I think I know what you mean. They are not just being meta about being on a television show, they are being meta about being meta.
It also has palm trees. Cf. the background when Britta is walking in at the beginning of this episode.
Greendale is indeed 4 years. Example: in the “Modern Warfare” episode, Jeff mentions that with priority registration he can graduate in 3 years instead of 4. (He also needs a 4 year degree in order to eventually become a lawyer again.)
Plus, plenty of people take longer than 2 years to get an AA. It’s a two-year program if you take classes full time, don’t fail any, and strategically plan your course load.
I went to a community college before I went to university (I took electrical engineering technology in CC, then physics in University). I found Community College to be harder - at least the engineering programs. They have to pack a lot into two years, and you have to come out ready to get to work in your specialization. As a result, plenty of people flunked out of various classes and switched majors, and/or slowed down and spread their education over three years.
Plus, lots of community colleges have two year programs that require summer semesters to finish in two years, and many now have four year baccalaureate degrees in programs like nursing and business admin. So there’s plenty of room for them to stretch the series out.
And if that’s not enough, in the 4th year they can discover that the college has been purchased by a large conglomerate which is turning it into a for-profit university offering programs all the way to the masters or Ph.D level.
Or, the writers can contrive to flunk them all out of their final years, or have them graduate - only to find that they’re unemployable in the fields they’ve chosen and they all wind up back in college taking another program. Pierce doesn’t even need to be there - he could be a lifer taking program after program.
It wouldn’t be hard to keep this show going for as long as they need to.
Or just expand the timeline. Have this season cover one semester, instead of a year.
Same can be said for Glee. What do they do with the cast when they graduate this year?
TV Time. No rhyme or reason.
That’s what I was going to say. He probably takes classes at random, or based on what time they let out for lunch. And after Shirley gets her business degree so she can sell her brownies, I can easily see her wanting to get something else to improve herself. It wouldn’t be difficult for the writers to throw in semi-plausible reasons.
At the end of the previous season, I wondered how they’d recover from basically stripping Britta of her dignity, especially given the fact that they made the dynamics of the sitcom made explicit in one episode – that they needed her and Joel to be even matches for each other to keep the tension working. I think they successfully worked through the problem by hanging a lantern on it. Her carpe diem boldness became a source of strength and superiority, and that notion itself was stood on its head in a competition to carry it to absurd extremes. When the dust cleared, they were back to being on par with each other and the show can now proceed with its dynamic restored.
I just read in Entertainment Weekly that the Christmas episode is going to be stop motion like the old Rankin/Bass shows (eg. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer). I can’t wait.
Last season established that the characters (at least the important ones like Finn and Rachel) were sophomores, so they have at least this season and one more to worry about it, and by then the show will either need to retool anyway (it’s gotta be expensive to make, they’ll need to cut the cast back by then I’m sure) or the novelty will have worn off and it’ll be 3 and done.