Community, the tv show

i mean come on, the point of magnitude is that he's a walking catchphrase. how does his existence remotely undercut the idea that characters were more developed and nuanced in the past?

Bitching that a character seems like a broad sketch on a show full of broad sketch characters and using as your main example a character who made several appearances over a protracted story line is making a poor argument IMO.

This isn't even getting into the issue of any minority outside of the study group being marginally drawn at best, with both Troy and Shirley (esp. Shirley) going through patches where the writers have no idea of what to do with them and Abed basically being a walking AV Club commenter 50% of the time. Despite this, I still find shit in the show to make me laugh, usually due to the chemistry between 6/7 of the study group.

The season opener was okayish and the Halloween episode was bordering on terrible; since then, the show has stabilized somewhat and given me solid laughs. I guess that makes me Cap'n Save-A-Show.

i've said it before, but i totally understand if someone who watchs a lot of sitcoms still thinks this is a show worth watching. there's good actors and decent gags. it's needling people over their word choice when trying to describe a quality drop-off and then, when they do, bringing up a bit character that was clearly meta commentary ON thin character work as if he wasn't, is what made me say "capn save-a-show"

i haven't seen the new episode, but i can see how a broad bit re: jeff's family would be disappointing considering the seasons of build-up to it. And if Vaughn feels like a poor comparison point, I thought Malcolm Jamal-Warner's first appearance was pretty classic as far as the introduction of family goes.

This just isn't true though, most of the minor characters had enough distinctive characteristics to make them interesting and enjoyable even they were only in an episode or a couple of scenes, I could easily have used the example of the Seize The Day guy, or the pottery teacher.

It's not even that the brother was a broad sketch character, it's that he's a lazily conceived and unfunny broad sketch character. I get the feeling you're playing down the distinctiveness of older characters (even some of the leads) in order to make the point that there's not much difference in how S4 handles things, which just isn't true. The old Community would never have handled such a pivotal moment in the life of its central character in such a tossed off way.

(xpost to DJP)

on the one hand i think you're right. on the other, i don't actually think the show is that much poorer for it.

this thread is going to straight-up "worked for me" vs "didn't work for me" and "not what it was" vs "still best thing on thursdays at 8" until they pull the plug, isn't it?

that's how all these popular sitcom threads go more or less

i'm probably done with it since the quality is just high enough that i can't hate-watch it like smash. "well that was an underwhelming resolution, but i liked when troy did that thing." Considering the flaws of season 3 it's not even necessarily worse than it would have been if Dan Harmon was watching it from afar while focusing on a new show. it's just clear that nobody on board is going to be surprising us. it's a skeleton crew until the lease runs out.

"Community" was never the best thing on Thursdays at 8

bbt4life

actually what about the end of s1, before they moved bbt - in early 2010 did you prefer vampire diaries, bones, flashforward or survivor?

The dramatic elements of most Community eps are really low on the chain of appreciation, personally. I enjoy the jokes and the performances of the main actors, and if it's a high-concept ep, the stylistic choices. I can appreciate the dramatic Learning Moments they pretty much put into every ep (aching piano soundtrack and all) because i think of it more as another element of TV sitcom meta. Character arcs over a single ep are important mainly as a framing device, and it is important to keep the balance between that and the comedy. Sometimes the show is so focused on getting to that Learning Moment that the other elements are ignored. And you end up with something like the last episode.

Did Harmon take a bunch of the writing staff too? Maybe there is something more to his leaving.

dude reportedly rewrote every episode and was heavily involved in shaping plots in the writing room. so basically every moment of s1-3 had his strong stamp of approval on it

the only two holdovers from seasons 2 & 3 that i'm aware of were andy bobrow and megan ganz, on a staff of about probably a dozen.

the thing about tv writing credits is that while the one credited did most of the grunt-work, usually the plots are beat out by committee and then the crew fine-tunes the script after. not every show-runner is as dictatorial as harmon reportedly was, but the only people with more power and authority over the direction and content of the show is the studio and network (and maybe a big name exec producer).

also acc to wikipedia The end of the third season also marks several other departures including executive producers Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, writer/producer Chris McKenna, actor/writer Dino Stamatopoulos, and frequent episode directors and executive producers Anthony and Joe Russo - that's a massive change at the top.

dead show walking anyway but ganz split for modern family almost as soon as this season wrapped. kudos to modern family for recognizing talent (and i'm reminded of when one of the modern family guys was gushing at harmon on twitter a few seasons back and he replied 'hey thanks, maybe you guys can give me a job in a few months'), glad ganz ended up w/ a show that could very plausibly still be on the air in ten years.

yeah other than bobrow I don't think there was anyone left from season 1 on the staff this year. xp

Modern Family is already 4 seasons deep, right? You think it could run for 14?

alot of season 1 staff left after season 1 right - couldn't deal w/ harmon's hours, work ethic, whatever?

yeah he lost people en masse every year, but those were usually staff writers, not executive producers and supervising producers and their go-to directors (the russo's deserve A LOT of credit for the show's visual makeup / dealing with shooting episodes with constant script changes or just missing acts while Harmon freaked out rewriting things during shooting). You can't really fix having everybody who lived and breathed the show splitting, whereas you can survive losing people for whom the show is just a job.

i mean it's very very unlikely it runs for 14 but there's nobody on it young enough to need to jump ship for movie stardom (the kids are another story but you can always just have them go to college out of state or get married and move like w/ charlene tilton), it's not a concept that necessitates a short run (which is what made it so weird that they seemed to started running out of ideas by season two), and it's one of the few genuine hits on tv right it'll only be more so in a few years when two and a half men and possibly ncis is gone (though for real ncis could totally still be on in ten years right?). it's a big cast so maybe salary issues could impede it down the line but they already hit that speed bump last year.

