Community, the tv show

Office was pretty good too, but nobody cares.

Office wasn't so great

I haven't been watching it much this season, but watched it last night and found it kind of painful.

every scene I accidentally see of the office has at least a dozen people in it

The costumes were perfect. So many great details. The hot dog cart. The prosecutorial moral dilemma. The twists.

didn't dino say on wtf or somewhere that he doesn't really like acting and didn't want to be on the show and starburns was only supposed to be a one-off joke

Copy/pasting from http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/04/27/community-law-order-death/

Why was Star-Burns taken from Planet Greendale so soon? He had so many more reptiles to station on his body and drug deals to attempt to make! The reason is simple: He asked for it — literally. Dino Stamatopoulos, who plays Star-Burns, is actually a consulting producer and writer on Community, and he requested that his character meet his maker so he could focus on his main job. It’s hard to believe that a scribe who got to moonlight as a cult character on a beloved network TV comedy would ask to be written off, but Stamatopoulos just wasn’t itching to be in the semi-spotlight.
“I’m not an actor,” he explained to EW via email. “I don’t enjoy waiting around for hours on set, I hate when people touch my eyes and neck (make-up department!), I can’t learn lines quickly (yes, even the amount of lines I get), and I don’t need other actors (Joel McHale) asking me why I never got my teeth fixed. There are certain acting roles that I don’t mind doing because I’ll write them and I’ll know how a specific character is supposed to behave. So in those instances, I’m comfortable with performing. The Star-Burns character was basically a conduit for the joke-sideburns and the one-note attitude about not being happy when people called him ‘Star-Burns’. I didn’t have a character in mind so it’s always been an uphill battle for me to perform the part. Yes, he’s been given funny lines, and I suppose the writers made him more like me eventually, but playing yourself is very difficult as well. I really don’t know how people perceive me. Obviously it’s as a scumbag, which is fair because I am, but that doesn’t mean I can play one on TV.”

And he didn’t ask to in the first place — rather, the job found him. At the beginning of season 1, series creator Dan Harmon needed an actor to sit patiently in a chair for hours so the hair and make-up department could figure out a way to pull off those now-famous star-shaped sideburns that initially defined this extremely ancillary character. “To pay an actor to do that was going to be expensive — it was cheaper to make a writer do it,” he says. (Harmon, by the way, declined to comment on that feud with Chevy Chase.) “I called Dino and asked him if he’d do it and he said yes.”

He decided to throw Stamatopoulos on camera in this low-stakes role, and viewers quickly took an interest in Star-Burns. The writers did too: Not only was Star-Burns an amusing visual gag, he represented another point of view in the halls of Greendale. “What I always loved about him was that joke where Jeff (McHale) is ripping on him from afar,” says Community story editor Megan Ganz, the obsessive L&O fan who wrote last night’s episode. “And then you cut over to Star-Burns and Star-Burns is calling Jeff a douchebag. That was the first moment you’re telling the audience, ‘Hey, just because we particularly choose to focus on this group doesn’t make them heroes.’”

No one would call Star-Burns a hero. In fact, he was “the one-man seedy underbelly of Greendale,” as Ganz perfectly sums up, giving drugs to Pierce (Chase) in a Halloween episode (one of Stamatopoulos’ favorite moments), and getting kicked out of biology class after trying unsuccessfully to persuade Prof. Kane to “get a Breaking Bad type of thing going” and venture with him into the drug business. While brainstorming the L&O episode, the writers made the logical choice to make Star-Burns a suspect early on: He confesses to stealing supplies from the classroom for his meth lab. And as they were deciding to include a fatal phone call twist at the end of the episode à la L&O, one man who’d been lobbying to have his character killed off appeared in a lightbulb above their heads.

Not that there wasn’t some hesitation in ridding Greendale of one of its most colorful characters and formidable forces. “My first thought when we talked about killing Star-Burns was, ‘Oh no!’ because the whole point was that each year he was going to have a new affectation,” says Harmon. “I wanted the show to run forever and have the guy turn into this umber hulk covered in branches and monocles and roller blades, and unable to function as a human being because of all these things that identify him. But then I think of Daffy Duck being tiny and grabbing that big pearl and saying, ‘Mine, mine, mine!’ and the clam shell slowly closing, which is how I always perceive people who won’t let go of stuff in the moment. You need to be Bugs Bunny and not Daffy Duck. You took a left turn at Albuquerque, you’re in a genie’s cave, you have to deal with it on the fly. That’s where joy comes from… I keep finding on this show that plans are the antithesis of good TV.”

While Stamatopoulos was a bit disappointed that his demise wasn’t seen on camera (“That would have been cool, but expensive. I can see why they didn’t do it. But I did think it was funny”), he found a certain appeal in Star-Burns being offed as opposed to, say, transferring to an overseas community college. “I thought to myself, ‘If my character dies, I’d be in a very elite group of characters dying on a prime time network show,” he says. “So, that was definitely an attractive prospect for me. It would be me, Coach from Cheers (who really died, gulp) and that guy from Two and a Half Babies.”

He may be dead, but he’s not gone just yet. In next week’s episode, the study group attends his funeral, and we will see him in some sort of “video” form. And McHale wonders if the joke could live on: “My guess is Dan will find a way to make him a ghost and continue to torture him by making him stay on set. Who knows? His twin brother will show up and it’ll be like, ‘What the f—?’”

Wonder if we'll see the return of his son w/ the bluetooth.

great episode

very

I was watching the draft last night, so I just now got caught up. As a L&O fan since the beginning, this was the finest tribute I could imagine. Not only was it a great tribute, but a great Community episode. I want to marry it. OMG

feel like this was a missed opportunity for chang, but i don't really care

probably would've been overkill to tangle up his "not really a cop" jokes with all the other ones going on in the episode. he got to be in those opening credits, though!

