Community which ran from 2009 to 2015 and somehow managed 6 season but no movie (yet?). 110 episodes. It was an extremely funny series at its best but the last 2 years were not very good sadly.
I thought this was a great series when it came out but I wonder how it will hold up, I assume it’s still worth watching. Are they going to include the final season that was on Yahoo?
I just finished re-watching on Hulu before it left. It is certainly an uneven show easily some of the best episodes to ever hit network TV and then just a weird mess for others. Overall I enjoyed it the second time but I think Donald Glover was smart to bail when he did.
Donald Glover bailing was a major cause for the fall in quality towards the end.
When Community started, I was recording some other NBC shows on Thursdays (30 Rock and The Office, for sure - I was too stupid at the time to watch Parks and Rec, but I have rectified that thanks to Netflix) but I skipped Community. I’d sometimes get a snippet of the tail end of an episode at the beginning of a recording, but it wasn’t enough to pull me in.
Then one Thursday night I was home watching TV live, and I switched over to NBC early, about a third of the way into that Community episode … which happened to be “Modern Warfare.” When Abed reached out to Jeff and said, “Come with me if you don’t want to get paint on your clothes,” I was hooked.
It did crash hard at the end (I never saw the Yahoo season, and probably not all of the final NBC season), but there was so much good stuff. “Remedial Chaos Theory,” “Pillows and Blankets,” “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” “Basic Rocket Science,” “Basic Lupine Urology” - so, so good. And “Paradigms of Human Memory” is the most hilarious “clip” show in TV history.
The whole Chang taking over the school and having amnesia was really dumb, and the very beginning of the series (when it was set up as a Jeff/Britta romantic comedy) was rough, but once it got on its feet those first four seasons were mostly really funny.
Cool, cool, cool cool cool.
They listed all six seasons. Not that that season had much to recommend it.
I concur. I think it really hurt the show.
A couple of months back I rewatched the whole series and thought that the last two seasons weren’t as bad as I remembered them to be (but still hurt from the absence of so many original cast members–it was akin to Warren and Emmett replacing Barney and Floyd.)
One little thing I noticed on this rewatch that I never had before: in Epidemiology, which is is otherwise one of my favorite episodes, I thought that Chang’s “ya bit” lines were gratingly cheesy (no pun intended, I swear) but I finally noticed that he was actually repeating lines he said in his first appearance, while introducing himself to the Spanish class (and likely used each time he had a new class.)
But Community is tragically underwatched, judging from how often I have to explain “Mexican Halloween” jokes.
The show was streets ahead and had one of the funnest short rapid-fire comedy exchanges ever.
(Another of the greatest quotes: Narrator: The North Cafeteria, named after Admiral William North, is located in the western portion of East Hall, gateway to the western half of North Hall, which is named not after William North, but for its position above the south wall. It is the most contested and confusing battlefield on Greendale’s campus, next to the English Memorial Spanish Center, named after English Memorial, a Portuguese sailor that discovered Greendale while looking for a fountain that cured syphilis.")
Great, my wife and I have been doing a binge rewatch of The Office and we’ll be looking for a new series to binge when that’s over.
I tried watching Community early on when it first aired, and didn’t get into it then, for whatever reason. But it’s really gained kind of a cult following since then, and I love Rick & Morty, so I’m ready to give it another go.
I’ve never seen it. We are on season 5 of a 30 Rock re-watch and just finished The Office(first time since it aired) a few months ago.
I presume most of you would recommend it?
Because it was highly recommended, I tried getting into it in later seasons but it never grabbed me. Like The Office, I think a lot of the jokes depended a lot on the characters’ backstories and what callbacks to previous seasons. Also, not being much into popular culture I’m sure a lot of jokes went by me. But maybe I’ll give it a try if I can watch it from the beginning.
One of the best comedies I’ve ever watched (so yes, I’d recommend it).
Perhaps the greatest example of Postmodern Comedy (almost textbook) that has ever been created. And it’s doubled over funny to boot.
