Community

Okay, dudes who made the Scott Pilgrim game - I want to play that. Now, please. I will give to you some of my money.

Some great failure analysis of the situation here.

Just caught up on the triple episode from this week via Amazon. Those owned. Thanks Dan Harmon. Sorry to hear about the rest of this shit.

Ken Levine (the first one, who was a successful screenwriter - not the second one who quit that to make things named Shock) reflects on Dan Harmon. I must admit, I agree with him. I do worry that his decision to sound off publicly about all this might hurt him in the future.

Nothing really earth shattering or surprising about this, but it just reminds you that you can't always take actors statements to the press at face value...

Leaked NBC Memo to the Cast & Crew:

Every single sentence there starts with a real answer, and then ends with how exciting it is to still be a TV show.

they ever get tired of looking forward?

That should have been in the memo.


Do you ever get tired of looking forward?
We're not a part of the thought process, only regurgitation, but we're really looking forward to the next question we can't answer.

So the very fact that the talking points memo leaked seems to point to the idea that the cast isn't very happy with the talking points.

Eh, at worst it means that one person who received it wasn't happy with it. Even then it could also just mean that one person who received it is a gossip. I wouldn't read too much into the fact that it was leaked.

The content of the memo, however, makes it hard to believe that any thinking adult would be happy with it.

That's not necessarily a safe assumption. There are hell of people that would have had their hands on that.

It's also worth remembering that Dan Harmon is kind of a cock, so it wouldn't be terribly shocking if nobody loved him. Granted, he would have tended to abuse his writers more than his actors if the stories are true, but still. If I were an actor on the show, I'm not sure how much I'd even care, unless I were Dani Pudi, because I'm pretty sure that nobody else is going to be able to write Abed right. We'll see what happens if they go to Comic-Con this year.

If you like Happy Endings give "New Girl" a chance. I'm tired of happy endings, although still find it funny on occasion.

I'd like Happy Endings from the New Girl

Went to a High school graduation today and the Valedictorian quoted Dean Pelton's speech from the first episode of Community

Geez. And here I thought Alison Brie cannot get any sexier.

It will return .... in February.

You mean "October 19th"

Unsubscribing from this thread since the show got canceled last year and replaced with a different show with the same name and actors and premise.

Not interested in checking out a new show with the same actors?

Chevy Chase is gone from the show effective immediately. He said he wasn't fired nor quit but rather he and studio mutually agreed it was for the best he left.

Eh... Chase was also tremendous. Cleese would have been great too I'm sure, but I don't think he necessarily would have made for a better show overall.

OMG NEW EPIC TRAILER OMG

So Thursday is October 19th!!!

I wonder how they'll explain Pierce leaving Community?

I'm excited that the show is coming back in spite of the all the Hunger Deans promotion. It just feels like they are trying too hard to prove it's still "Community." How many flicks did they reference visually just in the trailer alone?

Well, i'm sort of interested. Hesitant, but interested.

The National Post has released Twitter avatars to celebrate Community's return this Thursday!

Hahahaha, the Jeff one is PERFECT.

They won't. Episodes shoot out of order, and by the time he walked, they already had the finale filmed. Any explanation will wait for next season, which is far from a foregone conclusion at this point.

Assuming there's a next season with NBC... :/

So something a little worrying that I noticed in the preview photos that have been released is a picture with Jeff holding a green paintball pistol. Looks like the new showrunners don't agree with Abed's claim that paintball was "played out" last season.

Still, excited for tomorrow. I watched all three seasons over about a week and a half last month, having not seen the show before now. Just in time!

Given that it's Community, though, that just might be a quick throwaway gag or something. LOOK, I'M TRYING TO STAY POSITIVE HERE.

My wife and I also blew through all three seasons in the past couple of weeks, cementing my opinion that Community is one of the greatest television comedies of all time. The only things that I think are comparable, sitcom-wise, are WKRP In Cincinnati and Spaced.

Seinfeld?

I'm not as much of a Seinfeld fan as many people are. Don't get me wrong, Seinfeld had plenty of funny episodes, but as a whole I think it really takes a nosedive in the last couple of seasons.

It's an interesting comparison, though. Like Community, Seinfeld took great pleasure in skewering sitcom conventions and providing meta-commentary. But the central funny idea of Seinfeld - i.e. a group of essentially unlikable people who never learn anything and never grow as people - is also what prevents me from really embracing it. (I think the real heir to the Seinfeld throne is 30 Rock, another show that I can intellectually recognize as being funny but I don't actually enjoy watching all that much. Although I realize I'm in a comedy-nerd minority on that one.)

That's why Community strikes me as being more in the lineage of WKRP and Spaced, both shows that were comfortable with being surreal or silly but also clearly liked their own characters. WKRP even took great pains to humanize characters like Herb Tarlek when other shows (especially other sitcoms of the era) would be happy to just keep him as an irritating foil. Community is crazy and goofy and meta and all that, but at the centre there's the idea that people can come together to actually help each other. Like a community, in other words.

Honestly, that's one of the things that sorta gets under my skin about the crazy outpouring of love for 30 Rock in the recent weeks. Sure, I get that people love 30 Rock, but to me there's just no comparison between that show and Parks & Recreation and Community, two of the best sitcoms I've ever seen in my entire life. (Parks & Rec especially doesn't get the credit I think it deserves for subverting the normal, annoying tropes of sitcoms.)

The New York Times recommends you stop watching at the end of Season 3.

I suspected as much... but then again... I do like the silly fluff sitcoms like Happy Endings. So I might watch the post-modern Friend-ish version of Community for a season.
I'll just tell myself its a new sitcom that happens to be starring all the same people as my old favorite sitcom, Community.