Community, the tv show

Haha I realised I was intently watching for subtle signs of the pants pooping moment but hell they really went to town on that.

HA AH HA A h ahha hahaa

I didn't even notice Abed in the background until my husband texted me (he was watching elsewhere) with "Abed is on Cougar Town!!" I got the text about 7 seconds before the end of the scene. I am seriously unobservant.

Also, I like Cougar Town a lot more than I want to. Buck's sad/happy songs last night brought serious lolz.

i'm not sure how i felt about the Scrubs cameo. that show really destroyed any good will it had left w/ me by the end of the run.

well, they didn't call him by name and probably either interpretation is valid. i think it's clearly abed tho, since he pretty much does what he says he did in the Dinner with Andre ep

― Mordy, Thursday, May 26, 2011 12:59 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

haha it actually really bugged me that Courtney Cox wasn't in the scene since that was part of Abed's story

Dan Harmon's on WTF today:

http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_179_-_dan_harmon

I'm enjoying the ep so far, but am amused that Maron does a harsh left turn when they get into nerd shit and has to escape to safer territory as it were

Come play minecraft with dan!

--
@danharmon

Servercraft fixed old server...let's open to fans, see what happens? Respect each other's stuff. sc31.servercraft.co:1893
---

I don't play minecraft but I'm guessing that he just opened a can of worms

right now nothing about this show makes me laugh harder than the dynamic between Chang and Britta

After an initial burst of enthusiasm, I sorta drifted away from this show in the middle of S1. Largely because, despite my proselytizing, absolutely no one I knew was watching it, and I had no one to share my love with (outside of ILX, obvs). So once I discovered recently that absolutely everyone I know has apparently been watching it (and proclaiming its greatness) since I quit, I did a two-season mainline last week. And, not to toot my own horn overly much, I'll be damned if the show didn't do exactlywhatI predicted.

Aside from all of the undeniable discussion upthread about Community being an amazingly funny, well-written, and well-constructed show, Community now occupies a special place in my heart reserved for those rare comedic works that are legitimately funny in the pursuit of something more profound than belly-laughs (The Larry Sanders Show and Marc Maron's aforementioned WTF podcast spring immediately to mind). The framework upon which this show hangs is basically a long-form exploration of interpersonal dynamics and what constitutes the concept of community in the 21st Century. I don't think it would've been as apparent had I watched this on a weekly basis for the past two years, but it I'm in awe of the writers' weekly employment of what would have been, in lesser hands, a laundry list of stock sitcom conflict as an ongoing exploration of the difficulties inherent in coexistence with others and the importance of learning to resolve those conflicts* and deal with everything from fleeting insecurity to full-blown psychosis if we want to be part of a larger community. Which strikes me as a really important and admirable and ambitious project in and of itself, even beyond the fact that the show is funny as shit. So, yeah: two seasons in, easily one of the best shows ever made.

And for those that haven't, I want to strongly recommend listening to Dan Harmon's WTF interview. As has so often been the case with that show, it's made me love someone who I already liked an awful lot.

*I might be tempted to think I'm overreaching somewhat with the lofty goals I'm ascribing to the show if it weren't for the extent to which the writers bend over backwards to resolve the lingering conflict which other sitcoms (and narrative entertainment in general) tends to perpetuate for the sake of tension. The goal in terms of character interaction seems to be making sure, in the least sappy way possible, that everyone figures out how to get along. Which I think, in retrospect, is a large part of the reason why I felt really uncomfortable whenever a character (Pierce towards the end of the season, the Shmitty kids) intentionally stirred up a hornet's nest. I kinda feel like a serious book could/probably will be written about this show. And probably already exists in Harmon's head.

Rewatching season 1 and its amazing how quickly this show hits its groove

also I'm so used to cable TV pacing now that two seasons of a network series feels like 4.

Sneezed OTM.

Danny Pudi threw out the first pitch at a White Sox game today. Disappointed, I pegged him as more of a Cubs fan type.

Massive Harmon interview/season 2 overview (part one of FOUR!): http://www.avclub.com/articles/dan-harmon-walks-us-through-communitys-second-seas,57085/1/

I want to always make sure that all of these characters can all be worlds and universes in and of themselves. And I just felt obstacles there with Shirley, and I felt like I just wanted to make her human. So I had her make out with Chang in the bathroom.

love that Harmon feels the same way about Basic Rocket Science as i do

great, great stuff. dude is a mad genius.

Part two is full of gems:

And I remember one of the notes on that from the studio was, “I don’t understand why they’re going out drinking.” “Because Troy’s turning 21.” “Yeah, but why does that mean they have to go out drinking?” “I don’t know, man.” That just goes to show you that one of the inherent problems of the old world of television, which is that 1 percent of the country is controlling what 99 percent sees. And I think, in their world, on your 21st birthday, your pony gets a different haircut.

lol thats great

that would be a pretty cool 21st tbh

Posted: Tue., Jun. 7, 2011, 4:00am PT

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118037818/

'Community' student Abed analyzes the Emmys
Pop culture guru ABBA-plectic about Emmys

By Abed Nadir

Hi, I'm Abed Nadir, a film major at Greendale Community College. The editors of this paper have asked me to share my 2011 Best Comedy Emmy pick, I'm assuming as part of some diversity program.

man that thing i hilarious

OK, I had watched a couple of episodes of this show and found them faintly amusing, but I saw the "clip show" episode last night, and man. I totally need to catch up, because that was great.

