else just feel like the hiatus has had a negative effect on the episodes? harmon was talking about how there's a definite difference in tone because the staff was all bummed. imo these post-hiatus eps just haven't been as good. your agreement/disagreement probably hinges on whether or not you enjoyed the pillow fight civil war (it didn't do much for me).

imo last night was way way better than the other episodes since they came back (which i wasn't gonna hate on itt because this thread had enough drama but really some of those were pretty depressing)

i just watched the ken burns one, it was pretty blah i thought aside from some good jokes. like ppl said upthread not going FULL ken burns style kinda ruined the joke.

oh boy you are about to be the brunt of a slew of sarcastic posts from a one mr. deric haircare

You'll be very pleased to know that I've been effectively dissuaded from ever again commenting on this show on ILX. Congratulations!

we broke u

"Digital Exploration of Interior Design" (the 1984 one) was up there with their best. Otherwise, some dude OTM.

i feel like i missed that one what happened in it

the episode names are so obnoxious

s1ocki: It's the one where a person is enabled to represent the 'collective humanity' of Subway Inc, enrols as a student, and then has a relationship with Britta? I think it's still up on the Citytv site.

(Yeah, it is.)

(It's better than that description sounds.)

x-post can we just have some kind of shorthand for this kind of talk so we don't have to read the 200th iteration of it? Like NAGAS2: Not as good as Season 2.

i did see that one, it was ok

Wait a minute, didn't they film all these, along with the other ones, before the hiatus? I can't really think of a way to find this out but I was under the impression they write and shoot these all in one block.

I was under the impression the hiatus was pretty much a scheduling thing. Does anyone here work in TV? How is a show like this shot? I imagine they shot this entire season last fall before airing the first ep.

only part of the last episode that bugged me was pierce/chang. This is the second time they've had a non diagetic song play while someone gets pointlessly emotional with Chang (remember Britta and "Hello"?) and it's just beneath them.

xp harmon said that the eps we saw after the hiatus were all written and filmed after it had started. unless i'm misremembering.

I'm a big Ken Jeong defendant but it feels like the writers have no sense of Chang's character beyond incoherent wackiness at this point, would not be upset if they got rid of him.

lol defender, I mean

usually network television starts shooting about 6-8 weeks before the first episode airs. Show is usually 3-4 episodes "ahead" of the airing. So the first 4 or so of these episodes would have been in the can before the hiatus was announced. iirc.

I wonder how much they can really build Chang's character, given that of all of them, he's the one most likely to need to drop out at a second's notice to go and be in a film somewhere. Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit and actually they've just run out of ideas for him, but they don't want to get rid of him because he's a marquee name.

that might be true, although i have less of a problem with them developing the character than other people. he was funniest as a teacher but i don't begrudge them for trying other things. if the rumors that he's going to die this season are true, hopefully he'll have a funny death. otherwise, i hope they find some way to make him a teacher again.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2f8jtf0TC1qe44s7o1_500.jpg

Chang was the best thing about the show in S1 and was very funny in S2 especially when he was rooming with Jeff but his character isn't working at the moment because he by and large isn't interacting with the study group at all. There was an absolute shitload of comic mileage in Pierce and Chang being BFFs and they kind of sidelined it.

harmon said that the eps we saw after the hiatus were all written and filmed after it had started. unless i'm misremembering.

Ganz and Brie and Brown and Jacobs have all said that almost all of the post-hiatus episodes were made while they were on hiatus - everyone has talked about how it was odd to be making the show in a feedback vacuum, when they're used to be getting instant responses on twitter and AV Club comment sections and the like.

Yes, writing staffs on sitcoms create jokes. "Fans" of the sticom laugh, "everyone else" doesn't.

I guess there are some shows where the "fans" are just lazily watching cuz it's the best thing on at that hour.

That explains most of the CBS comedies tbh

this was my favourite episode since they came back, probably i hate women

i like that someone bothered to diagram the ending gag

not a brilliant episode, but there were some great touches and lines, and it wasn't terrible in any way.

i need to stop reading ilx tv threads, they seem populated with dudes who are itching to be the first person who noticed when a TV show 'jumped the shark' and its affecting the discourse negatively.

also deric, i love you, but you ARE ljagger's american cousin, right?

