TV Verdict

My fiancée and I love Joel McHale. Love love love him.  Part of our weekend routine is snuggling up on the couch, starting any unwatched episodes of The Soup or The Soup Presents on the DVR, and cackling for 22 minutes solid.

So when we heard that he was finally getting a starring role in a scripted TV show this fall named Community from his shameless cross-network promotion on E!, we prepped the DVR in anticipation.  Even though it was a sitcom (and we generally don’t do sitcoms), we figured it might break the mold because A) Joel McHale is fantastic, and B) other sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory have surprised us in recent years.

Community’s premise hits close to home for me, too—a lawyer is forced to return to community college to get a legitimate college degree or be disbarred, and while doing so, he manages to befriend a group of token misfits.  The college where I teach deals with a lot of community college transfer students, so the stereotypes attacked in the series make me giggle because I deal with them professionally so often.

As good as McHale is, the pilot left me iffy.  It had potential, but for an ensemble show, it didn’t grab me because I didn’t know the characters.  They didn’t gel as a group, even though their dynamic was already somewhat intriguing.  I never felt the titular theme congeal well enough.  But there was a Ryan Seacrest joke and the British professor played by John Oliver made me giggle uncontrollably at times, so it earned its DVR slot for the week and became fodder for at least that weekend’s McHale-athon.

And, like most shows, week 2 (“Spanish 101”) is where they hooked me.  Whereas the pilot was playing off blatant The Breakfast Club parallels and setting up the characters, the second episode was able to fall into the series’ structure without worrying about telling me who the characters were.  Casting Ken Jeong as the angry Asian Spanish professor was brilliant, and the class presentation montage with Chevy Chase (who is still hilarious, by the way) and Joel McHale called up memories of my favorite How I Met Your Mother episode where Barney puts on a miserably hilarious one-man play, instantly making me connect the two series in my head indefinitely. And when that happened, I just threw in the towel.  NBC won.

Weeks 3 and 4 kept up the pace and the dialogue just kept getting smarter and smarter.  Between Abed and his parent issues in week 3’s “Introduction to Film” and Joel McHale’s snarky dialogue regarding green tea pretentiousness in episode 4, “Social Psychology,” Community has proven to be one of the few shows I am always able to make time for.  The writing is clever, and that’s a feat for sitcoms if you ask me.  Community does not fall into the “Golly gee, men sure don’t like marriage!”category that plagues most sitcoms.

When I go to work and try to talk to my TV-loving colleagues about it, no one has ever heard of it.  “Joel McWho?” they ask.  So I’m able to then point them to not only NBC’s Community but The Soup on E!  I’m all about getting great shows that might be under-marketed what viewers I can (building community, as it were), so if you have not yet seen nor heard about Community, give it a shot.  Hulu it.  The worst you can do is hate it, and I just don’t think that’s going to happen.  My prediction: someone in the cast will remind you of either yourself or someone you know, and you will keep watching for that reason alone.

Image Courtesy of NBC Universal.