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Community Review: "Regional Holiday Music" (3.10)
Since we won’t be seeing Community again for a while, I’m very happy that the show went out on a high note. And NBC has been very cagey about the back half of the season—yes, we’ve been assured that there will be one, but how it’ll happen remains undecided. NBC has enough struggling sitcoms that it seems conceivable that Community will end up back on the air during the spring season… but then it might not. It might get thrown away in one night or scattered around the summer to languish.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux" (3.8)
If you’re reading this article you’re almost certainly aware of Community‘s current troubles. The show is not officially canceled by any means. It has a full order that will, we’ve been assured, be fulfilled. However, that’s the only good news. After December we don’t know when the show will be back, or how long it will be back for. Anyone who remembers the third season of Arrested Development may end up feeling some deja vu here. Similar scheduling shenanigans forced that show off the air after the fall, and Fox only aired the final episodes in one short, difficult-to-find block... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Studies in Modern Movement" (3.7)
“Studies in Modern Movement” was one of those episodes that helps illustrate how much Community can do within the old-fashioned sitcom format. The episode centers around Annie moving apartments, and there could hardly be a more predictable set-up for the characters to be in. This is the type of high-stress environment that the show’s format loves, one where stakes aren’t super high but they’re moreso than just sitting around a table. There’s a way in which Community takes each one of its four stories revolving around this and pushes them to the absolute limit.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Advanced Gay" (3.6)
Community‘s ambition to make every episode an event of sorts frequently has its less-themed episodes struggling for an identity. With last week’s Halloween episode, for instance, there was a clear hook that resulted in a something memorable, but it’s when the show needs to come up with something more organic to the normal school dynamic that Community tends to fall into trouble. Unfortunately, the less wacky episodes are also where the show has to find its emotional resonance. “Advanced Gay,” however, succeeded at for once bridging the show’s wackiness with the seriousness of these characters lives. This was the first... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity: "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps" (3.5)
The two-week break between last night’s episode of Community and the last one was a good thing, simply because for all of their mutual quality, they’re quite a bit similar. That “Remedial Chaos Theory” was originally episode three of the show rather than four makes sense because it’s hard to imagine that Community‘s creators wanted to have two episodes in a row about variant stories being told by slightly changing the character dynamics. Still, that doesn’t mean that this wasn’t a riveting Halloween episode; it’s just that a little bit of its punch was blunted compared with “Chaos Theory” or,... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Competitive Ecology" (3.3)
The criticism that Community has long suffered from is that its gimmicks overshadow its characters, that if you’re interested in a spaghetti western done as a sitcom, it’s a good show for you, but if you find that sort of thing irritating then it’s not. This has never been my concern. I have a love for the gimmicks, not just in and of themselves, but also how much they rely on what we know about the show’s characters already. The zombie invasion Halloween episode was fun, but I find myself wondering how comprehensible much of it was to people who’d... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Geography of Global Conflict" (Episode 3.02)
From the start, Community has been less about the experience of going to a community college (which seems to require a great deal of exaggeration to make interesting) than about throwing a group of interesting characters together who would otherwise never meet and watching how they grow and learn together. It’s like, as NBC’s ad campaign used to continually remind us, The Breakfast Club, just over an extended period of time. But since season one the show really hasn’t known what to do with the Annie/Jeff relationship and that largely comes to a head here and is also the... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Biology 101" (3.1)
The end of Community‘s second season featured a real finale, real in the sense that it that actually had an effect on the show’s dynamics. With Pierce culled from the group seemingly forever, I’ve been wondering all summer what role he would play in season three. Without his constant antagonizing it seemed like this huge change would have an effect not just on the study group’s dynamics but also on pretty much every other aspect of the show. If you look back at the second season, a large number of plots revolve around Pierce’s love-hate relationship with everyone else and... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "For a Few Paintballs More" (2.24)
Most television shows aren’t hits, and when they’re not that means very little certainty that they’ll be around for another year. Especially in the last few years decisions over what will return have really come to down to the wire, such that while the current season is right now winding down we’re still getting announcements about which shows have and have not been given another order. So when the final episode of Community was being written, it seems unlikely they knew that on March 17 the show would be picked up again—less than two months ago our little-watched show (relatively... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "A Fistful of Paintballs" (2.23)
It’s no secret that “Modern Warfare,” or “the paintball episode” as it’s most commonly referred to, was the fan favorite for last season. It was also, it should be noted, the fan favorite for the cast and crew, to the point that when I interviewed Dan Harmon last year his response to how NBC was taking the show was simply that they liked their paintball episode so they were doing fine. It was that important to the show’s identity, and its popularity meant that full-on style pastiches significantly increased in number during season two.... read more
Found in: TV, Reviews
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