Follow Up – Community

Community – NBC – 1 Season – USA / GO! – 9:00pm Tuesday – AUS

Ladies and gentleman I’d like to introduce you to the best comedy from this TV season. Don’t get me wrong there are a bunch of great comedies on air at the moment but Community shines out above the rest. In my original review of the series I threw around the word ‘potential’. While the pilot didn’t wow me too much, the show felt like it could go places. On this occasion I’d like to thank myself for being right, unlike that time when I said I liked Vampire Diaries more than Community. If Me From Now could go back and slap Me From October in the face, I would, because as it stands there is no show on television I like more than Community.

It was slow going to begin with and I don’t hold anything against you if you bailed early on, but it’s time to come back into the fold because the second half of Community’s season has been nothing short of fantastic. Community has been rattling around in my head almost daring me to define it. If I had to grab a couple of comparisons out of the air and slap them as labels on Community I’d go with The Simpsons and Spaced. Just as with Spaced, Community throws a ragtag team of stereotypes together but elevates them beyond their obvious stereotypes. Both shows like to play around with their character types while continuously stretching them.

Spaced and Community also love to dive head first into pop culture references, whether it be when Spaced ended its second last episode with a detailed Empire Strikes Back homage, or Community’s brilliant near episode length parody of Goodfellas. I think it goes without saying that both also feature episodes that are action movie parodies centred around over the top paintball games. We could literally debate for minutes as to whether Spaced’s war movie inspired paintball episode was greater than Community’s post-apocalyptic paintball scenario.

As for my absolutely outlandish statement that Community is the new The Simpsons, let me back try and back that up. Just like The Simpsons the first few episodes of Community struggled trying to find a tone, but once it hit its stride there was no stopping it. As I mentioned above Community manages to seamlessly lift storylines from movies that remain funny even if you aren’t sure what they’re parodying, but become even funnier if you’re in the know – which is a trait that The Simpsons has mastered over the years. Like The Simpsons, Community is slowly filling out its cast with little cameo sized background characters; if Star Burns isn’t the epitome of a Simpsons-style supporting character than I don’t know who is.

Deft pop culture parodies, and clever side characters, mean nothing if the core of your show doesn’t resonate. Just as with the early seasons of The Simpsons, and just as with Spaced, Community knows how to balance all that wackiness with characters that have an emotional core. The characters on Community are able to be broad parody one minute, but can make us care about them the next. Sometimes the crossover between the two is rocky, and sometimes it doesn’t work, but not enough shows understand the importance of the humanity inside of those big laughs. 30 Rock is a perfect example of a show that makes us laugh but can’t figure out how to make us care about its character’s lives. Think back to all those ‘Jack Donaghy dates Famous Actress In Extended Cameo’ scenes that you’ve tuned out during.

Community isn’t perfect, as I said, there are some roughies in amongst that comedy gold, but the back half of the season has been absolutely superb. There are a lot of great comedies out there at the moment, but there is no other show on TV that I can honestly make the following statement about: After an episode ends I want to rewatch it, and often do. How long has it been since you could say that about a TV show? … That’s not actually a rhetorical question. It’s been four years since we could say that, because the last great re-watch show was the first season of 30 Rock. That’s how good Community is.

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