(And I probably even missed a lot of in-jokes/references.)

actually i wouldn't say the clip show was that heavy on in-jokes, although a lot of the humor did play off of established character traits and common storylines

I like Harmon's statement, on WTF, that the show is precisely calibrated to be both new-viewer friendly and seem like the most self-referential thing imaginable to the super-fan.

from part three, posted today:

I think there was an element in there at one point where we were going to mirror Chevy [Chase]’s biography in a strange way, not in an obnoxious way, but hopefully in a profound way. That this play for kids was actually going to mirror Saturday Night Live’s first season. [Laughs.] That’s why there’s bee costumes involved, because the legend is when Chevy returned to host Saturday Night Live in its second season, he and Bill Murray got into a fistfight backstage that a killer-bee-clad John Belushi had to break up and shove Chevy out for his monologue. And that you could see Chevy coming out, kind of being pushed out, or that he was just in fisticuffs with Bill Murray because of something he said. These legends, probably none of them are true, but that is why there are bees. I think we were going to build to some kind of weird scuffle backstage.

I remember there was a complication in there somewhere. This is the Pierce complication. There was this original plan that we were going to trace his addiction to painkillers from the moment he broke his legs in “Trampoline,” and then we were going to have him go down a rocky road with pills, culminating in the hospital episode. But it was built around this idea that Chevy had asked for a week off in there. So we’d built a whole thing around this thing, so we were like, “Week off to Chevy, that’s great. We can build a story around that.” And so that’s why he’s unconscious on a park bench at the end of Valentine’s Day. The idea is that the next episode would have been the only episode without Pierce in it at all. That he would be missing, and then they would find him and then go to the hospital. We were breaking those stories about him being missing when Chevy found out the reason we were so gung-ho about him taking a week off is because we wouldn’t have to pay him. Then his agents wanted to be paid for the week he was gone, and we were like, “We’re not fucking paying you not to be here.” So everything fell apart, and we just jumped from Valentine’s Day to “He’s in the hospital” and stuff. That’s unfortunate.

ooooh, i remember feeling like that was weird

NBC is selling a Notches T-Shirt.

Yvette just posted a photo on twitter of "dvd commentary day". I'd love to hang around that studio and re-watch episodes with all the creators and cast.

http://i.imgur.com/JvZcS.jpg

Ack! Can't wait for that!

http://www.deadline.com/2011/06/emmys-communitys-dan-harmon/#more-141211

‘Meta’ isn’t even a word.

DEADLINE: Why did you pick a community college as a sitcom setting?
HARMON: I went to community college in Glendale when I was 32. I had an emotional experience there that I bookmarked for mainstream television. A fish out-of-water experience. I became part of a little study group in community college and started caring about strangers. It gave me insight into what an asshole I was. I saw that I had only lived half of a life. I was playing this game where I was going to be a great TV or film writer some day and there was nothing else that I thought about, including other people.

this is interesting, i'd never heard anything before about the show's premise having an autobiographical origin. kind of a good way to circle back to the concerns itt back when the show started that it was just mean ridiculing of community college from people who just think of it as a punchline and have no personal experiences in a place like that.

he talked about it a few times

oh i'm sure he has, but i've read a ton of interviews w/ the guy and it'd never come up in any of those, so it was a mild surprise to me

and hadn't been mentioned itt either

its been on the wikipedia page forev

im sorta ashamed of how much i like this show

d.harmon interviews def not doing anything to alleviate that feeling either

dude is thoughtful -- even tho I've read so much material from him since season finale that I kinda feel like: dude, you have too much free time! make something shiny and new and stop talking about your perfect show!

That huge thing he wrote for Onion AV Club is a good read but really really long. Dude must love writing about himself whole lot.

p sure that was transcription

yes it was an interview w/ harmon, not written by harmon himself.

adam bruneau as joe morgan in moneyball

lol

so I was reading Futebol, a 2002 book about soccer in Brazil, and I came across:

"In Sao Paulo crowds would hold up different colored cards to form an image visible at a distance - a technique that was popularized internationally decades later at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Brazil were streets ahead of the rest of the world."

Rewatched the first season last weekend. Didn't realize how much the Dean's Dalmatian Furry fetish was set up.

Streets Ahead is a dance and performing arts school in Ireland. Located in Dublin, its junior crew placed 3rd in the World Hip hop Championships 2006. Three more teams from the school qualified for the world Hip Hop Championships in 2007. In which the junior crew placed 4th.The junior also received second place in Eurobattle qualifiers 2007 and were asked to travel to Portugal to participate in a competition.

sym3: holy crap! awesome