R.I.P. 30 ROCK R.I.P COMMUNITY R.I.P. PARKS & REC

(Admittedly, I never got the Mackenzie Brothers until I moved to Saskatchewan.)

I was just trying to think of reasons why this show lacks the mass appeal of Seinfeld. I think we're actually in agreement there though.

not too sound like a jerk bc i really like community but maybe one reason is that Seinfeld was just a better show in almost every way, and a more groundbreaking show when it aired. community is wonderful imho, but there's just no comparison.

Apples and oranges, really, but we've had that extensive discussion before. For reasons that continue to baffle me, as their similarities seem to begin and end with their shared status as NBC sitcoms.

No, I don't think the two shows are similar at all. I was only comparing them in terms of popular appeal and only because someone mentioned Seinfeld earlier.

(I'm just watching the most recent Community btw and, while it doesn't seem like their best, I don't see how someone could get this without having see the previous episode.)

"just watching... now btw and..."

not to reopen a whole other conversation but community + seinfeld are similar enough (american network sitcoms around the turn of the century) that any comparison seems fair to me.

Well, then, I guess I just disagree that Community is obviously a worse-crafted or less innovative show.

Also, I finished watching. There are references to about half of s2 in this episode! And even stuff like Chang's pre-teen army only makes sense if you saw the episode when it was introduced. I don't see how someone who just dropped in would get as much out of this as someone who follows the show.

well this was a fake clip show.

I think after the last hiatus community just sort of gave up on accessibility (and on a lengthy future).

Ignoring just the basic differences in plot and intentions, they're very different sitcoms. With the very loose exception of season 4, Seinfeld episodes largely stood on their own and could be comprehended by a casual viewer and made the transition to the syndicated shuffle play super easily, as opposed to Community's more insular, more long-form narrative niche. And saying that they're similar because they were both released around the turn of the century ignores the vast changes that have taken place in (network) television in the past twenty years. Networks could probably air nothing else but Mama's Famly reruns if they had a hit on par with Seinfeld in its prime.

well this was a fake clip show.

Remember how Seinfeld didn't do those?

certainly in terms of human history, compared to the differences between community and whatever its greek antecedent in form was, the differences between seinfeld and community are negligible. like yes, one is multi-camera and one is single-camera. one is more heavily serialized. but ultimately the level of serialized episodes in your sitcom in 2012 is indicative of a particular choice and direction that either succeeds in capturing a broad audience or fails to do so. to then claim that they're not being fairly compared bc those very differences put them in separate categories just indicates that you are so attached to that particular stylistic choice that you can't otherwise explain why one succeeds and the other fails.

tldr version: lol ur trying to lawyer me out of comparing two sitcoms to each other, that's silly

You can compare two sitcoms all the live-long day. It's fun to do! Your initial assertion, though, was that the respective levels of success attained by Seinfeld and Community are strongly tied to their level of quality (surely you can acknowledge that quality rarely has anything to do with the success of a television show?) or the extent to which they're breaking new ground. I'm not saying those aren't factors, but my argument is simply that accessibility (particularly wrt casual viewers) and the different eras in which the shows were produced has much more to do with their respective levels of success.

(surely you can acknowledge that quality rarely has anything to do with the success of a network television show?)

Fixed.

yeah if anyone wants to actually argue that community is actually much weirder in comparison to 30 rock than seinfeld was in comparison to friends or cheers feel free since that was the actual comparison. if someone wants to respond that the reason seinfeld was a massive hit (bigger than friends, not as big as cosby) was that it came up in a time when nbc could make a hit out of anything by putting it on thursday (and moving there was when seinfeld REALLY became the huge ratings monster) and that because it was so successful and had built that success on nurturing creative shows that it could allow seinfeld to find its voice and then its audience; seinfeld gestation born from enviroment of success, community gestation born from enviroment of failure. i love community, it's first season was fantastic, this current season is great and i can tell already is gonna be crazily underrated when ppl badmouth it all out of proportion in the future, but only that second season is holy shit hall of fame level greatness. if i was gonna list the sitcoms that led to a show like community even being able to exist on network tv seinfeld would be #2 and simpsons would be #1 and both of those shows had SEVERAL seasons of that holy shit hall of fame caliber, by their third seasons they were just getting warmed up.

jesus christ where is that 'words you clearly can't spell' thread. environment environment environment. fucking hell.

