This, along with your love of WKRP, indicates that you are obviously a stone cold dumb dumb. I believe that StGabe proved beyond a shadow of a doubt years ago that nothing on TV before 2000 is as good as any given episode of My Name is Earl, Heroes or Reaper. Why, next you'll be suggesting that MASH is a better comedic drama than Chuck! Also, Homicide doesn't hold up! SO THERE! you know i'd still put dick van dyke up against any goddam sitcom on these days
AV Club and Alan Sepinwall agree that it's not the same show. I'll still watch and I'm sure I'll laugh, even if it never reaches the same level as the Harmon years.
/sigh This more than anything else makes me seriously doubt that the new Community will even be passable. I'll watch it because I think I have the constitution to not let it taint my memories (I watched three episodes of Scrubs: Medical School after all) and I'm definitely considering it a brand new show that is tangentially related to the old one, but my hopes are way down low at this point.
Well of course it isn't the same show. I fully expect some changes. That doesn't mean it can't still be a perfectly cromulent sitcom. The big questions I have about the season are: 1. So, how bad did these guys fuck up Abed? Because Harmon wrote pretty much all of him. 2. If all 13 are in the can, did Guarascio and Port go into the season with the expectation that they would miss renewal and actually end things, or will this end up being a sad coda that just kind of trails off at the...... 3. How many fucking is involved in the season? Harmon shied away from that because I'm pretty sure he has no clue how to write it and finds it boring. Troy and Britta are a given, but I do wonder what they'll do vis a vis Annie and Jeff. Numbers-wise, it's pretty simple. Community has to do at least as well as 30 Rock. Minimum. It doesn't make that target and it's done. If it does, then it goes into contention. We know Sony likes to make their shows so cheap that the network can't help but buy them, and losing Chase will actually help in that regard, but NBC wants to do a different kind of show than this is. Really, unless it turns around and triples its viewership on the harshest night of the weak with huge competition from CBS, I don't see it getting more than a short order for a midseason replacement run next year, but we'll just have to see where it goes.
That's... pretty much unforgivable. It's not like they replaced the entire cast and crew, surely somebody other than Harmon can remember previous episodes. Or just watch the episode they're making reference to.
Probably. Luckily, the finale of Original Community very much does have the feel of a series finale, so whatever happens with this one we have our "real" ending.
Ooooooooof. That was not good. Not good at all. So I guess the answer to "What did Dan Harmon bring to Community?" was "Everything".
It felt like a late in the run of Scrubs episode, where the wheels started coming off. I'll still watch it, though, because there were plenty of uneven episodes in the past.
Not as uneven as that was, in my opinion. I hope they settle into a better rhythm in later episodes, because everything about it was off - the pacing, the editing, the writing, everything. What a huge bummer. Well, at least Parks & Rec and the two Kroll Shows I had stacked on my DVR were funny.
Ehhhh....it's not that terrible. Some of the pacing was a little off, and the multiple shots at different points in time for the same action sequence (Britta and Troy in the fountain), was very Happy Endings, which feels weird. It's a little bit bothersome that the show has conveniently forgotten that the first and second season were consecutive semesters and they shouldn't be in the fourth year at this point, but whatever. The biggest problem is that it feels right now as though it's trying very hard to be something, which isn't going to work. Guarascio and Port need to make it their show. If people don't like it, then whatever, but this really needs to treat itself like a new series and not as though they're trying to ape the prior design, because that won't work very well. As the first episode of a new comedy, I'd maybe give it a C, because it has that same interfered-with feeling that lots of comedies that get pushed around by outside details get. It could still work out, but.....ehhh. However, on the plus side, it looks like the show is seriously going to treat this like a last season, which is good, because I really, seriously don't think it's going another year after this.
This isn't the same show. It can't be. I didn't even laugh once. It felt like everything was forced, everyone was trying too hard, and the camera angles just... no. NO. Fuck this shit, I'm taking my ball and going home (i.e. canceling this... whatever it is from my DVR).
It wasn't complete dreck, but it did make me wonder when all my other favorite shows start back up (Mad Men, ~Walking Dead, Gravity Falls). When they do start up, and if Community continues this way, I'll probably take a pass on the rest of the episodes unless I hear something outstanding about it.
Actually you're mistaken. Each season has been a full year with first day, holidays and winter break. So they are correctly in the fourth year now. But none of that matters if the season continues on like this. I don't even know what to make of the show now. It was just downright awful. I hope it gets better but I just don't see it.
Yah - this was definitely off. Everything felt very forced and basically as if the people writing it saw all the wacky hijinks that from the Harmon years and just did MOAR OF THAT without any understanding of what actually made it work.
I haven't seen it, and don't really plan on watching the new season. But season 3 was going in the "awkwardly forced wacky hijinks" route already.