So I guess Starburns is the death that was mentioned earlier in the season and Ken Jeong is around for a while yet?

I laughed at Chang standing next to Michael K Williams' desk, just dead-eyed, slack-jawed, and slightly out of focus, during the court scenes, but I don't think it was supposed to be funny.

There's a significant sorta-spoiler in that EW piece, re: how Starburns' death affects the rest of the season.

Said spoiler was revealed in the post-hiatus teaser montage, though.

"Sorry about my partner. He's been on edge since we switched."

Had to watch this again tonight.

laughed at Chang standing next to Michael K Williams' desk, just dead-eyed, slack-jawed, and slightly out of focus, during the court scenes, but I don't think it was supposed to be funny.

I thought it was, so there

the cast mentioned during the paleyfest panel that ken jeong will do that dead-eyed, protruding-tongue thing during scenes to try and get the other actors to break. they call it "chang-tongue."

I was pretty happy to see Williams and Todd reappear in this episode. I always really enjoy the episodes where the minor characters get a load of play, but I think I would probably have got a load more out of this one had I ever actually seen Law & Order.

Also I hope Neil gets to get it on with Vicky. That guy deserves a break.

"a man's got to have a code"!!

yeah it was a bit on the nose but i still laughed pretty hard

I liked the Dean going "awesome" on our behalf. Also the Dean with the hoola-hoop for no apparent reason. Why can't they give Chang some of those fantastic background moments?

otm

HIS NAME WAS ALEX

It was cute and had good bits, but that ep kinda bummed me out. Until this, every break from reality was explained in some way - the christmas claymation one was from Abed's perspective, etc. This is as close as they've come to that Family Guy parody thing, with no one ever acknowledging that reality has been warped. When Troy referenced that he'd "switched" roles with Abed, Annie and Jeff never acknowledged everyone was acting like cops and lawyers or why. When there were easy L&O gags - Annie withdrawing her slams - it was just that - L&O gags. No character development, layers, anything. Which isn't bad for 30 minutes TV, but well below the bar they've set.

You'd like the latest AV Club review.

How is this episode any different from any of the paintball episodes in that regard?

those were rather heightened, and, however barely, explained by the chaotic situation. It's also insane to believe Troy and Abed made a Ken Burns documentary of their pillow fight, but I appreciate that the show didn't just show us a Ken Burns doc of it with no explanation

we have law and order fridays where I work, I don't know why it needs to be set up.

also the paintball ones totally advanced the characters, climaxed season-long plot threads like Jeff and Britta's will-they-won't-they in the first and Pierce's freakout in the second.

again, I'm not saying this wasn't fun, just relatively thin

they are so loud sometimes that i was on the phone and during a particularly loud running stomping battle upstairs, the person i was talking to was like wow, i can hear that.

oops wrong thread

No character development, layers, anything.

Less of these things in Community please. Wasn't my fave episode, possibly because I've never watched L&O, but my preferred ones are just highly accomplished and ludicrously developed riffs on pop culture tropes using the characters who I enjoy but don't really want to see 'develop'. My less preferred are the ones about how they all love each other.

I'm not against 'character development' per se at all, but in community it always seems for the sake of it, at the expense of the exquisite laughs the show is often capable of producing.

This advanced Starburns, and Todd! Also, I thought the troy/abed as detectives thing needed no particular explanation. I mean they love to geek out and play pop-culture roles. So they were clearly psyched to step into l&o characters while investigating the potato thing. I thought this was made pretty evident with their arguments over who got to make the quip, and who got to say "why do they always run". Everything was pretty well explained, I thought.

My less preferred are the ones about how they all love each other.

I hate it when it's over the top, but I love it when it's subtle...like the way Britta looked at Troy at the end of the carney episode.

No character development, layers, anything.

I'd say Starburns' character developed quite dramatically, although his development from this point forward may be somewhat limited.

troy and abed are going to grow a killer stash with the ashes of starburns and when they smoke it he'll appear and help them cheat on tests.

There's not really much that needs explaining, Troy and Abed were doing what Troy and Abed usually do, Jeff is a lawyer anyway and Annie is a ridiculous obsessive tryhard. Any break from reality no matter how heightened is usually grounded by a scene where Jeff is looking at his Blackberry looking bored and occasionally being sarcastic.

I really enjoyed Professor Kane in this one and I hadn't realised I'd missed this show being essentially grounded in the classroom. Maybe they should have picked an actor who could do more than a handful of eps a season, but on the other hand Omar dude.

i'll admit I was already on alert for an episode where they'd just slot the characters in a format, tell jokes, and leave it at that. Slapping on the visual/audio signifiers of L&O non-diagetically just feels easier, less impressive than what they normally do homage-wise.

And yeah, it's not that they haven't done similar things before. I didn't scream "oh hell no!" when someone started singing behind Chang in the paintball episode, but there's a difference between bringing Scarface/John Woo touches out of nowhere in a surreal paintball warzone and going DUN DUN all through an episode.

Def not complaining about the Todd stuff, though

The thing is community doesn't tie itself to some formalistic "mockumentary" pretense or whatever to hang its premise off of. If the characters act out of character, that's one thing, but there's nothing more or less "correct" or "realistic" about the cameras and theme songs and sound effects acting out of character.

i thought this was a little funnier than the ken burns one but that's probably because i've seen at least two law and order episodes

If you scrubbed the L&Oisms out of this week's episode and just left it as proper Greendale shenanigans, not much would have changed imo. The L&O thing was just a bone thrown to the audience.

is there an original of 'why do they always have to run', or is it along the lines of 'let's do the show right here'

clover otm