Community: "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 Planning Holiday Musical Episode
NBC’s Community is staging a Christmas-themed musical episode. TVLine.com reports that the cult hit is stepping it up a notch and will produce an entire musical episode a la Glee with all original songs. read more
Found in: TV, NewsCommunity 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, ReviewsIt Takes a Community... To Embarrass a Writer
Paste writer Adam Galanter took a trip to the set of our current favorite sitcom Community, which ends its second season tonight. He spoke with the show's stars and ended up in his own little comedy. read more
Found in: TV, FeaturesCommunity 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, Reviews
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