NBC's Thursday night TV comedy block has been around for a while. From the 80s on, it has featured great sitcoms like Cheers, The Cosby Show, Friends, Frasier, Will & Grace, Seinfeld, etc. Of course, this block has also featured some heinous shows, but such is the world of TV sitcoms: you win some, you lose some. However, over the past few years, this comedy line-up has become a sophisticated critical darling (read: still low ratings, but damn good writing). Dutifully kicking off Thursday night's Must-See TV at 8 pm is Community, arguably the weirdest and most perplexingly hilarious 22 minutes of television you will encounter all week.
The show is currently in its third season, and while I thought the first two episodes were just OK, last night's episode was yet another revelation in a show that has long since ceased to surprise me with its ability to concoct some of the most brilliant episodes of TV in the history of the medium (yes, I realize I am being extremely hyperbolic, but frankly, I don't care). The show revolves around a group of students at a community college, including a former high school football star, a former drug-addicted over-achiever, a disgraced lawyer who got his degree in Colombia, not from Columbia, a religious single mother, a pop culture lover with Asperger's, and a ranting millionaire. These highly different individuals get together to form a study group for their Spanish class, and despite all their hang-ups and assorted issues, they become an incredibly tight-knit group of friends. The show is not some happy treatise on friendship. These people get into ridiculous fights, form alliances and enmities with regular abandon and are constantly at each other's throats. But ultimately they would rather annoy each other than anyone else and are the most cliquey bunch of lunatics you're likely to find on TV.
But now let's get to the good stuff. The actual joy of this show lies in the writing. Once the characters and settings were established, the writers just went nuts. They have created some of the most elaborate storylines I have ever seen on a TV show and are not afraid to push the envelope with their insane ideas. Sometimes these ideas fall flat - not everyone can be a genius all of the time. Sometime an episode is extremely polarizing, where half the fans love it and think it's a work of art, and the other half think it's sickening. And then sometimes, you get the episodes where everyone can just agree that the show is a masterpiece. Examples include the classic "Modern Warfare," where the entire school became a war zone due to a paintball competition turned deadly. There was the the fantastic Halloween episode "Epidemiology" where students started turning into zombies with ABBA playing in the background. "Paradigms of Human Memory" was a delightful send-up of the sitcom tradition of clip shows, but all the clips of the characters's past exploits were brand new.
This brings me to last night's episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory." The show was centered around a predictably bizarre concept. In an attempt to decide who has to go downstairs to pick up a pizza delivery, Jeff rolls a die, with the number determining which character has to go down. By doing so, he creates six different timelines (ultimately seven, but we won't get into that), and we get to see what happens in each timeline. At first, the timelines don't seem particularly adventurous. Then they start building on each other, explaining comments that made no sense in the past timeline, developing characters's story arcs, and dealing with some kindling romances. And then in traditional Community fashion, the mayhem just escalates. By far the greatest timeline in this show comes when Troy has to get the pizza. By the time he returns, the apartment is on fire and Pierce has been shot in the leg. If that sentence did not convince you to watch this show, or at least just watch this episode, then I don't know what to say to you.
Community is the closest approximation I've seen to the brilliant writing on Coupling, the British sitcom I briefly discussed in my blog post on Steven Moffat. Its irreverent take on sitcom and movie tropes and joyful exuberance make it a great start to the Thursday comedy line-up, and it is a crime that more people are not watching this spectacular show.
The show is currently in its third season, and while I thought the first two episodes were just OK, last night's episode was yet another revelation in a show that has long since ceased to surprise me with its ability to concoct some of the most brilliant episodes of TV in the history of the medium (yes, I realize I am being extremely hyperbolic, but frankly, I don't care). The show revolves around a group of students at a community college, including a former high school football star, a former drug-addicted over-achiever, a disgraced lawyer who got his degree in Colombia, not from Columbia, a religious single mother, a pop culture lover with Asperger's, and a ranting millionaire. These highly different individuals get together to form a study group for their Spanish class, and despite all their hang-ups and assorted issues, they become an incredibly tight-knit group of friends. The show is not some happy treatise on friendship. These people get into ridiculous fights, form alliances and enmities with regular abandon and are constantly at each other's throats. But ultimately they would rather annoy each other than anyone else and are the most cliquey bunch of lunatics you're likely to find on TV.
But now let's get to the good stuff. The actual joy of this show lies in the writing. Once the characters and settings were established, the writers just went nuts. They have created some of the most elaborate storylines I have ever seen on a TV show and are not afraid to push the envelope with their insane ideas. Sometimes these ideas fall flat - not everyone can be a genius all of the time. Sometime an episode is extremely polarizing, where half the fans love it and think it's a work of art, and the other half think it's sickening. And then sometimes, you get the episodes where everyone can just agree that the show is a masterpiece. Examples include the classic "Modern Warfare," where the entire school became a war zone due to a paintball competition turned deadly. There was the the fantastic Halloween episode "Epidemiology" where students started turning into zombies with ABBA playing in the background. "Paradigms of Human Memory" was a delightful send-up of the sitcom tradition of clip shows, but all the clips of the characters's past exploits were brand new.
This brings me to last night's episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory." The show was centered around a predictably bizarre concept. In an attempt to decide who has to go downstairs to pick up a pizza delivery, Jeff rolls a die, with the number determining which character has to go down. By doing so, he creates six different timelines (ultimately seven, but we won't get into that), and we get to see what happens in each timeline. At first, the timelines don't seem particularly adventurous. Then they start building on each other, explaining comments that made no sense in the past timeline, developing characters's story arcs, and dealing with some kindling romances. And then in traditional Community fashion, the mayhem just escalates. By far the greatest timeline in this show comes when Troy has to get the pizza. By the time he returns, the apartment is on fire and Pierce has been shot in the leg. If that sentence did not convince you to watch this show, or at least just watch this episode, then I don't know what to say to you.
Community is the closest approximation I've seen to the brilliant writing on Coupling, the British sitcom I briefly discussed in my blog post on Steven Moffat. Its irreverent take on sitcom and movie tropes and joyful exuberance make it a great start to the Thursday comedy line-up, and it is a crime that more people are not watching this spectacular show.
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