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Community season 5

Doesn't every episode hit a new low? Is it possible it will one day have a rating of 0 (and still get renewed somehow!)?
 
They should have and episode that's just a blank screen for 20 minutes then Abed appears at the end and says "I hope you IMAGINED a great episode."
 
I guess I sort of respect that episode in how it stuck to the forms of the Saturday Morning Cartoon and that it was very well made and it's nice there's a Britta action figure (I want one) but... it's a shame it wasn't actually funny?
 
I laughed when Jeff hit the guy with a rock in the final fight montage bit. But not as many laughs as normal.
 
Sometimes it's OK for a Community episode to be more "satisfying" than "hilarious".

That's what happens with smart sitcoms that nobody in the Midwest watches.
 
DIDJA KNOW?

Ken Jeong: Doctor By Day, Comedian By Night

Actor Ken Jeong, formerly a doctor, credits his first big break to the 2007 film Knocked Up, which led to his role in the Hangover series.

by NPR STAFF
April 05, 2014 1:47 PM ET
3 min 46 sec

As part of a series called "My Big Break," All Things Considered is collecting stories of triumph, big and small. These are the moments when everything seems to click, and people leap forward into their careers.

Before Ken Jeong was an actor, he was a doctor.

"Internal medicine was my specialty," he says. "General practice with an emphasis on adult medicine."

After a long day at the office, Jeong says he would take to the stage and perform comedy routines as a way to blow off some steam.

"Most doctors have golf as a hobby," he says. "Mine was doing comedy."

And he kept his hobby a secret. Jeong says he never let on to his patients that he was funny.

"I was so super serious as a doctor," he says. "I would bark orders to my nurses, I was hardcore. I wanted to make sure I did my job right."

Meanwhile at the comedy clubs, Jeong was making a name for himself. He was invited to perform a set on BET's Comic View.

"I would just go to wherever they were filming in LA, and they would just record my set, and it was my introduction to television," Jeong says.

Before long, his patients started recognizing him.

"There was an elderly white lady in her late '70s, and she said, 'By the way, me and my husband loved you on BET Comic View,' " he says. "And that kind of blew my mind."

Jeong credits his first big break to a casting call for a character named Dr. Kuni in the 2007 film Knocked Up, written and directed by Judd Apatow.

"He was looking for an Asian actor with medical experience," Jeong says.

He got the part. With the advice of his wife, who is also a physician, Jeong decided to leave medicine. It was just in time for his second big break — when he was cast in The Hangover as the infamous Mr. Chow.

"That changed my life overnight," he says. "It changed everything for me. ... I always say Knocked Up opened the doors and The Hangover just burst it wide open."

Jeong says his transition into acting still feels surreal.

"My wife is a doctor, all our friends are doctors ... it's just that I have an odd job now," he says. "I'm like a doctor who had a detour."
Click to expand...

HAHAHAHAHA THE TRANSCRIPT DOESN'T EVEN MENTION COMMUNITY HAHAHA we're fucked.
 
I just picked up a book called Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community by Saul Austerlitz. He charts the evolution of the American sitcom by analyzing episodes from 24 different sitcoms, beginning with I Love Lucy and ending with Community.

The episode he chose was "Modern Warfare" from season 1, the first paintball episode. I'll attempt to copy it here in installments:

And so we come to the end of our season, with one final episode to wrap up the loose ends , crack a few jokes, leave a lump of good feeling in your throat, and hopefully get you to tune back in next season. The sitcom spent its first sixty years slowly discovering its own contours: its traditions, its clichés, its ideals. In series like Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, and 30 Rock, the sitcom embraced its own version of modernism, ambition stealing into its inner chambers like a cat burglar in pursuit of a legendary diamond. With Community ( NBC, 2009- ), the sitcom fully comprehends its debts to television past. And yet the dazzling metafiction of the show, created by Dan Harmon, had an obvious Achilles’ heel: hardly anyone was watching. What happens when you sum up the history of television and no one bothers to tune in?

To answer the question more fully, let us synchronize our DVD players and press play on “Modern Warfare,” an episode from Community’s first season. The series had bubbled under the surface since debuting in September 2009, attracting a modest but passionate following from the outset, but “Modern Warfare” was perhaps the first Community episode to become essential Friday-morning water cooler conversation. In part, this was because it was the first episode to fully embrace what Community had been in the process of becoming: a show about other shows, an endlessly twisting rabbit hole down which we were unexpectedly dropped.

