Community, the tv show

who knew everyone felt that way about Childish Gambino

great table read. like the P&R special, they've pried open my wallet

I look forward to his surprise stand-up special dropping in 2025.

Atlanta is so good he gets a free pass from me on like four more poor Prince impersonation singles.

look the kid’s brilliant, it doesnt really matter if you didnt dig his music

he could have been the next Jordan Peele

JP never topped the Pazz and Jop singles poll, every kid's dream

only managed to tie for #9 in Reissues in 1986

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/bigmouth/images/c/c9/Screenshot_47.png

we are rewatching S1 and there’s so many genuinely great moments in the early episodes

i forgot about Abed’s first movie “Six Candles” in episode 3 or 4? amazing

it's funny because you'd never guess the show would get as zany as it did in the first season. it was never a grounded show and the characters and dialogue were sharp from the beginning but it was less set-piecey.

one of my fav eps is still the one where Pierce joins Vaughn's band.

We've been watching it from the beginning, me and a daughter, and it has aged really, really well.

a friend of mine is watching for the first time and his only word of complaint so far is that it "isn't believable." i've assured him that it only gets more realistic as it moves along.

lol

Ha, I'm glad people are coming around to my pov on s1. I think Abed's movie was as early as ep 2?

Arrested Development just doesn’t have realistic family dynamics. 2/10 would not watch again

been watching through S3 occasionally for a few months; gotta hurry up to get to the table-read ep.

just watched that podcast episode #5 with surprise guest alison brie, pretty incredible

It's wonderful how well they all get along and how funny they are all together. They never even get around to talking about "Community." Or anything, really!

this is on Netflix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juk9K1LaxP4

Still my favourite Dean Pelton moment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvzE64A28NI

ROFL

stoked to not rewatch

lol yes, as amazing as i remember it

We've been watching this, and we are a season or two beyond the D&D episode that apparently just got pulled for Chang in blackface. Which is weird to me, because I thought the joke was that he was all-in on OTT cosplay for a mundane D&D game, and that his black skin/white hair Dark Elf was just him emulating make-up from something like the Lord of the Rings movies. I had no idea that a Dark Elf (with black skin and white hair) was an actual D&D thing, but having learned that ... I still felt like the the gag was just him fully committing to a D&D game that all the rest of the crew were half-assing, and that it wasn't blackface, per se, it was just his face painted black. And he had white hair. Because he was a Dark Elf, which I now learn that in D&D lore has pitch black skin and white hair. Is that considered controversial? It's too bad, it's a really good episode. I mean, there's a lot more winking, ironic racism that is in this show - and dozens of shows - in service of a gag. Like, the Pierce character is nothing but racist/sexist/homophobic/xenophobic gags (with him always the butt of the joke, afaict), so why draw the line at Chang? Oh well. I guess it's good that Hollywood is at least aware and making an effort.

Yeah, and Shirley even described his costume as a hate crime. I was joking last week that I wanted to make sure my copy was stable in case it got pulled and now it happened?

With 30 Rock, there are actually WERE things I found questionable or possibly offensive, none of which were addressed by pulling the blackface episodes.

This, though, is easily one of the least racist shows I've ever seen on network TV. The cast and writing staff were diverse, the characters weren't just stereotypes, the bigotry was always ridiculed. Plus the AD&D episode was one of their best.

Were there actually any complaints or protests about this?

I don't think so? When she called it a hate crime I thought it was just supposed to be hyperbole, a little bit of lampshading about it coming dangerously close to being legit offensive, but also like calling a bad movie a crime against humanity or something.

And Chang being oblivious to it even possibly being offensive akin to David Cross in "Arrested Development" painting himself blue and being oblivious to all the "blue himself" jokes.

Yeah, I don't disagree. I just meant that it showed that the writers of the episode were clearly not clueless themselves and were pointing out the complexities of the issue in the dialogue of the show AND being funny. I doubt that anyone took the message that blackface minstrelsy/appropriation is OK or was laughing at the expense of African-Americans.

Iirc, Pierce also called Chang "Al Jolson" in that ep?

Oh god, I read too many of these books as a kid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzt_Do'Urden

I never really watched this show, but the idea of a blackface controversy over Drizzt cosplay (either in the show or irl) is funny.

xpost See, I think that's clever, because Chang wasn't being intentionally racist (well, I guess "Dark Elf" is a pretend race), but Shirley and Pierce recognized it as problematic, for different reasons that were nonetheless still in character. Good show!

These censorships are getting stupider too fast to even process: Hulu have pulled a Golden Girls episode where two of the golden girls got mud masks at a day spa

I do believe in taking down actual problematic material, but a lot of these recent moves seem performative, as if they're doing it so they're seen as doing something.

I prefer the content note approach

So you all know that the reason drow elves are dark-skinned is because their goddess corrupted them with evil, right?

I am not saying they should have pulled the episode (in fact, I think pulling it is incredibly fucking dumb) but the source material it's using has a bunch of shady shit in it, which is why Wizards of the Coast recently announced they were dropping the entire concept of "good races" and "evil races". The humor presented in the episode is explicit naming of a subtext running through the backstory of the drow.

I only learned that this week from my D&D friends!

Yeah, I had no idea. For pseudo-blackface, that's a pretty subtle sitcom gag.

Given the in-show reactions to Chang's costume, I think pulling the episode is beyond cowardly. It's the exact same impulse that leads to the conclusion that "colorblindness" is desired and aspirational. Shirley's hate crime line is one of my favorites of the entire show and that episode is probably my favorite of the entire series; more importantly, even in the context of the show and the subliminal shitty stuff in the D&D source material, IT WASN'T BLACKFACE and had absolutely nothing to do with minstrelized representations of Black people AND was used in the show to both obliquely and directly criticize said representations. Removing it is incredibly fucking stupid.

I don't care if you're black or white or yellow or green or elf ...

Thank you falettinme be mice elf

I'd never seen anything past season 3, and oof, the first few episodes of season 4 are indeed as totally, noticeably off and/or bad as I'd heard, enough so that my daughter was getting kind of angry and I actually googled "can I skip season 4 of Community?"

Yeah just skip the whole thing. Beginning of Season 5 is really great but there's a noticeable drop-off after Troy leaves.

"Herstory of Dance" was OK iirc. Otherwise, s4 was basically unwatchable imo. S5 was a little better in comparison but still didn't do much for me; the premise of the show had p much fallen apart by then.

was the giancarlo esposito video game episode in s4? i remember liking that at the time

We are about halfway through S2 on our rewatch, that season is just fire after fire after fire.

xpost No, that one is in season 3, I think.

Yeah, "Digital Estate Planning", the video game ep, is s3. S4 was done without Harmon and was not even really the same show.

I don't remember 4 being quite as bad as everyone says. It was a bit weak, but so were seasons 5 and 6; still worthwhile.