The great "Community" + Dan Harmon + "NBC, nooo" discussion thread

[Turquoiside]

Since when have straight parodies in Community been the low? As far as I remember, they've always been strong. And I think its no coincidence the first episode dealing with their class is the first high-quality episode they've produced in four months.

No The Office that day....so NBC will, for one night, have three hours straight of decent programming.

[CivCube]

There's a difference between using a parody to tell a story (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) and simply throwing out pop culture references (Family Guy, Dreamworks movies). That was my first impression for this episode, although I've come around 180 on it.

[CivCube]

Community's renewed for a fourth season!

Tonight's episode: I am slain. Slain.

Spoiler:

"TEN THOUSANDTH FLUSH!!!"

Spoiler:

"Welcome...*climb climb climb*...to Ladders!" and other worthless classes.

Spoiler:

Garrett as a pre-cog.

Spoiler:

John Hodgman's asylum fakeout.

Spoiler:

"Troy and Abed in the Moooooorning!-nights!"

[_random_]

I really love the original content clip show format. The noir paintball bit was great, as were the psychiatrist's attempts to force a twist ending.

[Eran of Arcadia]

"Greendale was purgatory and I'm the devil!"

Shades of LOST again . . .

[Camikaze]

I thought the last two episodes were some of the worst ever. There were certainly fantastic moments in Court Listing Unavailable,

Spoiler:

Such as the Dean and his 'can-can-cancelled'

and in Curriculum Unavailable,

Spoiler:

Like Garrett and the asylum.

but the episodes as a whole were incoherent and didn't fit in with the overarching storyline (particularly the latter), losing the tenuous link to plausibility that other farfetched episodes have managed to preserve.

Spoiler:

The Dean's doppelganger would've worked for a short space of time, but kidnapping the Dean for two months? How do they resolve that one without writing out Ken Jeong?

On the plus side, going by the 'two bad episodes, one awesome episode' thing they seem to have going on since coming back, next week's should be great.

[thomas.berubeg]

I'm kind of unnerved by the end of that last episode.

[Eran of Arcadia]

What, specifically? The

Spoiler:

Chang in the ducts?

[thomas.berubeg]

Mostly Abed, I think. I'm not quite sure, in retrospect, what it was, but something about the whole ending felt weird.

I thought they were good episodes, though.

[JamesCaesar]

The great Alex lives on!

[CivCube]

Sony made a really, really stupid decision.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/updat...mmunity,75385/

[SuperBeaverInc.]

My reaction to this news is the same as Abed's to daylight savings time

[Camikaze]

Yeah. Hopefully the cast can carry it for 13 episodes.

I liked the last three episodes. Second last was the best, IMO. Final was weak in terms of general storyline (could easily have been dragged out over a couple of weeks)

Spoiler:

I mean, what happened to Chang? Nothing more about the Vice-Dean's death? Why did Pierce and Shirley's dispute go straight to 'Greendale Court' when they were so easily willing to dismiss it? And what happened to the entire summer semester that had apparently passed? Did Abed et. al. not complete Biology? etc.

, but brought more out of the characters than normal. The ending was good in the sense that it was 'nice' from the perspective of being invested in the characters.

Spoiler:

City College may be the focus of next season, I guess.

[CivCube]

Dan Harmon has an interesting AMA at Reddit right now: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...ity_writer_of/

Originally Posted by About Chevy Chase storming off the set on the last day

He refused to do the "tag" for the Digital Estate Planning episode (the 8 bit video game episode). In the scripted tag, Abed comes to Pierce with the thumb drive he took, and says "Pierce, I've been able to adjust some of the code for your Dad's video game and I've made a version I think you might like better." He puts the thumb drive into a laptop in front of Pierce. We cut to the laptop screen, where we see Pierce's avatar on a front lawn with the giant floating head of Cornelius. Every time Pierce presses the space bar, his avatar throws a baseball to his father's head, which gives him a thousand points and a "great job, son!" Pierce presses the space bar a few times, pauses, then leans over and embraces Abed and we fade to black. When Adam Countee pitched that tag, tears instantly rolled down my cheeks, and in point of fact, my eyes are getting watery describing it to you. It was the most important part of the episode and possibly one of the most important moments of the season. I was very upset to hear that it wasn't shot because someone didn't feel like shooting it, especially since it was literally the last day of shooting, which meant we'd never be able to pick it up. I regret nothing about how upset I got. My job was to care about my show.

