Community 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, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Applied Anthropology and Culinary Arts" (2.22)
Last week Community took us on a post-modern trip through memory lane in which we hadn’t heard of half the events mentioned before. Nevertheless, it worked great because of the way the characters are so well-defined. In effect, those events are fully canon, part of the show’s continuity even though we never saw what actually happened. But that still leaves us with the traditional counterpart to that episode, in which all of what we’ve seen before builds to a real conclusion.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Paradigms of Human Memory" (2.21)
Television reviews, like book reviews or film reviews, necessarily focus on the plots of their shows because that’s a lot of their content. Last night’s episode of Community, though, was almost completely lacking in anything approaching a traditional story. What it had was a premise, but that’s true in plenty of Community episodes. It’s just that those premises are still story-based whereas here the premise is the meta-idea of a clip show.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Competitive Wine Tasting" (2.20)
Like most television shows about school, Community has always featured as little depiction of actual schoolwork as possible. Classes and homework are repetitive and pretty uninteresting, not to mention minor compared with what happens during the rest of our lives. For instance, you probably have fewer memories of that science class you took second semester of your sophomore year of college than you do of a particularly bitching New Year’s Eve party.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsListen to a New Childish Gambino Song
Donald Glover only released the newest EP last month from his hip-hop project Childish Gambino, but he’s already back on the proverbial horse with a new track.... read more
Found in: Music, NewsCommunity Review: "Critical Film Studies" (2.19)
One question that’s dogged my constant coverage of various comedies for Paste is how important exactly is it for a show to be funny? That is to say, is the worth of a comedy directly proportional to the number of laughs I have? It’s a question that goes a little further than just TV comedies, too, it’s something that is bound to come up to people giving serious consideration to stand-up comedy or film or even comedy music. It’s also something that dogs criticism anyhow, since there’s only so much you can say as far as finding something funny or... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy" (2.18)
Community has garnered such a fanbase not just because it has particularly tight writing, which it does, but also because of the way it breaks away from being a sit-com. And no, while I’ve talked a lot about the ways it’s different from traditional sit-coms, that’s not what I’m concerned with here. It’s that the show’s also different from post-The Office and Arrested Development sit-coms. It breaks rules that exist around single-camera shows and the sort of reality they ask us to agree on in a way that, for instance, Modern Family or Outsourced won’t.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Star Donald Glover Releases New Hip-Hop EP as Childish Gambino
Donald Glover first started getting attention with the sketch-comedy troupe Derrick Comedy. Since then, he’s served as a main-cast member on NBC’s Community and writer for 30 Rock. However, he has also been steadily releasing hip-hop music since 2008 as Childish Gambino. Glover has just released his newest Gambino EP, appropriately titled simply EP, for free via his website. The release contains five songs including the previously-released track “Freaks and Geeks.”... read more
Found in: Music, NewsCommunity Review: "Intro to Political Science" (2.17)
For all of its focus on growth and change, Community has tended to shy away from all but the most temporary sexual relationships. The first season had its somewhat awkward will they/won’t they dynamic between Jeff and Britta, and the second season has had Shirley and Chang’s one night stand, but nothing has stuck and everyone has stayed either alone or, in the case of Shirley, with their significant other largely off camera.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" (2.16)
After last week’s much more traditionally sit-com-y episode, “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” returns us to the strange and wonderful world of Community’s genre parodies. But while in the past these parodies have tended to overpower the rest of the episode, making it so that the zombies or whatever are more important than the show’s continuity, here we get the inverse. The episode is formally parodying the faux-documentary style of other TV shows, in particular The Office, but the focus is really on Pierce’s relationship with the rest of the study group.... read more
Found in: TV, Reviews
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