The Year in TV
By Emily Nussbaum Published Dec 5, 2010
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A scene from Community's upcoming episode, "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas."
(Photo: Courtesy of NBC) |
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It’s conventional wisdom that the antenna of a TV top ten—the selection that gets the fat print and the pretty illustration—should be a drama. It must be cinematic; it must be dark. It should almost certainly be on cable, probably with someone named David in the show-runner slot. So when I choose the network sitcom Community as No. 1, I’m not saying it doesn’t have serious competition: I couldn’t even fit Sons of Anarchy or Men of a Certain Age onto this list, each of which, were I in a different mood today, might rise right to the top. Cable still hosts the most ambitious television experiments, providing a place where oddball art can find a niche audience (and one that buys DVDs).
And yet it’s worth pointing out that smack in the middle of network, there it is: this auteurist sitcom, slamming it out of the park each week of its second season. Half-hour comedies are as potent an art form as one-hour dramas, and at the moment, the schedule is studded with great ones (Parks and Recreation, Eastbound & Down, Modern Family, Raising Hope, Bored to Death, Childrens Hospital, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and The Middle). Community is theoretically set at a community college, but it uses that conceit the way The Simpsons uses Springfield, as a jumping-off point for just about anything. The show explodes TV conventions while working within them, like the boldest meta-TV from Monty Python’s Flying Circus through 30 Rock. And it’s consistently hilarious, in large part because creator Dan Harmon has such a strong, icy grip on his characters and his idiosyncratic ideas about what’s funny. This season, Community pulled off an action-packed (and sexy) Halloween zombie episode, a self-referential riff on Charlie Kaufman–style self-referentiality, and the single best spiritual trampoline sequence ever. In a competitive environment for comedy, Community is this moment’s top dog.
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Can't wait for this week's episode! I've heard about and been waiting for the claymation episode since a while ago! :D
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