Community

Look, Community’s Golden Age may be over: seasons two and three of Community (season two in particular) are two of the best, ambitious wall-to-wall seasons of a network comedy in the last thirty years. Sure, the Greendale fans have hyped the show to death, even in it’s lesser, later years, the Harmon-less season four, and season five, which just ran out of gas three-quarters of the way through. For serious comedy fans, Community is our comfort television: a show where we know exactly what to expect from it, good and bad – and more importantly, it’s form remains inventive, always able to continually impress us with its abundant creativity in construction, if not always in execution or resolution. It’s the CBS show for the slightly pretentious television fan – and you know what? I’m perfectly fine with that.

With the release date of Community’s season six fast approaching, it’s hard not to get excited. A show about friends, community college, finding yourself, and what it means to be a family, the show has gained an almost cult following over the course of its previous five seasons.

Does Netflix have Eric Cartman’s AWESOME-O working in their studios? You remember; he was the lovable robot who could invent Adam Sandler movies out of thin air, like “Adam Sandler falls in love with a Golden Retriever” or “Adam Sandler is stranded on an island and falls in love with a coconut.” If so, that …

Sound on Sight takes a look at the best episodes of television that have aired so far this year. Part one includes episodes from shows such as Rick and Morty and True Detective.

After being cancelled by NBC last month, Community is coming back for a sixth season to be released online by Yahoo. And thus the demands for #SixSeasonsandaMovie will be halfway fulfilled, sure to come with self-aware winks about being able to swear on the Internet and what it feels like to be brought back from …

It’s easy to search for meaning in a Community episode: given the show’s uber-meta construction, it invites critical dissemination of itself in a very unique way. This includes episodes like “Basic Sandwich”, a story so bare-bones and un-Community, it almost feels as if Dan Harmon and company are teasing us, presenting us what appears to be a lot of loud, anti-climatic nothing, then simply dropping the microphone and walking off-stage. Yes, “Basic Sandwich” technically completes the season’s journey of Saving Greendale – but as “Basic Story” went out of its way to point out, the Save Greendale Committee had already saved Greendale. We knew Greendale wouldn’t become Subwaydale – and having that knowledge from the beginning casts both parts of the finale in a very different light.

As one half of a season (series? say it ain’t so, NBC!) finale, it’s hard to judge “Basic Story” in a vacuum. Double that when it’s an episode where nothing actually happens – until everything is happening, and the fate of Greendale is in the balance, as is the sanity of every member of the Greendale 7 (except Shirley, I guess? She just kind of vanishes at some point). In those final moments, it does feel like Community is straining a bit to give its finale purpose, throwing in tease after tease (including one I’m really hoping is just a big, fat mislead for “Basic Sandwich” to demolish) – though again, the episode plays things so close to the chest it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on.

One of Community’s most obscure pop culture homages delivers one of the season’s best episodes.

Community’s D&D sequel is funny, action-packed… and completely inconsequential.

With a lot of screen time dedicated to a story that goes nowhere, “VCR” doesn’t get to dig into its most interesting material.

Greendale turns into a futuristic dystopia for the season’s most ambitious, scatterbrained episode.

Community returns from its Olympic hiatus with an old-fashioned episode full of cathartic resolution.

In the first real episode of the “new” Community, “Cork-Based Networking” takes it back to the basics.

Community sends off Donald Glover in memorable, high-concept fashion.

Community gives Pierce Hawthorne a touching farewell in another memorable bottle episode.

Community does its first concept episode of season five – and it’s a little scatterbrained, but still enjoyable.

Community makes its triumphant return this week for its fifth season (and given NBC’s current comedy slate, we may actually get a sixth- who would’ve predicted that four years ago?). After the uneven, Dan Harmon-less fourth season, fans are understandably excited for not just the show to be back, but the creator as well.

In an episode of Community, Britta (played by Gillian Jacobs) once said that an analogy is “a thought with another thought’s hat on.” It may be laboured, clumsy, and teetering on the gobbledygook, but what she said was not altogether incorrect. In fact, that’s pretty much the reason why the scene was funny. Jacob Vaughan’s Bad Milo, in which Jacobs co-stars, deals with a metaphor that, in its execution, feels very much the same way: laboured and ridiculous, but not altogether unfunny.

When starting a new television show, the thing I look forward to the most is the title sequence, so it only felt right to devise this list when I heard the theme was favourite television shows this month. In early television there wasn’t a huge focus on title sequences; their only purpose was to present the …

Isn’t ironic that lately, the cast of Community has been criticized as being empty caricatures of their former selves, and now during Tuesday night’s PaleyFest panel, the cast and producers debuted a never-before-seen first look at the study group in puppet form. What followed was an announcement informing us that the ever-meta characters of the …

Let’s face it Christmas television in recent years has become pretty dire; here is a list of alternative programs and Christmas specials for you to enjoy over the Christmas holidays! 12. Community, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” Known for it’s endless pop culture references, Community carried on this theme with their Christmas episode. What makes it stand …

19. Veep Viewers had high expectations for this comedy from the mind of Armando Iannucci, creator of The Thick of It, and set in the dysfunctional offices of the Vice President of the United States and, happily, Veep delivered. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was fantastic as the VP, Selina Meyer, bringing out different elements in Iannucci’s comedy …

Last week, the years-long drama between Chevy Chase and the creative minds of Community came to a head, when it was announced he was leaving the show with two episodes left to be filmed in the fourth season. At this point, it’s hardly an unexpected move – and with the affect on set morale and …