russos were gone anyway, maybe there was a chance they could've somehow fit in an episode somewhere for old times sake or just to be near alison brie but their involvement was gonna be way way down no matter what.

how i met your mother ratings were higher than ever last year (dunno about this season), in part because syndication is making more people aware it even exists, and i think that's going to inspire networks to let shows last longer assuming they're syndication-likely and cost-effective. so a show like modern family could definitely last a long, long time.

and concept doesn't seem to be much of a hurdle anyway - ted's described nearly a decade of uncle barney's sex life to his kids!

yeah himym was something i was thinking specifically of, that if this thing w/ that concept could last and get milked for ten years than something as loose as 'three families' could be mined forever.

ok so i was checking how old ed o'neill was, to see if he could open a spin-off bar in 2022, and discovered this fascinating tidbit: After being introduced to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu by his friend writer/director John Milius, O'Neill has trained in the martial art for 22 years under the mentoring of Rorion Gracie. In December 2007, O'Neill received his black belt. In the 2011 TV documentary I Am Bruce Lee, O'Neill states that he considers getting his black belt "the greatest achievement of my life, apart from my children."

Wholly unrelated to Community, but hopefully appreciable to Community fans.

when read in Abed's voice, yes.

...British people don't say "co-ed", ESPECIALLY fusty old Oxford history professors. It's kind of annoying because they totally nailed the Britishisms with Professor Ian Duncan (RIP), even when they were lol-Britishisms, so this just smacks of laziness in the writing.

Ha, when rewatching s2 at my highly demanding temp placement, I noticed that Duncan does refer to Britta and Annie as "coeds" in "The Psychology of Letting Go".

Also, I basically decided in the end that it would hurt too much to keep trying to watch this season. Revisiting the awesomeness of s2 only confirms this.

we've really stopped caring, eh? i just watched the latest one. it was alright i suppose.

i'm actually curious about the chang storyline.

meh. shrug.

yeah this has been just barely better than the worst-case scenario for new guys taking this show over.

might've laughed once. but i thought the concept was dumb from the start so it never had much of a chance with me.

Only laffs for me were the Garrett stedicam bit and Troy constantly contradicting Annie. But man, this does not stand up to repeated viewing at all.

Clay and VG otm.

it just feels like they're on a hamster wheel of recreating old episode variations with flat obvious jokes

I mean, I'm mindful that I might be holding up the earlier seasons up a bit to highly in my mind but I don't think it's just me?

nah I was watching through the first three seasons recently with these episodes interjecting and side by side comparisons don't lie. Although season 3 was a bigger decline than I had noted at the time.

There were a few things I liked about this episode but really it was just a much less coherent and well-worked version of the previous documentary-style episodes - not just not nearly as funny but a bit of a tonal mess.

season was certainly in a certain amount of decline (partly via the audience coming to expect a certain amount of ambition that is always conducive to a sitcom's weekly cycle) but it also had some very high highs and there's at least a couple episodes i'd nominate for the series' top 10 (chaos theory, the apocalypse now ep., pillows and blankets, maybe the law and order one but it's pretty boilerplate). Season 3 is mostly just inconsistent. But the season 2 --> season 3 drop is just apples and oranges to 3 ---> this year.

certainly very certain certain whatever

it just feels like they're on a hamster wheel of recreating old episode variations with flat obvious jokes

I mean, I'm mindful that I might be holding up the earlier seasons up a bit to highly in my mind but I don't think it's just me?

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, March 17, 2013 6:12 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Naw, it's definitely not just you. I used to watch Community with incredibly high expectations and, in one way or another, they were either met or exceeded. It feels too easy and unfair to pin the decline on the new showrunners, especially since a lot of writers left before Harmon did (also, Donald Glover is doing some serious heavy lifting this season -- his readings of even the hackiest lines are funny). But even in the worst of the season 3 episodes there was an undercurrent of batshittery that kept us engaged/interested. Said undercurrent is gone.

there was an element of danger in the weaker episodes always like "is this just going to go somewhere wholely else four minutes in and i didn't see it coming"? and i've now given up on ever expecting that, so even if the material is the same, the experience of watching it is very different.

but on the other hand, once you accept it as a less daring show, its still pretty decent.

it feels a lot more telegraphed? idk. talking about comedy is weird because it's so subjective and shit just is funny or it isn't, but for me this season is like when Mum would buy home-brand supermarket versions of cereal i loved and get mad when I wouldn't eat it saying 'they're just the same'. CHOCO POPS ARE NOT COCO PUFFS

yeah to me it comes down to, like, these characters are pretty fine-tuned and often delicate. Britta being the worst takes more than someone saying every episode "Britta, you're the worst." Abed being Abed takes a little more than "[television reference]" + "Eeeeeeeeeeee". I'm not the first to make this observation but the comparisons to mediocre fanfic are otm.

I feel like the Abed character has suffered the most in this season. Just not funny anymore.

definitely

everyone will roll their eyes @ this but: abed was based on a dude that Harmon knew irl so with Harmon gone maybe the ~heart~ of him gets lost somehow? speculating

the "real Abed" has been showing up on Harmontown the last few weeks

i need to listen to that

There was an interesting discussion a few weeks ago about the Abed auditions. Kumail Nanjiani, who auditioned for the part and didn't get it, was there. Everyone seemed to think Danny Pudi is a genius actor, and the character was refashioned around him.