The thing about Harmon’s Community that I really love is the spoofing or references to pop culture as part of the plots. Goodfellas redone as the chicken finger mafia, for example, or zombie/dystopia movies as paintball, or The Right Stuff/hero space films in an old KFC motorhome. Also, the show’s not afraid to poke fun at itself, as the “gas-leak year” or Troy’s freakout over Zach Braff (“After everything Scrubs did for him?!”), or even acknowledging big changes in character development (how did Britta change from the activist-feminist-reason-for-Winger-being-in-the-study-group-in-the-first-place-so-he-could-get-in-her-pants to the resident airhead, anyway?). I love catching that stuff, and the whole Troy-Abed dynamic, and Dean Pelton, and the jokes are mostly good.
Oh, and the board from the Model UN/Bizarro Study Group episode was in storage in the study room. “Crisis alert!”
You take that back! What was wrong with Season 1? Well, except for the pilot, and the first episodes that centered around Jeff trying to bang Britta … and the odd character relationships that didn’t really gel at first … and Troy being a former football star … okay, it took a while for the show to find its groove. I think around the chicken fingers episode, and certainly by Modern Warfare, they were in full swing. Is that halfway through season 1? Maybe a bit later than that - but the last half to a third of season 1 was prime Community, I think.
Not that I know of, but the science in BBT is pretty accurate, they have some excellent consultants and they listen to them. Not to mention the fact that Mayim Bialik has a Doctorate in neuroscience.
David Saltzberg verifies the white boards of equations shown on most episodes are correct. His cred: Bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton. Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. Post-doc at CERN. Currently a professor of physics at UCLA.
Getting back to, you know, “Community” ;), I like what io9 said about the RePilot:
I do think some of the uncomfy-ness of S3 was there was more than a few attempts to leave Greendale behind and it seems that this reviewer is correct in that Greendale is essential to the heart of the show.
Love the show, but both of those episodes were unwatchable garbage. If you distilled everything that sucked last season into two episodes, they would have been (far) better than the first two episodes of season 5. Just awful, in every way.
I liked the two new episodes. The groups commentary while watching the Nic Cage movie made me LoL.
Neither the characters of the setting make much sense anymore, but that’s been increasingly true since the first season. I can roll with it.
(I still wonder why they decided to make “1 season=1school year”. It’s not like the show going on more then four seasons was some unforeseeable possibility. Now they’re left with the characters basically just nonsensically deciding to keep going to Greendale. Ah well.)
He has a juris doctor, which despite it’s name is equivalent to a master’s degree. Only his bachelor’s degree is fake. Besides whether he’s Mr Winger or Professor Winger would depend on what his job title is (eg assistant professor vs. instructor), not what degree he has. Now Doctor Winger would be incorrect and extremely pretentious.
There’s only one way to put it: anybody new coming to the series who watched Repilot and decided there was something there worth continuing is as insane as the characters have become. It had no reason for existence except to give the fan base an excuse to go on after season four.
Introduction to Teaching was a better pilot episode if there had to be a pilot episode. It wasn’t good, and it promises nothing good, but it set the new world into motion. From the Harmon interview, he seems to understand that the characters have to be fixed. Great, but it hasn’t happened yet. Though not having Pierce around was a big plus and keeping Chang to a bare minimum is also good. Bringing in more characters is the only way for the show to survive and the hints that the show will focus more on the teaching side give me a tiny slice of hope.
My plan: dump all the study group except Jeff and Annie. Pierce is gone. Troy soon will be. I wouldn’t be unhappy if Abed, Brita, and Shirley vanished. They’re damaged goods. I know this won’t happen this year. Season six, though…
I’ve never been clear on whether Jeff had a legitimate JD or not; it’s been my impression that it was only his BA that was faked.
In any event, who gets called “Professor” varies from school to school in the US. In some cases that title is reserved for instructors with the rank of full professor, at others (including my undergrad school) it’s used for instructors who don’t have a Ph.D. while those that do are called “Doctor”, and at some all instructors are addressed as “Professor”.
As the rare Community fan who thought Chevy Chase was hilarious as Pierce, I’m glad that, as unlikely as it probably is given his history on the show, the hologram angle opens a door to possible periodic returns.
That keeps him on in small doses, he’s-there-but-not-there and can dispense terrible advice when the group doesn’t ask for it, basically Pierce as anti Jor-El.