Hurm. I could have sworn that wasn't the case. Perhaps I simply do not know how community college works, as there was no such thing at my university as a course that covered two semesters. That was, to some extent, on purpose. When it became obvious that he could not possibly continue to operate the television show, Sorkin sort of deliberately shit the bed and left everything in a state that was not particularly conducive to a smooth transition of power. For a guy with a little bit of a reputation, it was one of his least fine hours. I'm not saying that it would have been just fine if he hadn't exploded his own show on the way out the door, but it sure didn't help matters.
Was there such a thing as a course that only lasted one week? Because the show has an awful lot of those.
Didn't they take Spanish 1 and then Spanish 2, or whatever their equivalents are at this community college?
This is exactly what was strange about making the reference - I have no idea how many people they think would catch it, and there's nothing particularly clever or funny about it even if you do except in the most self-depreciating way. The obvious reference is the musical cue they end the episode on - that discordant violin sound is same music Fringe uses to mean that something is afoot before they cut to commercial or at the end of a cliffhanger-type episode. A character everybody has seemingly forgotten randomly appearing to a stranger soaking wet at the end of an episode is how one of the early S4 Fringe episodes ended as well, and that was the season in Fringe that most fans would rather forget because they'd just erased the timeline of the past 3 years so it never happened and all the relationships between all the characters you liked were reset to square one, because they otherwise had no idea where to go after the way they had finished S3. So maybe that's the point? But wtf, why would they be saying, "Hey, this is going to be like that really shitty, barely renewed, and almost certainly final season of that other critically acclaimed/low ratings show where we drove the fucker off a cliff." I mean, could be apt, but is it some sort of inside joke?
I did watch Fringe, but I didn't take it as a Fringe reference. I don't think any of the references in this episode were subtle, which was part of the problem.
The new writers are geniuses. Pierce represents the new writer's room, given seven red balls and desperately trying to wring a decent joke out of them through the entire episode. In the end, all we got was "GAY BALLS!" It's a joke on us. Right? Please?
A small part of me hopes that they knock this season out of the park, and then we can have people coming back during episode 10 or whatever being like "God, I knew it was going to be amazing when they did" the above. And we can all point and shake our heads at them for being so blatantly stupid. It wasn't a bad episode. It just wasn't a good episode.
Alright I'm watching this now. I was all set to come in here and trash it, but it's not... that bad. I've gotten a few chuckles out of it so far. I'm about halfway in and so far I haven't wanted to disembowel myself, which is what I was more or less expecting. So maybe my expectations were low enough after all. ...and as I was typing this, the splash fight in the wishing well happened. Sigh. Edit: ok, I'm laughing at Fred Willard. If liking Fred Willard in everything is wrong, I don't want to be right. Edit: come on, Leonard dancing with Annie Kim? That's adorable. Final edit: alright finished. Not that bad, I don't think. I kind of wish it was less like the old show, because the stuff I liked was the more standard sitcom character work and the attempts at Harmonesque grand parodies felt too forced and obvious (although the fake terrible sitcom did make me laugh several times). Some characters are written better than others; probably the dean was the best and Pierce the worst. Hopefully that smooths out. Anyway on balance it's a hell of a lot less good than a different show I used to watch that was also called Community, but also somewhat better than certain other shows that I still watch, which means I'll keep watching. One caveat: if this pulls a Scrubs: Medical School and puts all the best ideas they had for the whole season into the premiere, it's going to be rough sledding from here on out. But hopefully that won't happen.
That's how I felt watching Season 3 and why I wasn't as outraged as others when Harmon was fired. So honestly I was kind of looking forward to this season to see what they would bring and how they would wrap it up. Instead they tried to make a show that they think the original audience loved but instead fell flat. As for them taking Spanish, I took it as them taking Spanish 1 and 2 in the first year and getting all of their foreign language requirement out of the way. And the community college I went to back in the day did have a bunch of short term classes you could sign up for mid-semester so it's not unheard of.
So, bad/good news, I guess, depending on whether you think that the perfectly adequate thing called Community that happened was worse than Hitler or the greatest thing since sliced bread: ratings are up. Kind of significantly.
I don't know, I think this was a pretty clever episode playing off everyone's fears that with Harmon gone this was going to go the way of a regular sitcom. Yeah, it wasn't a laugh-out-loud episode, but as has been mentioned, episodes last season were pretty up and down so it's not like this wasn't par for the course. I'm willing to give them at least another episode to figure out whether or not we're looking at an entirely new creature here.
It's a real thing at a lot of places. For example, 2 years ago for my humanities electives I took Psychology 100 which lasted a full year and would have been the equivalent of Psyc 101 and 102 at other universities. There are also economics courses and other courses that last a full year, they are usually the introductory courses for a given subject that need a full year of lecturing and readings and so just combine it all into a single class with two exams and a single grade point, but double the weight of a normal course.
There's a joke in there somewhere about Yvette Nicole Brown's book getting canceled, but it's just not coming together for me.
