Community, the tv show

lol i was just razzing ya. It is funny! I always forget that Annie is meant to be so young, her & Britta def feel the same age to me except when its specifically called out

and when annie’s age WAS called out it was usually in reference to Jeff & then i’d get that jarring UGH WHAT moment

She was on tv as Trudy Campbell at the same time so I definitely never thought of her as an actual teenager (she also didn't look it, no matter how infantilizing her wardrobe was). Which was fine because I couldn't imagine romantic scenes between Jeff and someone that actually looks like a teen, yucky

They kind of covered for her appearance by saying she'd had extensive reconstructive plastic surgery after going through a plate glass window at a party whilst high.

Didn't watch Mad Men, so didn't have a problem with Annie's on-screen age. OTOH they were sexualizing her even in season 1, tons of Jeff/Annie jokes on that wavelength

Debate episode is one of my favourites.

Just heard “Evil Woman” in the supermarket and immediately thought of the debate episode.

so good! i love that one too

HE WAS HORNY, SO HE DROPPED HIM. Man is evil!

Re: F&G music- Wikipedia sez some of the songs were replaced with generic music when reruns ran on Fox Family

I watched the S6 “We gave a dog a degree?” episodd and found it p funny esp everyone saying that line allthe time, it cracked me up

S6 so far not too bad! It’s not early season giddy heights but still v enjoyable & often funny.

at this point I’m thrilled at anything that is an improvement on the nadir of the puppet episode, my bar is maybe too low idk

oh and the s6 episode where Dean does virtual reality filing was also *hilarious*

Yeah, for me it's:
S2>S3>S1/S6>>S5>>>>>>>>>>S4

S2>S1>S3>>S6>S5

nah

I'd rate S1 higher if it didn't take so long for them to de-center Jeff and figure out who Troy and Britta were. Granted, to me the show's peak is the trampoline story.

rewatching s2 and it's striking what an utter over-the-top asshole pierce becomes. (the d&d game and the one where he pretends he's dying, specifically.) and not in a funny way or a way that can be reconciled at the end by hopeful music and shirley and annie going 'aww'

sort of wonder if the writers made pierce worse than necessary because everyone hated chevy? i don't feel like he needed to be this awful simply for comedic effect

By S2 they were largely writing Pierce's dialogue by putting things that Chevy actually said to his coworkers into the scripts. The plots were probably similarly motivated.

Even at the time the wheelchair felt like a device to physically keep Chevy apart from the rest of the cast as much as possible and he has way fewer scenes when he's physically in the room with them.

Even some of the study room scenes tend to film Pierce separately and on his own. Like you can just see in all those scenes where they're all supposed to be round the table together and Chase just isn't there except when he absolutely needs to be.

Granted, to me the show's peak is the trampoline story.

I've been rewatching the DVDs with the commentaries, and someone (I think McHale) talks about how Donald Glover and Matt Walsh (janitor who made the secret trampoline garden) would do hilarious improvs with each other. When he shows the swastika tattoo, "It's going to be a maze" was improvised. An alternate line for that reveal, which was Donald's idea, was, "It's the original U2 logo."

Ha!!

We made it up to the episode where Troy leaves to go sailing on Pierce's yacht last night, Season 5 was like an immediate uptick again in quality after S4.

Being able to binge these seasons made me realize just how much darker S5 in, and I don't just mean the tone. The color is more muted and everything seems filmed with less lighting or something. I saw a few reddit threads that mentioned it was due to the lower budgets by that point, but that seems to be a weird specific place for the budget to impact.

Back half of S6 is proving to be weird as hell

There was a great ep on Grifting 101 with Matt Berry guest starring, super funny

But we just watched Giant Hand/RV episode which was about as bad as you can get without puppets + singing

I saw a few reddit threads that mentioned it was due to the lower budgets by that point, but that seems to be a weird specific place for the budget to impact.

Production design overall takes huge steps down as the series progresses. It's probably that they were no longer lighting to make sure 43 background jokes were clearly visible on a fifth rewatch, than that they couldn't afford the same bulbs as before.

(Harmon paid props and design staff overtime out of his own pocket on the first two seasons, partly out of appreciation for the incredibly great job they were doing, and largely because his own constant rewriting and rewriting of the scripts meant that they weren't able to do such a great job on regular schedules. In the third year, he stopped doing this and bought a house instead.)

Interesting, that makes sense about the background stuff. Had no idea he paid so much out of pocket.