Jerry Seinfeld was also way popular as a stand up years before the sitcom.

i sort of feel like community and -meta is in this thing where it has to keep outdoing itself just like in comic books the superhero keeps getting more powerful and fighting more powerful villains and the whole thing gets more and more cosmic until eventually somebody needs to push a reset switch. All the things that make it interesting also make it unsustainable.

yeah if anyone wants to actually argue that community is actually much weirder in comparison to 30 rock than seinfeld was in comparison to friends or cheers feel free since that was the actual comparison.

Yeah, Community feels much more of a kind with 30 Rock than Seinfeld did with Friends or Cheers.

Realizing (especially after reading Bill Carter's books) I'd totally read a book analyzing the last 30 years of NBC's Thursday night line-up (cue 'lol tv biz nerd' mockery).

curious what would win a 'current actual hit network sitcoms' poll on ilx? himym out of inertia and memories? how sizeable is the contingent of ppl who'll admit that big bang can deliver an actual laugh (albeit clumsily and crassly) plus the cast is clearly talented enough to deserve better than chuck lorre? modern family (although talk about mystifying declines, a show like that should be able to run thru seven seasons before they show hints of running out of ideas)? would the brits put glee over the top? i've never seen glee but it's a sitcom right? or at least it's half an hour long? sweet jesus would new girl win?

Glee is an hour so really it's a musical/comedy.

xposts galore

yeah that second season every week it was like community was rewriting the rules and you can only sustain that for so long. even the beatles only did it for a couple of years before they went 'fuck it let's just do stuff like 'get back''.

gukbe i want to thank you for just completely confirming finally i will never ever watch an episode of glee.

almost tempted to start that poll just to see if seward and shipley do some sort of carville/begala tag team campaign for the middle

What I really liked about community was when it was a pretty decent straightforward sitcom that every now and then would just cut loose. Now it's this whole *thing*. It's like Harmon wanted to make a cult show all along and was just pretending to be accessible for a bit, and now with every bit of rope he gets, he just uses it to tie the knot tighter. Which makes it sound like I don't enjoy community, which isn't true. But I think they could have cut back on the injokiness and the -meta without killing the show.

yeah that second season every week it was like community was rewriting the rules and you can only sustain that for so long. even the beatles only did it for a couple of years before they went 'fuck it let's just do stuff like 'get back''.

Agreed. The thing about the recent response, though, is that it's been all, "'Get Back' sucks!". And I'm like, no, it actually doesn't, it's just that you've been to the heart of the crab nebula and now you're no longer content with, like, flowers and pretty clouds and shit, dealwithit.gif.

yeah, i mean paradigms of human memory probably made me laugh the hardest and blew my mind the most but i think collaborative calligraphy, the bottle episode, was the best episode this show has had (well, maybe the first paintball) and beyond abed noting it was a bottle episode (and that was much an expression of how his character deals w/ stuff as an injoke) there wasn't much meta about it though it did require a knowledge of the characters, their relationships, etc.

yeah this season hasn't had as many amazing episodes, the efforts at serialization haven't really paid off, the relationships feel clumsier, and the trips back to the well have probably been ill-advised but ppl are acting like it's the tv falloff equivalent of muse sick n hour mess age or something, which it's nowhere near being. i'm trying to remember if ilx went overboard decrying the relative lameness of mr f and the charlize theron plotline on arrested development back in the day.

yeah if anyone wants to actually argue that community is actually much weirder in comparison to 30 rock than seinfeld was in comparison to friends or cheers feel free since that was the actual comparison.

I don't remember late 80s/early 90s TV well enough to make a comparison but I'll bite: what is there in 30 Rock that could have led you to expect something like "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas"? The closest comparison I could think of would be something like the musical episode of Buffy.

off the top of my head the closest 30 rock parallel to abed's uncontrollable xmas would be maybe the episode where kenneth saw everybody in muppet form? what's the friends parallel to bizarro jerry, george, and kramer?

