I suspected that prior familiarity with the actors might have been part of your problem. As I said earlier, I didn’t have that, so I didn’t see Joel McHale and Allison Brie; I just saw Jeff and Annie.
He was lucky.
Melissa George, a native Aussie, played a character on Alias for a season. While the character was American, she used her natural accent in the role. It was explained by her character having grown up…
… in London.
“Ahh, British, Australian, who’ll know the difference?”
OTOH, that helped me because Joel McHale’s character on The Soup is basically Jeff Winger.
Don’t have much to add other than I suspect your thinking Donald Glover was miscast might be because you first saw him in dramatic roles before you saw him in Community. For some of us, the surprise was that Glover had such good dramatic chops after only seeing him on Community and thinking of him as a comedic actor.
The first place I saw him (and Aubrey Plaza) was Mystery Team.
I think the problem with casting Alison Brie is that before Community, most people only knew her from Mad Men, which would make her about 70 when Community starts.
^ I laughed out loud at this for over a second.
I’ve actually never seen Mad Men and am surprised to learn she was on it. I knew Saffron from Firefly was on it, though!
And he is the same character on Cake Detective. I was watching an episode of Community with the 10-year old granddaughter and asked her if she recognized him. As soon as I mentioned Cake Detective you could see the light go on in her head and she gave me a big smile.
What is Cake Detective?
My bad, it’s called Crime Scene Kitchen, a summer filler show on Fox. In my own defense, they’ve only done bakery items, kind of a parody of The Great British Baking Show. McHale is his usual smarmy self; I love it.
Oh, glad to hear about this. I loved Community so much that I got on a kick last summer of watching anything with Joel McHale… LOVE the Joel McHale Show.
I still miss The Soup. It was funny and entertaining and the only reason I know anything about most of those reality shows and people like the Kardashians.
For over a decade, my wife and I watched Joel’s The Soup and called it our education on what crap is on TV and is in the culture.
Back when Jon Henson hosted it, it was about talk shows(and was called Talk Soup) and I used to love it then. I wish they’d bring him back and do The Soup again.
As I was saying, I just got caught up on all that, and I’ve got to say that since I don’t keep up on which reality show is doing what to which unknown-to-me celebrity, it didn’t matter that I was watching him make fun of old shows.
And I absolutely love that the show got cancelled, and (years later?) he got to do The Joel McHale Show in the exact same format. So he showed up for the first new show in exactly what he’d been wearing, with the same image up on the green screen behind him.
And the first words of his new show were “As I was saying…”
.
[cue Jeff Winger-esque smirk]
I know, we watched it and it was great. I thought he actually said, “Now, where were we?”
The age thing in Community did bother me a little bit too. They were constantly making jokes about how much older Britta was than Annie. In retrospect, maybe it was a sort of in-joke, but it didn’t come across quite that way in the show, or maybe only did if you were familiar with the actresses from something else, so I the joke went over my head.
Glover was also slightly too astoundingly handsome, as well as sociable and intelligent, to be believable as never having any luck with the ladies. That did start being an in-joke after a while but at the beginning it really just seemed like they hadn’t realised how attractive he was.
Neither issue was really distracting or problematic, just something I noticed.
I didn’t like the “thing” between Annie and Joel - I know it was mentioned many times that it was wrong, but the thing was, it really was wrong, especially since Annie was young even for her age, and he was a very experienced adult in his late thirties. Once would have been fine, but I didn’t really like it when they kept doing it.
Also, in Burn Notice, They originally had Gabrielle Anwar’s character be Irish with an Irish accent. The problem was that they cast Gabrielle Anwar, who is English, and her Irish accent was horrendously, painfully bad even by the standards of broadcast television.
After a while they decided to have her still be Irish, but speak in an American accent (in-story it’s because she’s living in America and is on the run), which Anwar could impersonate much better, and when she slipped up it could be explained away by it not being the character’s real accent. Not a bad solution really.
“For God’s sake, man, she’s 18, and you have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone. Just have at it, would you, and stop fluttering about.”
It isn’t an “in joke”, it is character bio. Britta Perry is 10 years older than Annie Edison.
He was actually about twenty years older than her character, and he had already practised as a lawyer. If he was still at the emotional maturity level of a very sheltered teenager, that’s problematic as well, but he didn’t seem to be. So that was probably one of the lines that stuck out to me as a bit off.
Yes, I know. But the actresses are the same age, and look the same age.