Community - TV Series

So Netflix now has Community available to watch. My suggestion is to sit down and get watching. There is something here to point out, they only have the first five seasons. The sixth season was produced and broadcast by Yahoo. This is why the main bulk of the Community is available, but one season is not.

This annoyance aside, it is still a fantastic piece of writing, directing and acting. Each person is perfectly cast and the dynamic of the show is perfectly set.

The premise of the show is a once high power lawyer, Jeff Winger, has been caught and found not to have graduated college. He is sent back to community college to get his degree before being allowed to practice law again.

He tries to hit on a girl in his Spanish class and creates a fake study group to try to spend time with her. This becomes a problem when a study group actually appears and so the series begins and continues with the fun and foibles of the groups dynamic playing out each week.

While the show has its main set of characters, I find that some of the side characters are just as funny (sometimes more so). For instance John Oliver plays the psychology professor that keeps dropping in for small parts in other episodes. He takes over teaching anthropology for a short time in season 2 and through all this his character arc of drunken English idiot is perfectly developed from his first episode showing as just a connection to Jeffs past as a lawyer.

Ben Chang, the crazy character of the show who starts as a teacher but evolves (or should that be devolves) has some of the funniest parts and because they were so perfect, you can see his inclusion in the later series grows as he would have undoubtedly tested well with audiences.  Ben Chang is played by Ken Jeong who as we know from the Hangover films plays crazy so very well!

The main study group however are made up of

Jeff Winger (The Leader) - Joel McHale
Britta Perry (The Millitant) - Gillian Jacobs
Abed Nasir (The Nerd) - Danny Pudi
Annie Edison (The Girly Stereotype) - Alison Brie
Shirley Bennet (The Mum) - Yvette Nicole Brown
Troy Barnes (The Jock) - Donald Glover
Pierce Hawthorne (The old confused idiot) - Chevy Chase

The characters are distilled into the stereotypes I have listed above, but are of course so much more than that, and as the show progresses unlikely friendships form and the dynamic of the group changes.

Rewatching this on Netflix has been fun, but what was interesting to notice this time is the directors of the show (for a large number of episodes) are The Russo Brothers, of Captain America and Marvel fame. They really have gone on to do well for themselves and from this body of work it is easy to see why.

It is such a self referential and self aware program that plays in the stereo types you expect from a sit-com but subverts them because of the fact it knows it's using them.

Abed is the voice of the audience in this case, the film/tv nerd that is socially awkward and aware of the conventions that others don't see. It is through his innocence that we get the charming animated Christmas episode, where only he and the audience can see it is an animation. The rest of the group keep the notion he is crazy and everything is as it should be. It is beautifully quirky and everyone is perfect for the show.

If you have not heard of Community I suggest you find it as soon as you can, as there is plenty of Youtube clips and interviews now that it is all wrapped up.

You will also find the not so nice side of it by the end. Creative fallings out and Season 4 loses the guy who created and wrote the show, only to receive such criticism for him to come back in 5 but then lose Chevy Chase because of on-set differences. This is well documented else where if you are interested in that side of this great show, but I would suggest you ignore it. Plenty of shows have dramas outside of the fun TV bubble (Castle being an example, where it is rumoured that by the end Nathan Fillion was nasty to Stana Katic. I hope it is not true as I found Castle such a fun show and think Nathan Fillion seems like such a genuinely nice and funny guy, don't burst my bubble!)

This series is perfect to fill small gaps in your TV time, but I bet once you start you will have lost a weekend and binged watched as much as you can in that time. It is worth it on every level and is a truly great series that has so much rewatchability that I am enjoying as much if not more so this second time around, and I expect when I get to the end, I will watch it again in the future. There are lovely little hidden side stories, background scenes and treats hidden on screen while the main story plays out, you will need that many watches to try to find and see them all.

Community is a great bit of television that I am sure many people will have now seen or been aware of. If you, for whatever reason missed that. Well let me tell you to get on it. Go back to school and get your education.