Review – Community

Community – NBC – 9:30pm Thursday – USA

Community joins NBC’s Thursday night comedy line up of the funnier than the real SNL SNL Weekend Update Thursday, The Office and The Office-lite Parks & Recreation, with a slowly worsening 30 Rock returning later this year. Unlike Kath & Kim from last season Community makes for an almost perfect fit if only for the fact that it’s not horrendously awful.

Community stars Joel McHale, who is snarkily brilliant on The Soup, as a lawyer named Jeff Winger. Jeff could lose his license because he’s been practising law without a degree. “I thought you had a bachelors from Colombia?” “And now I have to get one from America.” So Jeff enrols at community college where he joins a rag tag team of misfits in a study group. Community is nowhere near as stupid as that premise suggests, but it should be noted that now every sitcom on NBC’s Thursday night line up can now be summed up with ‘rag tag team of misfits’.

Joining McHale are a bunch of folks you’ve never seen before and Chevy Chase who has finally given up on the dream of appearing in Snow Day 2 and has returned to television. In what I assume must be a stretch Chevy plays a pompous git who describes himself as “a prominent business leader and a highly sought after dinner guest.” As much as Chevy in real life is a douche, he makes for an amusing foil here.

The study group consists as Chevy as Pierce the old guy, Joel as Jeff the smart ass, Abed the Arab guy who doesn’t shut up, a hot girl named Britta, Troy the black jock, Shirley the older black woman and Annie the weird girl (played by Pete Campbell’s wife Trudy from Mad Men.) Joining them at the university is Professor Duncan played by Jon Oliver from The Daily Show. Being a bit of a Daily Show fan boy it’s awesome to see Jon Oliver in anything… except maybe The Love Guru.

Jeff is used to getting his way and starts the study group just to hit on Britta, unfortunately for him the others all show up to actually learn something. Joel McHale plays Jeff in a way that can only be described as a less mental Dwight Schrute. Super confident, very self assured but unlike Dwight, Jeff appears to be from planet earth.

Filled with likeable characters and Breakfast Club references I really enjoyed the first episode of Community. It’s funnier and much less painful than Parks & Recreation because it doesn’t adhere to the ‘cringe inducing’ school of comedy that P&R and The Office do. You can tell that the laughs in Community are going to come from the characters rather than the awkwardness felt as a clueless Amy Poehler holds an unwanted town hall meeting in front of an outraged crowd of locals.

The key word for Community is potential. Potential. Potential. Potential. I felt the same way about Community as I did after the first episode of Better Off Ted; there were some likeable characters, a few laughs and the possibility things will get better. They did with Ted, and here’s hoping they do with Community as well.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright