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

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.

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(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

Yeah, that was some of the darkest network sitcom plotting ever.

balls/blount otm throughout this thread, but

a) s1 of cheers was by no means its best; a great season, but the show got better as it warmed up, certainly until s3 at least
b) muse sick is an amazing and hella underrated album

also i know i have said it before but srsly himym is so charmless and unfunny, it hurts my soul. and mod fam, a great first season but oh my the steam just evaporated from s2 onwards.

the Simpsons comparison is pretty useful because a lot of Community's much-discussed 'weirdness' (at least in the first 2 seasons) was the kind of extended parody and 4th wall-busting that's been old hat for decades but is generally still more the province of animation.

really the 'weird' narrative around the show is the worst thing to happen to it, since it seems to have made both the fanbase and the creative team extremely self-conscious and try-hard about what kind of hijunks they're willing to try/praise

hijinks

otm

muse sick diss may have been targeted trolling. simpsons influence on live action sitcom has been interesting (and strangely belated right? maybe i'm forgetting some earlier clear examples), w/ community it's pretty much straight genre play and fucking w/ format, w/ parks it's w/ filling out the town w/ characters (pawnee as springfield, perd hapley). stevie sadly otm re: himym, though i think the second season is best. it really has become like watching big bang is for me where i know the show is terrible but i like the cast, though dear god i think the jokes might be funnier on big bang. you might be right re: cheers, i think i'm just amazed that they nailed that show so completely from the get go. i used to think that show was pretty much of uniform greatness throughout its run but having watched some of those early seasons again via netflix i'm pretty strongly in the 'diane/coach years are best' camp. also while the joke-a-second latter day model of cheers (which i still love, don't get me wrong) is still present on tv today that earlier more nuanced character driven model of the first few seasons doesn't really seem to exist on tv now, the closest might be parks and i might be just thinking that cuz i know fire joe morgan dude is a huge cheers fan and even there the only relationship that's been interesting to me (well, besides ron-tammy 2) is the andy-april one (which is almost 'what if woody and carla turned out to be the perfect couple?').

Balls you are good at writing about tv

watching the last community, I kinda wonder if this show is just flying through the simpsons quality arc in lightspeed. "hey, we're a great show...woah, it was fun breaking that rule...HEY, THERE ARE NO RULES WE ARE COMEDY GODS...wait what was our thing again?...hello, new showrunner"

granted, simpsons had a bunch of different showrunners in its heyday, but if harmon really is on the outs I'll pleasantly surprised if s4 doesn't get mike scully-ish

the thing with himym is, i wanted to like it. i like the central concept, the shaggy-dog-story approach, the flashbacks, etc. but i find the characters limp and vile. its funny that there's so much "these characters are horrendous" stuff on the girls thread; i think that show's pretty adept at telegraphing that it thinks, say, the weird booty-call guy and the art museum girl always ragging on her drip-boyfriend are pretty unsympathetic, yet it still gives them a depth that keeps them somewhat compelling. but there's something cold and cynical about himym's characters, and both barney and the main character's poon-hound instincts don't ring true - like, they're out to bed women but not out of any particular joy of conquest, but in a notch-on-the-bedpost way. like in the one where the main guy is sleeping with the cobie smulders character but not in a relationship kind of way, and he keeps boasting about it to barney, who's dying inside because he's secretly i love with her... he keeps going about how often he's boning her, but it just sounds empty and joyless. and maybe that's the point, but i can't really give a shit about those characters, and when stuff happens like the jason segal character thinking his buddy might by in gay-love with him because they had brunch together and saw mamma mia, it just seems so vanilla and small-minded. in the UK, channel 4 has blatantly tried to market it as the next Friends but, say what you like about that show, it was pretty good at giving its characters depth and charisma, at least for the first couple of seasons. the moment when rachel kisses ross after watching the video of their prom night is prime rom-com material imho, and i can't imagine himym ever pulling off a moment like that. the big bang cast do great stuff with tepid material though.
you're dead right about cheers being on the button from day one - the pilot episode is like a masterclass in subtle and entertaining exposition, in how it introduces the characters. there's some real clunkers in that first season, though, and for me the show hits its peak in the intensity of sam & diane's relationship - the moment when she slaps him and he slaps her back is electrifying - and i think frasier really sets the show alight (though his own sitcom soon devolved to tiresome french farce imho). i don't know, i'll fuck with all eleven seasons of cheers tbh, i can't think of a sitcom that developed its characters so well, and stayed so sharp for eleven seasons. rebecca doesn't quite work at first, but the minute she's revealed to be as damaged and broken as the rest of the show's characters, she becomes awesomely entertaining.
that's all ot, obv. community rules though.

maybe with the girls characters, its not that they have a depth, but the show has more of a remove from them than himym. we're not supposed to think its characters are likeable, necessarily - though they aren't irredeemable, as the scene with the dancing to the robyn shows - but himym seems to genuinely think ted (that's his name, ted; such a non-character) are Likeable And Charismatic Characters We Will Identify With, and i think that it fails at this really badly. it also has a tendency to be mawkishly shallow and clumsy a la Scrubs when it tries to play for Serious Moments.

Ted has about as much actual likability and depth as Harry Potter

Ted has always been the weakest link.

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

Well, the Seinfeld people had the motto "no hugging, no learning", right? A big part of Community's appeal is that it is basically the opposite of this. Community's strangeness is of an entirely different sort (and, yes, The Simpsons is a good comparison).

who's the strongest one, though? jason segal is a likeable enough chump, i guess. that's pretty weak sauce though.

(xp)

I think you will find that there's not a lot of Ted love even among fans of HIMYM. He's a pretty universally-acknowledged drip. And I definitely have some reservations about Barney but mostly to the extent that the character's loveable presentation might validate any real-life PUA creepers. But that's a risk you take anytime you present a creep as a sympathetic protagonist in fiction.

I kind of like Ted! Maybe I am also a pretentious saddo douche! His random hookups are supposed to feel empty and joyless. That's the point: he's killing time, trying to fill a void while he's desperately searching for the one (who, until now, was Robin in his heart). With Barney, there definitely was a joy of conquest imo: see all the bizarre challenges he tries out (e.g. convincing a girl that she needs to sleep with him in order to avoid a climate change catastrophe 40 years in the future), his black book and bro code, etc. This has faded though. There was also always an element of desperation to his character too.

(xposts)

Well, yeah, Barney is genuinely evil.

Also, Jason Segal's character is not supposed to be sophisticated and broad-minded! He is a superstitious Midwestern rube.

true, but i think the thing w/barney is that he *isn't partic sympathetic: he's priapist-as-one-note-joke, like the doctor in scrubs who never met a dick joke he couldn't drop into inappropriate conversation.

okay i need to stop ragging himym, this is the thread for gr80 and whiney to high-five as shows that commit the unforgivable sin of being liked by ilx's cornier fux have their future's threatened.