But we just watched Giant Hand/RV episode which was about as bad as you can get without puppets + singing

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, July 29, 2020 1:05 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

That was where I bailed. I was pretty hopeful up to that point, but this episode just felt so desperate. I never saw any of S6 after that.

the next episode is the final paintball episode though!

yes we watched that last night & it was fun!

Wait, there’s a paintball in season 6?! OK, will revisit.

I’m about halfway through rewatching season 5, and it’s much better than I remember. Jonathan Banks’ reaction to the Meowmeowbeenz presentation is one of my favorite moments of the whole series. And the darkness pointed out upthread is only in the first episode and the Ass Crack Bandit episode.

We just got the Ass Crack episode, was ok.

I ended up stopping my rewatch at the My Dinner With Abed episode, I remember being...not confused...but taken aback by it. Obviously it's very tonally different from the average episode, but also iirc the previews of the episode were focused on all the Pulp Fiction costumes and all the online chatter was dedicated to theories re: what kind of Tarantino homage Dan Harmon was doing to do. Then of course you watch the ep and realize the episode has absolutely nothing to do with Pulp Fiction. Am I making that up or does anyone remember that?

Anyway all that said just makes me think about what the show would have been like if Dan Harmon had direct access to the viewership through twitter...an important part of being self-aware is making sure that everyone else is aware of how self-aware you are.

Am I making that up or does anyone remember that?

I honestly have no memory of those promos, so I went into the episode blind. I believe I shouted out loud, "THEY'RE DOING MY DINNER WITH ANDRE?!" I mean, of all the referencey stuff the show had done up to that point, this was not an expected reference. iirc, Danny Pudi had neither seen nor heard of the film, so he had to watch it a couple of times in preparation.

But TV promos were notoriously misleading. The promos for the Simpsons episode where Bleeding Gums Murphy dies were, "BART GOES TO THE E.R.!" (implying some kind of E.R. crossover).

Harmon did have twitter, but was always very self-aware of the difference between a general audience, dedicated viewers, and the kind of microniche of super-dedicated fans who track down offscreen communication from the uncredited writer of a TV show.

He talked about twitter all the time on Harmontown

he incorporated the term "streets ahead" in an early episode because some Tweeter claimed that Modern Family was "streets ahead" of his "meta-bullshit", so of course he had Pearce trying to coin the term.

I know episode promos are either misleading or totally uninformative (shout out to the Mad Men previews) but they really seemed intent on playing up the Pulp Fiction angle. I guess as I watch less and less TV in the traditional week to week format I forgot that preview promos used to be pretty disconnected from the material.

“Critical Film Studies” has been sold as “the Pulp Fiction episode” of Community. Even NBC, which often doesn’t promote the show all that heavily, has run many, many promo slots for the show playing up the crazy costumes and situations involved in the Pulp Fiction-styled B-plot.

(I tried expanding the comments in this post to find old discussion too and I broke firefox so never mind)

all the online chatter was dedicated to theories re: what kind of Tarantino homage Dan Harmon was doing to do

although it may have come from dumb decision-making in the promo dept, preserving the surprise of the Dinner With Andre-ing is a great result of this tactic

That's very true! That's why it made me wonder about how else the show could have played with/subverted expectations if Dan had been showrunner and on contemporary Twitter (and not 2009-era Twitter which hardly counts) at the same time.

Considering the swirling cesspool that 98% of Twitter is right now, I can only imagine how much worse it would have made the show. Harmon would have gotten in huge arguments with fans eight episodes in and/or canceled in real time for the Chang Drow gag and never would have even finished the first season, imo.

(yes I know the D&D episode was in season two, but still...)

I think he would have gotten through season 1 but by season 2 he and the show would be literally and figuratively cancelled for sure

almost suffocated watching danny pudi's nic cage impressions

I still think the (first season?) "Goldbluming" joke is one of the funniest things ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv6mA0qyOo4

Well there ya go

.@alisonbrie @kenjeong @dannypudi @YNB @donaldglover @GillianA @peacock @SonyTV @CommunityTV pic.twitter.com/ynVqgaPuQD

— Joel McHale (@joelmchale) September 30, 2022

Amusing oops

Lmao just realized he tagged Gillian Anderson instead of Gillian Jacobs

— Preeti Chhibber 🔜 NYCC (@runwithskizzers) September 30, 2022

Hooray!

Will Chevy return tho?

The lack of tag says it all I think.

Ha, good point Ned!

six seasons and no Chevy!

happy birthday jesus

MERRY HAPPY