Community - Season 2

Community was my favorite comedy last year, and the show didn't have to do much besides keep being itself to maintain that honor this season. But the Community I know wouldn't rest on its laurels, so they pushed things even farther and took a lot of risks. It could have fallen on its face, but thanks to great writing and my favorite ensemble cast on TV, Community did the opposite, and became an even better series. I know some people do think it went a little too crazy, but I don't see it all. Community throws itself into everything it does, and the results are always at least pretty funny, and occasionally downright transcendent. There's just so much the show does well, and while it's far from flawless, the great way it always makes me feel always manages to make those problems seem like trifles.

What makes the show work is how it can bounce between standard sitcom storytelling and plots with much grander ambition without it ever seeming like there's a disconnect between the two. Part of it is how straight the pop culture send-ups are always played, despite the occasionally absurd scenarios. The most obvious example of this from season one was the finale, which used paintball guns to play out a typical action movie scenario. The thing is, if you took out the paint, the episode would basically just be a pretty good twenty minute action movie. Sure, there are jokes, but the genre tropes are laid bare and used to tell a fun story, instead of just being mocked and misused. This is the template season two often uses, whether it be a story about simulating a space mission, or pseudo-zombies attacking a Halloween party, or revisiting paintball guns in the two part finale, which managed to be a great Western AND a great war movie (with some Star Wars flavor, to be more specific). The tone is just right, which is what allows the show to keep working when it's just being normal. Or, as normal as this show can be. It's not disappointing when an episode is just about the group playing Dungeons & Dragons together, or trying to find Annie's special pen, or visiting a bar on Troy's 21st birthday. The characters are the same people every week, so there's no disconnect in either situation.

And then you just have standout episodes like the fully animated Christmas special, which worked both as part of the ongoing series and also as one of the best genuine holiday cartoons ever made. I can't think of another show that would even try something like that, let alone totally nail it. I love the way the outside cast has expanded, too. Only a few guys like Dean Pelton and Dr. Duncan are really more than caricatures at this point, but guys like Starburns and Leonard and especially Magnitude are just fun diversions that somehow stay amusing without a lot of development, and bring joy whenever they pop up again. Or pop pop up, as the case may be. As far as the actual main cast, Jeff, Troy, Abed, and Annie remain great, and I liked the work they did developing Britta and Shirley more this time. Pierce and Chang are a bit problematic, though. All season long there's a running story about Pierce butting heads with the rest of the group, and while I liked the payoff at the end, the way they handled it wasn't always consistent or interesting. And even though I continue to enjoy Ken Jeong in anything he's in, his Spanish teacher persona was a lot more consistently incredible than his reluctant student one, and I hope they find something better for him in season three now that's he's a permanent cast member. These problems seldom brought down the show though, and it was one of the best, funniest, and most imaginative single seasons of a comedy I've ever gotten to see. It seems like a miracle that the show is coming back again (thank God for NBC's consistent failure to find better ratings draws), and I'm going to enjoy this while it lasts.

Hot Tub Time Machine

You've probably seen a movie like Hot Tub Time Machine before. A comedy that you like the actors in, and has a funny concept, and is actually pretty humorous, but you still feel a little let down by. It's not a bad movie at all - I'd call it pretty good. But I kind of wish it was more. This is a movie about a group of guys who find a hot tub that can travel back in time... and they spend the whole thing stuck in the 80s. A common complaint with comedies is that all the funny parts are in the trailer, and while that's not really true here, I'd like to make a variation on the idea. There are plenty of laughs that are not in the trailer, but all the laughs that are in the trailer are represented in full. What might have been teases for great scenes, like the one with Craig Robinson reluctantly having sex in the bath, are pretty much exactly as they appeared, with nothing extra you didn't know about. It leads to a movie that's funny but not really ever unexpected.

It's obvious after a point that it's really a send up of 80s movies rather than time travel. A few stars of those films appear, like Chevy Chase as the mysterious hot tub repairman and Crispin Glover as a bellhop who's always close to losing an arm. And it's really a typical 80s comedy in a lot of ways, with characters like Lizzy Caplan's Deschanel-esque quirky perfect girl and Sebastian Stan's douche bag alpha male. There's a lot of gross-out bodily function stuff that doesn't really play anymore and of course a Communist paranoia thread that helps lead to the main conflict keeping the good guys from getting back to the present. All of the main guys are pretty good, and the supporting cast is mostly decent even if some of them didn't really sell the 80s so much as someone's vague memories of the 80s. Rob Corddry is the main comedic catalyst, though honestly it seems like he's trying too hard in an attempt at a broader audience. I liked the movie, I just wish it was better. And after hearing about the whole color correction issue, it was impossible not to notice. If you don't know what I'm talking about, google "teal and orange". Lots of movies are limiting themselves to this palette, and it really doesn't work in a movie that's supposed to represent the 80s. It just looks really weird in spots. Even the DVD box art can't escape the madness.

Community - Season 1

I only gave the pilot of Community a shot because it was in the middle of NBC's comedy night, though it didn't take long for it to become my favorite new show of the fall season. The problem with the advertisements is they weren't honest about what the show really was. They showed Joel McHale, a pretty funny guy but not really an actor, as a sort of jerk named Jeff who's forced back to school after his law license was revoked. There were a couple decent jokes, but not a lot to on. But the show isn't about Jeff, not really. He's the protagonist, sure, but the show is about the whole cast - a hodgepodge of misfit Spanish students who form a study group together. It may not sound like a lot, but believe me, when everyone on the show is working right it's pretty hard to beat the amount of laughter the show can produce. It might be easy to dismiss the great diversity of the group as a cloying attempt at diversity, but that's sort of the point, and they play around with it enough, and the actors are good enough, that you like them all anyway.

Not every episode of Community is a total winner, but enough of them were brilliant enough that it wasn't long before it was my most anticipated show every Thursday night. Ken Jeong as the Asian Spanish teacher and the bald dean who's overly obsessed with political correctness tend to be the ones who set the plot in motion, coming up with crazy assignments or school activities that the group have to navigate through. There's some other notable recurring characters, like John Oliver's psychology professor who Jeff pushes around at first but gets more ballsy (and drunk) later, and an antagonist fellow Spanish student played by Dino Stamatopoulos that they know only as "starburns". My two favorite characters though are Abed and Troy, two of the youngest members of the group who come from different backgrounds but turn into the best of friends. Troy is sort of the token idiot but the writing and his performance keep him more interesting than that, and Abed's obsession with pop culture usually provides what seems like the majority of the show's best jokes. The show tries to keep you invested in what girl Jeff will end up with, but I'd keep watching even if the whole thing was just the little bits of genius between Troy and Abed that close most of the episodes during the credits. I already can't wait for season two.