Community 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, 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, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Early 21st Century Romanticism" (2.15)
One of my favorite things about Community is the sheer number of unique episodes the show’s had already in less than two seasons. Last week’s episode was one of those, re-framing the entire show within the world of a fantasy game, but that still leaves us the rest of the episodes. You know, the ones that don’t have a gimmick to rely on, the ones that need to go back to old-fashioned sit-com storytelling in order to get their points through. Unfortunately, those episodes aren’t really the show’s strength, even when there’s nothing particularly wrong with them. It’s just that,... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (2.14)
There may be no form of comedy more delightful than a perfectly executed parody. It’d a rare thing, especially these days when the standards for what “parodies” are have been stretched to the point of breaking by Family Guy and Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer of Date Movie infamy. The ones that work, though, from the early Python movies to Shaun of the Dead have become cult classics for a reason. Community’s “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” got every note of its parody so correct that it managed to outdo even “Modern Warfare” or “Epidemiology.” It just clicked in a certain... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Celebrity Pharmacology" (2.13)
With all of Community’s non-stop meta-commentary it’s a surprise that the show wears its heart so very much on its sleeve. Early commercials for it mentioned The Breakfast Club, and while that’s not really what Dan Harmon and company are going for, there’s a lot of that earnestness going into the show. Characters are really supposed to work out their issues and improve as people, which immediately sets the show off from the kind of nihilism of Seinfeld or meandering repetition of The Office. There’s an element of the show that, for better or worse, is a bit didactic. In... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Asian Population Studies" (2.12)
The elastic reality of Community feels more akin to animated sit-coms, and not just because it had a recent episode that was entirely animated. But while the show’s reputation is largely built on a solid sit-com foundation, it’s also dedicated to moving its cast forward as characters and not just spinning its wheels for episode after episode. That’s one of the most unique parts of the show, and while The Office may have personnel changes or relationship drama, ultimately its characters are the same week in and week out.... read more
Found in: TV, ReviewsCommunity Review: "Aerodynamics of Gender" (2.7)
One of my favorite things about Community is that there isn’t really a stock episode-type or plot. There’s no monster-of-the-week like in Buffy or disease-of-the-week like in House, but more importantly neither does it have the sit-com equivalent of those plot repetitions. In short, no episode is easily mistaken for any other. There are constants, of course, with the school setting and the study group meetings being the big ones, but last week’s episode was completely unlike what we saw in “Aerodynamics of Gender,” as will next week’s. The basics of the show haven’t changed, either, it’s just that by... read more
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