Community, the tv show

alison brie's career ends, except in hentai

i think she'll do fine.

chevrolet chase becomes the guy "you love to hate" on the next celeb apprentice

alison brie's career ends, except in hentai

Isn't she still on Mad Men? (Haven't seen the current season yet.)

She is, and, if the previews are to be believed, shows up in the next episode.

gillian carves out a career playing the love interest in every boring indie romcom, never gets to play a character that isn't boring and just a generic stand-in for "desirable woman" in scripts written by guys that go out of their way to avoid making her the MPDG and instead just write her so she gets occasionally angry

xp have never watched an episode of mad men, was under the impression her character isn't really central to it

but yeah i was joking about that, but i seriously have no idea what she'll do after this

but but but

yvette goes back to drake and josh, av club starts reviewing drake and josh

alison brie has been doing movies, she's in "the five year engagement" right now

Brie is a total pro, she'll be just fine post-community. XP

I wish Gillian would dye her hair back to red

Episodes I would like: Abed narrates an Inspector Spacetime episode, while in his mini-dreamatorium. M*A*S*H homage. Something involving Jeff, Britta, and "we were on a break." Cassavetes. Entourage. The West Wing. Something olympics themed. A folk rock group. Asphalt.

many xps - McHale's standup was very mediocre.

Already did a M*A*S*H thing with Jeff being the editor of the paper and Abed being his Radar, right?

Did anyone else watch "That's My Bush"? Remember the last episode where it spins off into like Cheers and Jeffersons mini-episodes?

Allison Brie is on today's Comedy Bang Bang with Bob Odenkirk and Jason Mantzoukas

My biggest Community fear is that it will become nothing but wacky pop culture references, a la Family Guy. Which, if I were honest, I've caught glimmers of throughout its run, albeit extremely well handled.

with SAUL GOODMAN and Jason Mantzoukas!

the show didn't have to create a false dichotomy of 'weird' and 'normal' episodes (especially since i kind of suspect that the theme/parody episodes would probably be some of the most accessible ones, i.e. seeing the right episode first could easily hook a Law & Order or zombie movie buff), but by overdosing on those episodes and basically doing the Treehouse of Horror once or twice a month they painted themselves into that corner where that's the expectation the show has to serve now, as much as being funny or true to the characters.

but i'd argue that at their best they delivered 'theme' episodes that still pushed the characters further along...

obviously they've often succeeded on all 3 fronts, i'm just saying

http://a1.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/147/9b6a2ac2d05548b5b3b044574d818577/l.jpg

Allison Brie is on today's Comedy Bang Bang with Bob Odenkirk and Jason Mantzoukas

holy shit this is the greatest news I've heard all week. i love jason mantzoukas so much

xpost -- hahaha

what IS that thing next to martin sheen? or is that emilio estevez?

It's Joel McHale and Chevrolet Chase (during his period of heavy steroid abuse), I believe.

Chevrolet Chase is still the funniest fucking thing

Ha ha that's neither Martin nor Emilio

He's Joe Estevez, Soul Taker extraordinaire.

Some pretty good discussion about the role of a showrunner in this A.V. Club article, specifically comparing the Community situation with previous instances of central people leaving/being fired from other shows.

good article. kinda surprised they didn't mention the whole deal with Sorkin, which was pretty extreme (he wrote the vast majority of almost every single script during his West Wing run, in additional to all the other crazy responsibilities)

http://sakarisingh.deviantart.com/art/Community-World-Map-302989170

that was a good a.v. club article, thank you!!!

they alluded to sorkin, right, without getting into it.

VanDerWerff knows about Sorkin and all that, and I think he might have addressed it in the previous thing he wrote about Harmon leaving.

oh, ok. i tend to wonder about those personalities in general. don't know much about the Moonlighting guy, besides the obvious changes to the show on screen.

or even someone like Pamela Fryman, who's credited as director on about 90% of all How I Met Your Mother episodes, certainly has a hand in that show's consistent style and tone, if not the quality of the scripts which seem to vary wildly from season to season despite having the same showrunners/creators since its inception

i found it interesting that the simpsons changes showrunners every few years. i wouldn't credit any aspect of the show to this. it's gone downhill, but so have a lot of shows with more consistent personnel.

uh, disagree. I blame Mike Scully and solo Al Jean, who have each run the show for several mediocre to shitty years, for a lot of that show's downfall. I would agree, however, that comparing the Oakley-Weinstein years to the Mirkin Years to the Jean-Reiss years, you see a show that entered distinct yet consistently strong eras under different leaders

i just meant that i wouldn't NECESSARILY blame a shifting roster of showrunners for a show's decline. don't know the specifics re. the simpsons.

a lot of these shows (the office, simpsons) that lose their show runners replace them with people who have been working on the show for years. even the guy who took over for sorkin had been a west wing producer since the beginning. I'm trying to come up with another show that had a complete creative turn-over.

not a complete turnover but the closest example to that I can think of is maybe Heroes? iirc NBC didn't get rid of its creator, but did fire its two showrunners, after ratings plummeted between the first and third seasons, and then fired another producer a few months after that.

They then brought back in Bryan Fuller (creator of critically-beloved, audience-kryptonite shows like Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me) who had written for the show in season 1 - a lot of fans believed his scripts were the reason the show was so strong in the beginning. At this point though he had just come off the end of Pushing Daisies and hadn't worked on Heroes for two years. While he wasn't credited as a showrunner, he ended up taking over most of the main writing duties for the end of s3 and the start of s4.

I think he even managed to push the show's ratings up slightly when he came back - but the damage was done by then.

the Simpsons case seems like a particular kind of extreme to me, in that the decline was so rapid despite what looks like very few major changes in creative personnel. Listening to the DVD commentaries it's pretty clear that while the first few groups of showrunners had very strong and clear ideas about what they wanted the show to be, Mike Scully let it be much more of a free-for-all, and the result there is deviating towards all of the show's worst tendencies. I don't know how much we can parallel that with Community - which seems to me to already be looser with any kind of overarching principles - but I can certainly imagine a caricature version of Community getting very bad very quick.

actually Bryan Fuller would prob be the best possible person to take over Community, and i'm totally not kidding

He would be great!

iirc Frank Darabont was showrunner and head writer on and developer of the Walking Dead TV adaptation, with Kirkman writing one episode; at the end of S1 Darabont fired the entire writing staff and planned to write S2 with freelancers; then six months later, with this new work perhaps not having eventuated, AMC fired Darabont.

actually Bryan Fuller would prob be the best possible person to take over Community, and i'm totally not kidding

Would support this 100%. It would still likely be a different show with a different sensibility, but it's at least a sensibility I trust.

i think his ear for dialogue and characterization and his appreciation of genre conventions could easily be tuned to the show's sensibility

iirc the Walking Dead "fired the entire writing staff" thing turned out to be greatly exaggerated

the Simpsons case seems like a particular kind of extreme to me, in that the decline was so rapid despite what looks like very few major changes in creative personnel.

It may, perhaps, be instructive to read the list of Simpsons showrunners below, keeping in mind both the show's original "two-season showrunner" formula and the point at which The Simpsons began its decline:

• Season 1–2: Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, & Sam Simon
• Season 3–4: Al Jean & Mike Reiss
• Season 5–6: David Mirkin
• Season 7–8: Bill Oakley & Josh Weinstein
• Season 9–12: Mike Scully
• Season 13–present: Al Jean