Yeah, there's a certain 'anything goes', 'expect the unexpected' quality to 30 Rock and Community. Most of the '90s NBC sitcoms were pretty firmly grounded in reality, but Seinfeld went in some wacked directions at times.

And they were way ahead of the game with the entire meta season devoted to getting Jerry's Jerry sitcom off the ground.

Ha, well, I told you I don't remember early 90s TV well enough to make that comparison. And apparently I don't know 30 Rock as well as I thought because I don't remember a Muppet episode either! I guess I can't really engage very well in a TV criticism debate. Ask me something about Bartok.

2xpost

(But I have to say that I'm much more willing to buy the argument that there may have actually been a comparable 30 Rock episode than I am to buy that Community is less innovative just because "there's a certain 'anything goes', 'expect the unexpected' quality to 30 Rock and Community".)

People be losing track of arguments itt. For the sake of review, balls' comment and my response:

yeah if anyone wants to actually argue that community is actually much weirder in comparison to 30 rock than seinfeld was in comparison to friends or cheers feel free since that was the actual comparison.

Yeah, Community feels much more of a kind with 30 Rock than Seinfeld did with Friends or Cheers.

No one, afaict, said anything impugning Community's level of innovation. I'd argue that it's hugely innovative, even in ways hardly anyone talks about (yet).

OK, that makes sense. Fair enough.

i'm definitely not arguing community is less innovative, that second season was crazy innovative and daring imo. in terms of 'quality' i might have it neck and neck w/ that concurrent season of parks, second season of 30 rock, first two seasons of arrested development, but in terms of innovation it's doing things i didn't really think tv sitcoms could do, nevermind network sitcoms, that season is streets ahead. every week i pretty much knew what to expect from parks, i pretty much never knew what to expect from community and even when i thought i did - pics of characters in pulp fiction dress leak for example - it would turn out to be a riff on my dinner w/ andre. i can remember the week paradigms of human memory ran 30 rock ran an actual clip show and as clip shows go it was good but coming that same night it was like watching the monkees w/ jimi hendrix opening. i love the monkees but how you gonna follow jimi hendrix?

It occurs to me that it feels as if 30 Rock and Community have had some weird entropic relationship with respect to quality over the past two seasons. Last season, it was like Community was totally Dracula-ing the lifeblood out of a 30 Rock that seemed increasingly on its last legs, while this season it's like they've reached this harmonious symbiosis where neither is thriving mightily at the expense of the other. Just in time for NBC to dump industrial waste into their ecosystem.

Abed's Christmas was cool, but I did see a few pomo claymation Xmas specials around the same time. I think Its Always Sunny had one.

lol that thing where my eyes sometimes can't distinguish between an 'm' and an 'r' and an 'n' next to each other happened w/ yr post and i thought you were bragging about about having seen a few porno claymation xmas specials around that time

lol, that's exactly what i thought - "what? did someone make a thematic followup to Let My Puppets Come?"

as well as I thought because I don't remember a Muppet episode either!

it was about 20 seconds of one episode, not a whole episode

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

not exactly on the level of abed's christmas, no.

ohhh that fey muppet walk always gets me

Thing is, Community isn't actually that much weirder than The Simpsons or South Park or other shows that have pulled massive ratings and have managed to get away with doing all sorts of weird shit because they're animated. Maybe people a lot of viewers are put off because they come to it expecting something it usually isn't trying to be, I dunno.

simpsons and south park are both cartoons; also simpsons didn't get truly weird until later (season 6?)

seems like shows that are weird off the bat don't succeed? seinfeld's first few seasons are pretty tame, it wasn't until season 4 imo that it really got remotely alienating

was green acres weird off the bat or steady ratcheting up? i'm guessing at first it was somewhat more standard fish out of water stuff and it wasn't until later that it became absurdist (and even then it was just w/ jokes, not things that would assault the viewer like story structure, etc).

ohhh that fey muppet walk always gets me

Seinfeld was basically an insane show, like I saw some of the arc where susan dies from licking envelelops and no one cares, just remarkably brutal

Community is tame by comparison