Yeah how you guys can muster the enthusiasm to have this mindnumbingly tedious "has this show got worse or is it just me?" argument every week is beyond me. FWIW the run of episodes from Elementary Chaos Theory up until Christmas is one of the best in the show's history.

I quite liked this as a group dynamics episode actually, there was something refreshing about seeing them all just sitting round the study room table, which we haven't seen in a while, with the Dean coming in wearing a stupid outfit with an irrelevant announcement. Also I felt sorry for Troy at the end.

Kinda think that Vice-Dean Laybourne needs to come face-to-face with Jeff and Britta at some point, given that Britta could probably get Troy into the air conditioning repair school at this point. Also I had the batshit notion the other day that the Vice-Dean might actually be Jeff's dad, given that they are kind of the big and small parallel villains of this series.

Enjoyed that one; plenty of good gags. My mileage on Community really depends on the joke quality/quantity, rather than whether it's a conceptual ep or not. And also whether Troy gets something fun to do.

FWIW I feel like the show's been super inconsistent since the animated episode last season, but it's still one of my favourite things on. This ambulance-chasing need to be the first fan to proclaim a shark-jump is super tiresome.

fwiw this is the FIRST time i've stopped in on this thread to have that mindnumbingly tedious argument

The posts of people saying "Community jumped the shark" is outnumbered by the posts of people saying "Why are all these people saying this show jumped the shark?" by at least 20 to 1. 10 to 1 if you count anybody saying anything bad about an episode.

Community could get worse, but truly jumping the shark - producing episodes that have NOTHING to do with what people watch the show for - would be pretty hard. Whether the show gets too caught up in character romance, or devolves to Family Guy parody, people do watch the show for both shipping and parody.

i need to stop reading ilx tv threads, they seem populated with dudes who are itching to be the first person who noticed when a TV show 'jumped the shark' and its affecting the discourse negatively.

― I accidentally sonned your dome (stevie), Sunday, April 15, 2012 4:41 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah as much as people around here decry the new school of TV fanboy culture, "their first album was better" syndrome manifesting itself in TV convos is even worse.

ehh who cares

sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse, esp in tv, ppl will always be around to point that out, that shouldnt preclude any discussion imho

Community has gotten worse, then better, then worse, then better so many times it's pretty unlucrative to keep charting it. It's not like on one particular week everyone involved with the show is going to stop knowing how to write a joke. But will they get tired and uninspired from time to time? Of course.

Some of us don't see it that way. To me, it does seem that there has been a drop in quality this season that has gotten worse since the mid-season break. Even some of the stronger recent episodes are missing some of what drew me to the show previously. I have the DVDs of s1 and watched them quite recently so I don't think it's just nostalgia.

It's not like on one particular week everyone involved with the show is going to stop knowing how to write a joke. But will they get tired and uninspired from time to time? Of course.

You've never known e.g. of a band that got worse over time even though they still remembered how to play their instruments?

But a band suddenly starts to suck from the beginning of recording one album until the end? Also, a band with like 25 equally good songwriters? Never heard of such a thing.

Also, the ssn 3 episodes are funnier to me than the ssn 1 ones--so this might be a subjective thing. Anyone who says the craft was there in ssns 1 & 2 but not in ssn 3 is I think a bit on their own planet.

oh god guys i'm sorry i gave you the "first album" metaphor to play with, i should've known it'd be dangerous

Of course my whole point was that comparing such things is dumb, so lump me into the idiocy.

imo the craft and the humor are still there as ever, but what i loved about the show early on was the light touch with the meta stuff and the format-breaking, it's kinda slowly gone from self-aware to self-conscious in a way that makes what once felt playful and effortless into something a little more transparently willful

the thing to keep in mind in all of these discussions is that this is an American sitcom on a major network. As banal as that fact is--what standard are you holding this show to?
Are there any British sitcoms that have cranked out 75 great episodes in 3 years' time? Or is there more than one (P&R) American one that has done anything of similar quality?

I just think the standards here are unreasonably high. If the slight lag in quality affects your enjoyment so much, just stop watching.