It’s weird. Parks and Rec and Modern Family are also critical darlings, like Community and they both suffer from low user ratings. While, The Office and 30 Rock another couple of shows liked by the critics end up with 8s and 9s.
So. Whatever is going on is probably not related to Glee. But, it’s weird for sure.
As **Justin_Bailey **pointed out, the Arrested Development and *Firefly *scores must be based on people who cared enough to go on TV.com and give ratings to episodes that had originally aired years before. People who thought the shows weren’t very good are unlikely to look them up now and assign mediocre scores to each episode they saw.
You are assuming that someone who generally thinks Community is just okay would agree with you about which episodes are the best. Someone who is lukewarm on Community because they think it’s too geeky or weird (the latter is my mother’s stated problem with the show) would probably find the episodes you named to be especially irritating.
I’m looking at the season two guide for Community on TV.com right now, and I also disagree with your characterization of the show’s ratings. It looks like on average TV.com users consider Community a consistently good show worthy of about a 7 (18 of 24 episodes are rated 6.9-7.2), with a few episodes that are unpopular getting lower ratings (as low as 5.7, but mostly around 6.5). I did not look closely at the ratings for season one, but they looked similar to those for season two. The ratings for this past season of Community seem to be about the same as for Parks & Recreation, which is on right after it on the same channel.
I would personally rate Community episodes higher than their TV.com averages, but the pattern doesn’t strike me as especially suspicious. The four season two episodes tied for #1 with a 7.2 rating are ones I would consider among the season’s best. The six rated below 6.9 are ones that I considered mediocre (e.g. “Asian Population Studies”) or that I thought were good but that I can see would seem confusing or unpleasant to people who weren’t regular viewers or dislike it when the show becomes too surreal (e.g. “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”). While there may be some general downranking going on – I can believe that there are people who give a 0 to a lot of current shows in an attempt to make their own favorites look better – I doubt it’s as bad as you’re suggesting.
There’s one big exception to the above. I see that the “Modern Warfare” episode in season one (which I’d expect to be a fan favorite but is rated 6.9) received an unusually high number of votes – nearly double that of any other Community episode – which does indeed seem fishy. Maybe there was a backlash from people who didn’t normally watch the show but gave the “Best. Episode. Ever!” a chance and were disappointed. Maybe TV.com users who were fans of other shows wanted to drag down an especially popular episode’s average rating. Or perhaps it was indeed angry Glee fans who felt this episode was taking shots at their favorite show…but if so one would expect to see something similar happen with “Paradigms of Human Memory”. Instead that episode received a typical number of votes, and was one of the four highest rated episodes of the second season on TV.com.