This show really really really made me want to play paintball. I’ve wanted to before (haven’t yet), but it makes it look great.
One of my favorite moments was Abed’s “wall run”- the scene where he runs for a couple of steps along a wall while protecting Jeff. If Danny Pudi were better looking (he’s “weirdly cute” but not a conventional leading man) I think he’d be a big star, but he deserves an Emmy nom for his work on Community.
Perhaps they’ll go to a cabin in the woods sometime and have a send-up of slasher pics (except those parody themselves- needs to be a more self-righteous genre).
They wouldn’t have to go anywhere. The college would be a perfect location for that kind of story. The only thing they would have to figure out is how to make it so no one actually gets harmed. That was part of the genius of “Modern Warfare.”
This wasn’t the funniest episode, but it’s their Hall of Fame ep, the one that everybody will be talking about long after the show is gone. Possibly the weirdest single sitcom half-hour of all time. (And that includes NewsRadio, which did full episode science fiction parodies.)
If this isn’t the episode that gets submitted for the Emmy, they need to paintball their producer.
Fox’s record for cancelling good shows is no better or worse than any other network. And their treatment of shows is no better or worse than any other. See how CBS treated Bob, which actually did better in the ratings than any of the shows you mention. ABC cancelled the brilliant VR5. ABC Family killed The Middleman. It’s part of the business.
The only difference is that more of the Fox shows developed a cult following afterwards – from people who never watched it in the first place and lament how Fox killed their who.
(The article is full of errors – Drive, for instance, was dead last in the ratings for the weeks it was run, yet the article says it got decent ratings)
I think you forgot to read the post you just quoted:
Nobody is saying the shows were “rating successes.”
Fox did, however, sabotage many of their own shows by showing them out of order, changing their time slot over and over during a season, and not airing some of the episodes.
Some would have failed anyway. But I’m confident that Futurama, for example, would have succeeded if it wasn’t sabotaged. Fox really hated Futurama for some reason.
I still keep laughing at the scene with Chang in the Dean’s office:
“put me in the game, I play paintball three times a week”
And then he said EXACTLY what I was thinking:
“I’m one of those douchebags that brings my own gear.”
That scene is even funnier when you realize he has one of those crazy retarded fully automatic machine-guns (in tiger stripe) and then two gold-plated handguns. You know he shows up to play against kids with that stuff.
Best throw away line:
“you’re pretty good at pulling up your panties with one hand while holding a gun in the other.”
Anyways, I finally got to see the episode (I was waiting to watch with my sister.) I definitely loved it. The whole apocalyptic thing after Jeff’s nap totally threw me, and made the insanity of the rest of the episode perfectly palatable.
I ended up rewatching this episode twice already which isn’t something I do (at least in a shorter time period than years) - it’s an episode I’d consider worthy of being compared to some of the better stuff in Arrested Development (but not as good as it at its best), which is high praise coming from me.
I really hope it continues to be comfortable with itself and just keeps going where they’re going in the second season. They may have to branch out from the movie references and metajokes to keep it fresh though.
I just rewatched it for the second time myself. I was only planning to watch the beginning to get the exact wording of my favorite line in the episode, but it is too good to stop there.
Jeff. Winger. You son of a bitch! I thought you were dead, man!
So I went to tv.com to look up how many episodes we had left this season. And I noticed that this episode got a rating of… 7.3/10.
Every formulaic episode of house gets an 8.8+, every nonsensical episode of lost gets 8.5+, even generic sitcoms like 2 and a half men and how I met you mother regularly score in the 8s, and yet all the scores for community are in the high 6/low 7 area?
Now, I’ve come to terms with the reality that good entertainment almost will never get good nielsenratings. But this isn’t viewership - this is how good the audience already watching the show thinks it is. How the hell can this great show have such low episode ratings?
It must appeal to certain fans that don’t think it’s great, but still watchable. My guess is people who don’t get the references. Or people mad about the whole sex thing. (At least one person complained on Hulu.)
Kind of off the topic, but I saw Joel McHale last night at the Chicago Theater and he was hilarious! Donald Glover opened with some blue stand-up and Danny Pudi was in the audience. He and Donald did their Spanish rap from one of the episodes (video from original here)
In addition, there’s no reason to believe that the shows would have magically have found an audience if treated differently.
But consider Drive. [url=http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/04/25/fox-cancels-drive/]Here is a comment when it was cancelled[/ulr]:
Yet people now say it’s all Fox’s fault (despite the fact they promoted it heavily and gave it a good time slot).
That’s your opinion, but you have no real reason, other than belief, that Futurama would have succeeded even in the same slot.
The fact is that what Fox did to its shows is no different than what any other network did to its shows. Fox is a TV network and it’s always about ratings. All this hand-wringing and blame for Fox is just making playing the “If only” game. The shows would have failed on any broadcast network simply because they weren’t bringing in an audience.
Totally hated it. That’s why Fox ran it for four seasons and, in the course of those four seasons, spent millions on the show. Just so they could sabotage it and cackle maniacally.
Thanks for sharing your inside knowledge, Carmady, the secret that makes you so confident that Futurama would have been a success if Fox hadn’t sabotaged it. I mean, a plan that involves spending millions of dollars to sabotage something doesn’t make as much sense to me as, say, not ordering the show in the first place (or only ordering one season and then cancelling it, as happens), but I’m sure you know better than I do.
Ahem – as to the episode in the OP, I must have been in the minority who was a little let down. This show is at its best, IMO, when the characters are playing off of each other. This episode didn’t have as much snappy dialogue as usual, so it couldn’t do that. Not bad, but I’ll probably sigh a little when this comes up on my inevitable DVD re-watch.
Did anyone else think that the gag with Chang was going to be that he passed himself off as some paintball badass, but then he was going to get tagged as soon as he entered the room? (Wow, sorry for the muddle of tenses in that sentence). I did, but I like the John Woo thing they did better.
I will just add my quick (and shallow) 2 cents by saying that while I have always thought that Annie (Alison Brie) was more physically attractive than Britta, after this episode I am seriously reconsidering my position on this vital topic.
Seriously, Britta (can’t recall the actresses actual name) was stunning in this one.
I saw her on Craig Ferguson’s show a while back, and she seems extremely bright and articulate; a very lovely young lady…
