Community is busy at work making a special episode dedicated to the crime drama, complete with the “dun-dun’ sound effect.

In Basic Lupine Urology, Greendale is devastated when their science experiment is ruined! Their poor little yam sprout has been demolished, yikes!

So, like any other community college students would do, they begin a detailed investigation into the matter to find the culprit. And as soon as they do, he or she will have to face the wrath of judge…

Source: Perez Hilton

Community cast and creative team will be at the Paley Center on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 7:00 pm PT

Get tickets here.

IN PERSON:
Joel McHale, “Jeff Winger”
Chevy Chase, “Pierce”
And additional members of the cast and creative team.

Boasting a crack ensemble cast led by Joel McHale as wisecracking disgraced lawyer Jeff Winger, Community follows the misadventures of a quirky group of students at Greendale Community College, an institute of less than higher learning. Creator Dan Harmon’s cult credentials are impeccable—he’s behind Channel 101 and The Sarah Silverman Program, among other alt-comedy favorites—and Community is an intriguing and wholly successful move into mainstream, ready-for-primetime entertainment. A critical and popular success, Community delights with its rapid-fire, off-kilter comedy, its fundamentally humane heart, and a perfectly deployed Chevy Chase as ragingly inappropriate moist towelette tycoon Pierce Hawthorne.

Decisions as to which network shows will be asked back for the 2010-11 season will made over the next couple of months.

For NBC’s new comedy “Community,” it’s like being a college freshman with a 2.0 GPA — it’s doing OK but there’s no guarantee it will return for a sophomore year.

For those of you who have not found this cool comedy, “Community” features the biggest band of misfit schoolmates since “The Breakfast Club.” Their leader, Jeff, is an ex-lawyer (Joel McHale) who’s more interested in the social aspects of community college than making the grade.

The show has received critical support, but when it comes to viewers, “Community” falls in the middle of the 130 network programs on the five networks.

A solution for the low ratings from Chevy Chase, who plays the world savvy community college student Pierce, has him thinking like a transfer student. “We could go to another network,” Chase sarcastically suggests during an interview on the set.

Read the full story on Fresnobee

The Flickcast has their own top of 2009 in TV, and Community made it:

Ranked next to new shows like Glee and Modern Family, this little show about a community college in Denver, Colorado is making a big splash. With a cast including Joel McHale, Chevy Chase, and Derrick Comedy star Don Glover, this show has some of the smartest writing on TV right now, even if it did get snubbed in the Golden Globes and the WGA Awards.

Tim Goodman from the SF Gate choose the best comedies fo the year and #13 is Community:

13. “Community,” NBC. Sometimes superb, sometimes creatively erratic, this freshman series about a group of diverse students and a strange faculty at a community college is now hitting more than missing. It, too, has a lot of potential and has rewarded those sticking with it as the writers hone the characters.

Having taken a break for Thanksgiving, Community returns with a brand new episode this week. IGN paid a visit to the set of this episode, and when asked Joel McHale (“Jeff”) what the storyline was, his deadpan response said it all: “Venereal diseases are involved.” He then paused, before adding, “So far in the script, I have not contracted anything.”

As Alison Brie (“Annie”) sat down with IGN on a Greendale Community College bench to discuss Community, it was hard not to notice her t-shirt, which had “STD” prominently written in the center – though closer examination showed it was for the “Greendale STD Fair ’09.” Brie told IGN she especially enjoyed the phrase on the bottom of the shirt, which read, “Catch Knowledge.”

As Brie noted, “Annie is a character who’s very much into being at the forefront of every project that’s going on in the school. She really wants her brag sheet to be great when she’s ready to move on to her state school or other colleges. So she just tries to head up every project, and this is her latest.” Brie added that while Annie is trying to promote safe sex, “It kind of seems like they’re trying to promote STDs. We’re celebrating STDs at the fair. So if you have one, come on by! It’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

Read the full story on IGN

M. Garrett Bauman, an emeritus professor of English at Monroe Community College in New York, however, doesn’t like the characters from Community.

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauman argues that the show’s cast of quirky characters (a divorcee, a former football star and a once straight A high school student to name a few) are not representative of students at a real community college. Bauman says the show overlooks people too poor to go to an expensive four-year university, people on welfare, high school slackers etc.