If you’re bored, try it from the beginning. It hits peak funny by episode 23, Modern Warfare, but gets going by the 3rd episode. Some have described **Community **as TVtropes the Show. Not sure if that makes it more or less appealing to you.
I love episode 21 also “Contemporary American Poultry”.
Season 2 is just incredible though: From episode 2.01 with Betty White, “Basic Rocket Science”, “Epidemiology”, “Aerodynamics of Gender”, “Cooperative Calligraphy”, “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design”, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” (Peak Funny again), “Intro to Political Science”, and finishing with “A Fistful of Paintballs” & “For a Few Paintballs More” (both Peak funny).
???
Do you have the impression that Community is similar to Rick and Morty? Because it really isn’t, at all.
The Dan Harmon connection is what I expect he is referencing.
Yes, a lot of the humor goes right past you if you aren’t a long-time fan of Inspector Spacetime.
Yes, exactly, the Dan Harmon connection. I’ve also occasionally listened to and enjoyed Harmontown, his podcast. I enjoy his comedy style in general.
Community was great. It started well, got a LOT better, then crashed out for a season. Some people link the dodgy fourth season with the fifth and sixth season being as bad, and though they did lose something with Troy and eventually Shirley leaving, but it was still better than all the rest of the sitcoms of the last twenty years. You have definitely missed out if you skipped those seasons. It was the same show until the end. Only weirdness is the timing of having 30 minute episodes on the sixth season.
Understand that Harmon got fired party because of issues with the “star” Chey Chase (who was never the star) but also because Harmons resistance towards making it just another sitcom. He got back on track after he came back. And Chase was gone too. I don’t think they lost too much from his departure. The fourth season is much more “people come out wiser and happy” end the end of an episode and the cast refer to it as a bad dream.
One of the best parts of the show was of course Annie’s Boobs.
You guys are mostly wrong about the last seasons being bad. They’re different, and they lack Donald Glover who gave the most consistently incredible comic performance there has ever been as Troy, but the average quality is pretty good and there are some gems. The fourth season is the bad one - that’s the one where they kicked Dan Harmon off his own show, and the result is a season of what feels like mediocre fan fiction of the show. Harmon comes back for seasons 5 and 6 and, while never returning to the high of season 2-3, they’re as good as season 1 and still constitute some of the best comedy ever put on TV.
So, anyway, to prospective viewers, here’s the deal. It starts out a little slow. It feels like they had to sell the network on being a normal sitcom, so the early episodes feel like a relatively normal sitcom. It’s a pretty good sitcom, but nothing amazing. Towards the end of the first season, it starts to stretch its legs. There are a ton of, well, I guess concept episodes. They take a concept and just run with it. Sometimes those are homages or parodies, like the paintball episodes you’ve probably heard of, which done in styles like modern action movies, westerns, star wars movies, spy movies, etc. Or stylistic homages, like an episode shot in the faux-documentary style of the Office. Or fun concepts, like a clip show where none of the clips are from previous shows, but are little snippets from made-up episodes that you can only imagine. An episode where a new social media rating app instantly devolves into a mad max apocalyptic world where factions and religions are invented in the span of a few hours. A claymation episode. An episode where the story is told through the characters being in an 8 bit sidescroller video game. But it’s not gimmicky, even if that sounds gimmicky. It’s very well set up by the creative nature of the show.
It’s actually a pretty warm and wholesome show, as a contrast to something like Arrested Development and or Always Sunny. It has a lot of heart, and the characters are likeable people. That takes a bit of time, though, because again, the first 10 or 15 episodes haven’t quite started to reach what the characters become. There’s a lot of heart.
I highly recommend it, and during its prime it’s as good as any comedy that has ever aired. I would stay to stick with it even if you’re digging it a little bit during the early episodes, it gets better. I don’t think I’d recommend skipping those episodes, as the character development and callback jokes are significant.