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It has a touch of 30 Rock's absurdist style and a likable, Whedonesque ensemble cast. A couple of writers came from Arrested Development, so there's a strong AD influence as well.
If you've never seen the show before, the episode Cooperative Caligraphy is a great place to start.
I usually discover great TV shows after they're canceled (Firefly, AD, and Freaks & Geeks come to mind). Community is a bubble show at the Thursday 8:00 slot, competing against juggernauts American Idol and The Big Bang Theory. Just wanted to spread the word and see if anyone else love the show.
BTW, if you're already a fan, Walmart is selling the 1st season DVD for $12 for Black Friday.
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That, Dr. Who, and very recently Modern Family are my only must watch shows. I second it is brilliant.
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It's really hard for a tv show to catch and then hold my interest, and Community has never wavered.
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To be honest Samprimary, this show did not catch my interest at first. The first two episodes were a bit shaky. The show felt like a mediocre vehicle for Joel McHale and Chevy Chase centered around Jeff and Britta's "will they won't they" relationship. I gave up on it until accidentally running into Cooperative Caligraphy on Hulu a few weeks ago. That's when I fell in love with the show and watched the whole first season in one sitting.
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I love this show as well. The Paintball episode is probably my favorite. I probably laugh the most at Troy. He becomes so convinced at certain things it cracks me up.
I am intrigued at the whole Shirley bombshell that was dropped two weeks ago, and am really interested on how that will play out. (I'm leaving it spoiler free in case you haven't seen that or the Halloween episode)
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quote:Originally posted by vwiggin: To be honest Samprimary, this show did not catch my interest at first. The first two episodes were a bit shaky.
For whatever reason, I didn't really feel put off by them. It never really signaled that if I kept watching, I would be disappointed. This sort of thin-slicing a whole season in the first episodes is something I do all the time, even if it is a crude mechanism. Rarely does a season show promise to me (for whatever unconscious reason), then bomb out.
Well, except for Heroes.
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I love this show so much. I watch a lot of television, but this is probably the show I get most excited about watching every week. The paintball episode. Also the zombie episode was great. I think Abed is my favorite; he's just so funny, and I love how everything is related to him in movie terms. I'm enamored with how over-the-top meta this show is.
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My partner just introduced me to this show, and it's amazing. We've only watched a couple episodes so far.
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As with all ensemble comedies, I love every character in the show. Except Shirley. The first season, at least, she vacillated between annoying little girl voice, "That's nice!" and stereotypical black woman, "WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN!"
Meh. I could never figure out if it was the actor or the part, but she kills me. In a bad way.
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Also: Betty White drinking her own urine and shooting the giant crossbow at Jeff was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
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Geraine - I think Donald Glover (Troy) is the funniest actor on the show. He's written for 30 Rock and I suspect he's responsible for a lot of Tracy Jordan's best lines. Donald Glover and Alison Brie (who also plays Trudy on Mad Men) are going to be huge stars.
Samprimary - Ah Heroes had so much promise. After season 2 I just couldn't care about any of it.
El JT de Spang - Shirley and Pierce are the least developed characters. I hope we learn more about them in the future. I did really enjoy this exchange between Shirley and Britta.
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Oh, best show on television now, easily. Well, the funniest. I still watch The Office, but this is the only show that makes me laugh consistently. Not nervous little tittering laughter, either, but "BWAHAHA-snot-HAHAHA!! I can't believe they DID that!" kind of laughter.
The first eps were a tad wobbly, I guess, but I was put onto it by a friend after the fifth ep or so, so I was already hooked by the time I saw the first couple.
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I've been watching since day one, and I really liked the Pilot episode. "Most people don't say Boo-yah to moral relativity!"
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Harmon attended Glendale Community College for a semester and a half in 2003, taking classes in biology, psychology and Spanish. His show was "emotionally" inspired by his biology study group, Harmon said, which consisted of himself and two Armenian American students a decade his junior.
He was earning a solid A and had no real incentive to help his classmates study. Nevertheless, he found himself caught up in their failures and successes.
"I was 32 years old and I gave a crap about whether or not these two strangers passed a test," Harmon said. "And I had nothing to gain from them passing it. I remember while still sitting in the study room book-marking that emotion because it was so odd to me."
The community college setting has proven to be fruitful. Because of the open-enrollment policy two-year colleges don't have to be populated by one age group, race group or gender, Harmon said, making it a terrific backdrop for creative television writing.
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The Pierce stories are my least favorite ones as well. The story about his dead mother was just painful to watch. In the DVD commentaries Dan Harmon said they initially wanted to pair up Pierce and Troy as the Beavis and Butthead characters. But after observing how much chemistry Troy and Abed had together, they've decided to change the dynamics of the show.
