Community, the tv show

feel like this was a missed opportunity for chang, but i don't really care

probably would've been overkill to tangle up his "not really a cop" jokes with all the other ones going on in the episode. he got to be in those opening credits, though!

So I guess Starburns is the death that was mentioned earlier in the season and Ken Jeong is around for a while yet?

I laughed at Chang standing next to Michael K Williams' desk, just dead-eyed, slack-jawed, and slightly out of focus, during the court scenes, but I don't think it was supposed to be funny.

There's a significant sorta-spoiler in that EW piece, re: how Starburns' death affects the rest of the season.

Said spoiler was revealed in the post-hiatus teaser montage, though.

"Sorry about my partner. He's been on edge since we switched."

Had to watch this again tonight.

laughed at Chang standing next to Michael K Williams' desk, just dead-eyed, slack-jawed, and slightly out of focus, during the court scenes, but I don't think it was supposed to be funny.

I thought it was, so there

the cast mentioned during the paleyfest panel that ken jeong will do that dead-eyed, protruding-tongue thing during scenes to try and get the other actors to break. they call it "chang-tongue."

I was pretty happy to see Williams and Todd reappear in this episode. I always really enjoy the episodes where the minor characters get a load of play, but I think I would probably have got a load more out of this one had I ever actually seen Law & Order.

Also I hope Neil gets to get it on with Vicky. That guy deserves a break.

"a man's got to have a code"!!

yeah it was a bit on the nose but i still laughed pretty hard

I liked the Dean going "awesome" on our behalf. Also the Dean with the hoola-hoop for no apparent reason. Why can't they give Chang some of those fantastic background moments?

otm

HIS NAME WAS ALEX

It was cute and had good bits, but that ep kinda bummed me out. Until this, every break from reality was explained in some way - the christmas claymation one was from Abed's perspective, etc. This is as close as they've come to that Family Guy parody thing, with no one ever acknowledging that reality has been warped. When Troy referenced that he'd "switched" roles with Abed, Annie and Jeff never acknowledged everyone was acting like cops and lawyers or why. When there were easy L&O gags - Annie withdrawing her slams - it was just that - L&O gags. No character development, layers, anything. Which isn't bad for 30 minutes TV, but well below the bar they've set.

You'd like the latest AV Club review.

How is this episode any different from any of the paintball episodes in that regard?

those were rather heightened, and, however barely, explained by the chaotic situation. It's also insane to believe Troy and Abed made a Ken Burns documentary of their pillow fight, but I appreciate that the show didn't just show us a Ken Burns doc of it with no explanation

we have law and order fridays where I work, I don't know why it needs to be set up.

also the paintball ones totally advanced the characters, climaxed season-long plot threads like Jeff and Britta's will-they-won't-they in the first and Pierce's freakout in the second.

again, I'm not saying this wasn't fun, just relatively thin

they are so loud sometimes that i was on the phone and during a particularly loud running stomping battle upstairs, the person i was talking to was like wow, i can hear that.

oops wrong thread

No character development, layers, anything.

Less of these things in Community please. Wasn't my fave episode, possibly because I've never watched L&O, but my preferred ones are just highly accomplished and ludicrously developed riffs on pop culture tropes using the characters who I enjoy but don't really want to see 'develop'. My less preferred are the ones about how they all love each other.

I'm not against 'character development' per se at all, but in community it always seems for the sake of it, at the expense of the exquisite laughs the show is often capable of producing.

This advanced Starburns, and Todd! Also, I thought the troy/abed as detectives thing needed no particular explanation. I mean they love to geek out and play pop-culture roles. So they were clearly psyched to step into l&o characters while investigating the potato thing. I thought this was made pretty evident with their arguments over who got to make the quip, and who got to say "why do they always run". Everything was pretty well explained, I thought.

My less preferred are the ones about how they all love each other.

I hate it when it's over the top, but I love it when it's subtle...like the way Britta looked at Troy at the end of the carney episode.

No character development, layers, anything.

I'd say Starburns' character developed quite dramatically, although his development from this point forward may be somewhat limited.

troy and abed are going to grow a killer stash with the ashes of starburns and when they smoke it he'll appear and help them cheat on tests.

There's not really much that needs explaining, Troy and Abed were doing what Troy and Abed usually do, Jeff is a lawyer anyway and Annie is a ridiculous obsessive tryhard. Any break from reality no matter how heightened is usually grounded by a scene where Jeff is looking at his Blackberry looking bored and occasionally being sarcastic.

I really enjoyed Professor Kane in this one and I hadn't realised I'd missed this show being essentially grounded in the classroom. Maybe they should have picked an actor who could do more than a handful of eps a season, but on the other hand Omar dude.

i'll admit I was already on alert for an episode where they'd just slot the characters in a format, tell jokes, and leave it at that. Slapping on the visual/audio signifiers of L&O non-diagetically just feels easier, less impressive than what they normally do homage-wise.

And yeah, it's not that they haven't done similar things before. I didn't scream "oh hell no!" when someone started singing behind Chang in the paintball episode, but there's a difference between bringing Scarface/John Woo touches out of nowhere in a surreal paintball warzone and going DUN DUN all through an episode.

Def not complaining about the Todd stuff, though

The thing is community doesn't tie itself to some formalistic "mockumentary" pretense or whatever to hang its premise off of. If the characters act out of character, that's one thing, but there's nothing more or less "correct" or "realistic" about the cameras and theme songs and sound effects acting out of character.

i thought this was a little funnier than the ken burns one but that's probably because i've seen at least two law and order episodes

If you scrubbed the L&Oisms out of this week's episode and just left it as proper Greendale shenanigans, not much would have changed imo. The L&O thing was just a bone thrown to the audience.

is there an original of 'why do they always have to run', or is it along the lines of 'let's do the show right here'

clover otm

xp they really did use that line in L&O many times. i'm sure everyone who played a cop used it at least once, especially anyone slotted into the "younger cop" role

didn't Herc or Carver use it on The Wire before or am i misremembering? but ya, it's a pretty common cop show trope.

ya, i seem to remember it as a Wire line.

Matt and s. clover OTM. If anything, this seemed like less of a leap to me than e.g. the chicken finger Mafia episode. Prof Kane told Annie she needed to provide evidence to back up her hypothesis, Shirley said she watched a lot of crime shows, Troy and Abed did their thing. People even kept reminding them that they weren't cops and that the classroom wasn't a courtroom.

I also thought that this episode did show (further) development in Jeff's character: where previously, he would have BSed his way to winning and nailing Todd, now he actually wanted to find justice and truth, if only to preserve Annie. (You could even compare this to the s1 episode where he pleaded Britta's insanity to get her out of a penalty for cheating on a test.)

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Dudes, Michael Ironside!

Also, something Dan said twitched something in my head, and whilst searching I stumbled upon this:

http://www.umberhulk.com/

wtf. Someone bought a domain name and made a site just to be a character card of a d&d monster.

The jump to the L&O format didn't bother me at all, as the writers clearly like to do genre exercises. Abed & Troy immediately slotting into the roles of cops b/v it was fun reminds me a lot of the detective/film noir ep of the Venture Brothers, where everyone around Hank was clearly relishing helping him play in this genre universe.

Also, yeah, I like it when they take established characters & demonstrate how they fit into the trappings & tropes of some pop cultural flavor they'd like to dabble in.

This was kind of on the same tip as the Tarantino episode, except it was based on source material I care about.

lol, I'd forgotten that was also the Dinner With Andre episode. I need to go back and watch the prev seasons.