Community embraces its own self-awareness, refracting the predictable genre exercises of mediocre movies and television through its warped lens. Seven students of varying ages and backgrounds form a study group at Greendale Community College, last home for losers and misanthropes of all kinds: ex-lawyer Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), busted for practicing without a college diploma; middle-aged Christian housewife Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown); feminist firebrand Britta (Gillian Jacobs); ex-jock Troy Barnes (Donald Glover); moist-towelette magnate Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase); pill-popping high school overachiever Annie (Alison Brie); and quasi-autistic film student Abed (Danny Pudi). In another memorable episode, “Basic Rocket Science,” the study group members pilot a space shuttle that is actually a creaky, circa-1980s flight simulator, sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken and housed in a dilapidated motor home. The show itself is much like that KFC space shuttle: quirky, jury-rigged, peculiarly self-referential.
Click to expand...

Here's the Table of Contents with the shows/episodes that were chosen for each essay:

1 I Love Lucy: “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”
2 The Honeymooners: “Better Living Through TV”
3 The Phil Silvers Show: “Doberman’s Sister”
4 Leave It to Beaver: “Beaver Gets ’Spelled”
5 The Dick Van Dyke Show: “Forty-Four Tickets”
6 Gilligan’s Island: “St. Gilligan and the Dragon”
7 The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Chuckles Bites the Dust”
8 All in the Family: “The First and Last Supper”
9 M* A* S* H: “Yankee Doodle Doctor”
10 Taxi: “Latka the Playboy”
11 Cheers: “Strange Bedfellows, Pt. 2”
12 The Cosby Show: “Pilot”
13 Roseanne: “Terms of Estrangement, Part 1”
14 The Simpsons: “22 Short Films About Springfield”
15 Seinfeld: “The Pitch”
16 The Larry Sanders Show: “The Mr. Sharon Stone Show”
17 Friends: “The One with the Embryos”
18 Sex and the City: “My Motherboard, My Self”
19 Freaks and Geeks: “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers”
20 Curb Your Enthusiasm: “Seinfeld”
21 Arrested Development: “S.O.B.s”
22 The Office: “Casino Night”
23 30 Rock: “Rosemary’s Baby”
24 Community: “Modern Warfare”

(Yes, he acknowledges and addresses the fact that All In The Family and The Office were based on UK sitcoms) ;)

Here's the Amazon (US) page for the book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I7IVYB6/ref=oh_d__o00_details_o00__i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
 
Indeed. Unless next week's conclusion somehow pulls it all together, this seems like kind of lame for a season climax.

Lots of funny little bits here and there of course, mostly thanks to Dean.
 
I thought it was weird and kind of confusing. I kept waiting for the pace to pick up... but I guess it's a two parter?

There were good bits. The insurance appraiser was funny, seemed like his part could have been bigger. It was funny when he didn't trust the steps, and when he tried to turn over the vending machine. Dean Pelton trying to turn over the vending machine was really funny too.

Prof Duncan and Prof Hickey hanging out together was good.

Definitely not one of my favorite episodes. Almost everything fell kind of flat, I suppose. Some individual jokes were really good, but it never seemed to come together.

[youtube]GBgI6FlTzqE[/youtube]

This video is supposed to be one of Abed's movies or something, about Britta and Jeff getting married but I can't get it to play on Youtube so I'm putting it here and maybe it will work. I DON'T KNOW :rwmad:
 
"It's going to be the most boring thing since Britta dated Troy!"

Like the first half of the episode was Abed saying "story is boring without conflict" but even when the conflict arrived it still wasn't that great?

I like the school board guys?
 
That was so meta that even the metaness was like a meta reference to excessive metaness?

I mean, I laughed more than at the previous three episodes, which was good. But like...ultimately it was another episode going "this show is weird and awkward and the people in charge don't like it!" and I feel like they've covered that ground before. And I didn't really like the "aww, we're not getting married then, late season Simpsons style plot resolution!" thing with Jeff and Britta. But Abed's rant was really good.

Remember how Jeff is a teacher now.
 
I liked it, even though the META stuff was kind of sad since they were acknowledging that the show might not come back. The robot emotions stuff was good.
 
Yeah we've finally seen that there is a ceiling for how much the show can break the fourth wall before (as impossible as it seems) it becomes a parody of itself.

It was like a MAD magazine sendup. I see what Dan was doing, but it seemed kind of detached and aloof. I wonder if he really wants to come back if the show is renewed.
 
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