Now I get the feeling that they have no idea what to do with Pierce. Which is a shame, really. Pierce is a great cautionary tale for Jeff--he's an example of what you get for living a purely selfish life.
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I'm a little worried the show is going to be cancelled. NBC has removed it from the Thursday line-up, and stated that the rest of the episodes in the season will be shown in the summer. I didn't think this season was that great so far, but for me it's still one of the best shows on television.
As you can tell I'm not super stoked about this.
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I watched S1 on Netflix before I moved to the US, but I don't think it's on Netflix here... or at least, the second season isn't. I'd like to watch more of it, though.
Edit: Streaming, that is. I'm less interested in physical media for this sort of stuff.
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I caught up on this entire series over the last month. I'm sad to be caught up. And I'm sad to hear it might get cancelled. I've really loved it.
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I've missed the Chang from Season 1 for a long time. I hoped that maybe his becoming a security guard would give him the necessary power over them to be an effective villain again, but that hasn't really happened.
I will cry if this gets canceled. For god's sake, at least let 'em have one more season. They could legitimately end the series then!
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Lots of shows that are small viewing audience favorites are on the chopping block this year.
Shows like Community or Chuck tend to have smaller but rabid fanbases that simply cannot make up in energy what they lack in numbers. When it comes to viewers, it really is quantity over quality.
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: I've missed the Chang from Season 1 for a long time.
I have never liked Chang. I would be thrilled if he just poofed out of show existence -- I don't even need an explanation.
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I actually liked the episode with Pierce's father. Sure, giving us an even worse figure to compare him to is cheap, but it worked for me.
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Of course the show is going to fail in the ratings if they put it up against Big Bang Theory. A) Its one of the most popular sitcoms on tv right now and B) there's alot of audience crossover.
I will be so heartbroken if Community is cancelled. I already have terrible Troy/Abed withdrawls between seasons. Its one of those shows that, when I find out someone else is a fan, the result is always a half-hour of us quoting our favorite moments back and forth. A coworker's boyfriend forced her to watch the recent episode with the alternate timelines and she spent the entire next day raving about how amazing the show was.
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It seemed very twisted. I don't think there was much of a philosophical point to be made - other than that Jeff is extremely selfish. It went a little bit far, and was kinda painful to watch the terrible things that happened.
And I can't help but feel terrible for Shirley, who I think has been abused beyond funny lately.
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The ending was really sad, yeah. Realizing that the point of the episode seemed to be that Jeff is the biggest problem with the group.
That episode got me thinking that this season has really highlighted Jeff's douchebaggery. Sort of a notable contrast to think back to him around mid-to-late first season, when he had significantly improved from the first few episodes and seemed like a genuinely decent friend.
I've thought about it a lot, actually, and here are my thoughts:
At first I thought Jeff has been backsliding and being a worse friend. I wonder if he's actually backslid, though, or if it's more just that Awful-Jeff is so far in the past that it's easier to see that Normal-Jeff is still not the best friend. I think in the first semester (first half of season 1) he shifted from being an F grade friend to being a solid C-. And, being Jeff, he decided that a C- is good enough and has never improved from that (doing more than the minimum required work is his definition of failing). But it's been long enough since he was an F that the C- is starting to look, justifiably, pretty unimpressive.
Or maybe he really is more of a jerk. I'm not sure.
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So I really loved tonight's episode of Community. It was awkward and certainly not the funniest, but the ending made it the best episode this season I think.
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Being blessed with some free time, I downloaded and watched the first 6 episodes of season 3.
I really loved the chaos theory episode - I'm a big fan of TV shows pushing boundaries, and I love the fact that Community is a sitcom a first glace, but it incorporates a lot of Science Fiction (and many other genres) into the mix - and that the actors and writers are talented enough to pull it off seamlessly. I also think this is the first season that the show is really mature enough to consistently make really wonderful episodes, and it'd be a shame if they killed it. (which looks like the direction it's heading) Unlike a lot of shows which seem to lose steam after the first 2 seasons, this one looks like they just needed to develop the characters and the settings before they got up to full speed, which is where I feel they are now.
I really don't understand why everyone is so hateful towards Shirley. The way to a man's heart is through his stomach (or at least it's true for me), I'd absolutely love to have Shirley as my friend. I also felt terrible for Todd - I thought he was a really nice guy, and just felt miserable at the end of his episode. That entire episode will hopefully be the low point of the season - it reminded me of the more hateful, bitter, petty isn't-everyone-an-asshole nature of the first few episodes of season 1 which made me initially dislike the show. At least in season 1 it was mostly limited to Jeff and Peirce.
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