The answer I heard from the people on set was that he didn't think it was funny. After he realized how upset I was about it, he said things in voicemails like "there was no script" (untrue) and "I have a weird relationship with the name Cornelius" (dumb, he had no dialogue in the tag). The real answer, I believe, is that he wanted to go home because he was tired. He probably didn't realize he was permanently damaging the episode by doing so because he often walked off set and then we would just pick up his shots later in the week. But this was the final shot of the season. The sets came down after he walked away. So this was the one time in three years that his personality caused unfixable damage to something I really held valuable.

Originally Posted by On writing and his next Adult Swim show

My suggestion for young writers: find your voice and shout it. Know who you are, know what you love, know what you hate and why. Take a piece of paper and press it to the top of your brain and share that map of your universe with anyone who will bother to look at it. If that doesn't appeal to you, the problem solves itself, because there are those among us who are compelled to do it, and they are the ones that should be doing it. Hollywood was a different place when I moved here - one notable difference being that I had to move here, because Hollywood was a geographic location, whereas it is increasingly becoming simply an industry spread around the world. Rob Schrab and I wrote a spec script and we wrote our phone number on the cover sheet and we kept ten copies of it in the back seat of each of our cars. And we annoyed the hell out of anyone we met that we thought might possibly read it. And we got lucky. Nowadays, you probably don't need the backseat of the car, you can bug people and say, "can I please email you my script, and if you have a chance, could you read it?" Many will say no, some will say yes, most of them won't read it anyway. But it's really all you can do on your end. You can just write and try to get people to read it and hope that somehow, one of them knows an agent.

Yes, I believe in my heart of hearts that, to quote Stuart Cornfeld, a producer working for Ben Stiller's Red Hour, "talent will out." Talent will out. If you should be doing what you are doing, either by grace of God or the industry's greed, you are going to be discovered. The difficulty is that you can't control when (That, by the way, is the unfair syndrome that results in, for instance, there not being enough black voices in television. Disenfranchised demographics statistically don't have the outside support system to pursue a career as frivolous and unpredictable as writing so you have Harvard graduates giving jobs to Harvard graduates in precisely the vocations that require their sheltered point of view the least, which leads to bad TV which leads to disenfranchisement of unsheltered demographics but that's an answer to a different question and now the Ketel One is doing the talking). But yes, short or tall, black or white, male or female, weird or handsome, if you are talented, your talent will out. It will rise to the top. And one of the least likable aspects of my personality, by all reports, is that I associate talent with "goodness." So by my perverse definitions, yes, good writing and good people rise to the top and get to make a difference. It's just very important that MORE OF US TRY. I'm looking at you, sixth grade black girl in a public school that likes to write but isn't being told writing is an option by anyone. Maybe it's not an option but if it's your COMPULSION, I believe you owe it to your God, your government and yourself to indulge it come hell or high water.

The wheels of animation turn slowly, especially at the beginning. We're still waiting to get an official nod from Adult Swim but it's looking good. I can't express adequately how excited I am about "Rick and Morty." It's not going to be a substitute for "Community" for 100 percent of Community fans, some will love it but some people that hated Community will love Rick and Morty and some people that love Community will hate Rick and Morty, but the bottom line is, it's a really, REALLY exciting pilot and the series has a unique potential to go just about anywhere. I want to get started on it really bad.

[LucyDuke]

Cool thread, thanks CivCube.

[LucyDuke]

Originally Posted by Cutlass

link to video.

I just ran across this elsewhere and was going to post it.

Screw you NBC, stop jerking us around.

[CivCube]

On the bright side, that was a decent video. Gives me hope that a Harmon-less Community won't be terrible. The fact that it even exists shows that there's still potential for good subversive humor at NBC's expense, if not Sony's.

I can see the fourth season doing well for a few reasons:

- Harmon wasn't 100% great all the time, either. There are some less than memorable episodes during his run too.
- Megan Ganz is still on, along with a few other writers. Ganz's voice became bigger and more noticeable throughout season 3. It's also fairly similar to Harmon's mean flavor of sarcasm.
- While the previous seasons pushed the envelope on concept episodes, that often came at the expense of character development. The gang at the end of S3 feel much the same as at its beginning. Maybe a more mainstream focus could help those more intimate beats come to the forefront.

[CivCube]

Another season announced for Community!

I was pleasantly surprised by Season 4's quality. I have faith that the writers will be able to kick it up a notch, even without Megan Ganz.

#sixseasonsandamovie

[LucyDuke]

Link?

[Azale]

Originally Posted by CivCube

Another season announced for Community!

I was pleasantly surprised by Season 4's quality. I have faith that the writers will be able to kick it up a notch, even without Megan Ganz.

#sixseasonsandamovie