Here are some highlights from his article:

Don’t expect a realistic portrayal of community-college life any more than you expect as much in other comedies about social institutions like M*A*S*H, Scrubs, or The Office. Like them,Community satirizes the institution while making the people empathetic or endearingly eccentric because of the crazy place they inhabit. Community is the usual story about us. The subtext says we are caring survivors despite our institutions’ attempts to debase and destroy us.

While Community conveys community colleges’ diversity in age, gender, and race, it conspicuously avoids students in career programs or those who are truly academically weak or unprepared. Its core seven all have personality, brains, and zest. Despite the jab at air-conditioner repair, our characters take film, astronomy, and traditional liberal arts; most have no stated career goals. I suppose students truly shattered under life’s wheel and those seeking technical jobs don’t make for perky television material…

Community does not capture the real community college—as if there were one. But neither doM*A*S*H, Scrubs, or The Office capture actual institutions. Comedy exaggerates, romanticizes, and deconstructs. Community plays off stereotypes and clichés, reinforcing and puncturing them at the same time. Another college show currently airing, Greek, about sororities and fraternities, is just as absurd, with elegant houses, formal flirting lessons, and “unhappy face” cupcakes sent to decline invitations. It enacts the same myth as Community: People muddle forward despite the institutions that are supposed to nurture them but don’t.

The reality—of strangers working closely together for 15 weeks on commuter campuses, working long hours to pay bills, poring over diagrams of air conditioners or Spanish verb forms, and then going their separate ways—is too cold for comedy. The show may miss the intellectual life of community colleges and ignore the prosaic struggles many students face, but it has created precisely what is often missing in real community colleges—community.

[Source: umdbk.com and Chronicle ]

Tressugar calls Alison Brie Adorable, and we agree.
She plays Trudy Campbell on Mad Men and she is also on NBC’s Community.
Other than radiating ebullience in real life, Alison, who says she’s rarely recognized on the street, seems nothing like either character. She grew up with hippie parents in South Pasadena, CA, where she still lives and showed up to a Pasadena Weekly interview in a “Die Yuppie Scum” t-shirt.
But Alison’s not as innocent as she or her characters look. She told Pasadena Weekly: “I don’t know why people see me . . . like I’m all prim and proper, when I couldn’t be more different. People think I come off that way, but I’m not.”
She’s right. In this 2007 skit, she dishes it right back to the Internet’s most infamous yogi, The Underminer, when he asks her to be in his variety show that’s like “Curb Your Enthusiasm meets You Can’t Do That on Television.”

Yvette Nicole Brown of NBC’s Community sat down with TVGuide.com, offering a taste of hilarious off-screen antics. Brown also teases what’s coming up with her character Shirley, the many relationships at the community college and who may be next to lock lips with Joel McHale.

Here are some highlights:

TVGuide.com: What’s the on-set reaction been to the full-season pickup for Community?
Yvette Nicole Brown: It’s been amazing. Every week we’re finding out that more and more people are watching. We’re like, “Really? We got five more people? Awesome!” We’re looking at it as a grass-roots movement and every bit by bit we’re going to keep growing. Slow and steady wins the race, so we’re tortoises, maybe not hares.

TVGuide.com: A love triangle formed in last week’s episode between Brita, Annie and Jeff. Will that continue?
Brown: I think that was just for that episode. There’s an age difference involved. Well, we’re in Hollywood … age difference, what is that? I really think people want to see Annie with Troy [Donald Glover]. Annie’s had an unrequited crush for years on this guy and I’d love to see that go its natural course. I think Jeff and Brita will, of course, find their way together. That episode was just an anomaly, just like Pierce having a crush on Shirley … Hear that, writers? [Laughs]

The LA Times commented that ‘Community’ loses out to ‘Modern Family’, here are some of their reasonings:

“Community,” though, feels like a fourth wheel. Buried amid NBC’s Comedy of the Awkward, this show, about thrown-together students at a community college, is forced to lean on tricks native to those other shows but that are worse suited to this one’s premise. There’s no Michael Scott or Leslie Knope here. And it’s not that Jeff Winger would make for a great traditional hero, or even antihero: He’s generically slick, moderately intelligent and smarmy without cause. He’s not oblivious; he knows too much. Even though other characters — ascendant social outcast Annie (Alison Brie) and self-assured oddball Abed (Danny Pudi) — aspire to the “Office” mold, they’re actually remarkably normal and evenly drawn. (And in the case of Ken Jeong, as the Spanish professor Señor Chang, hilarious.)

Just because a character is unusual for prime time doesn’t mean he or she has to engage in odd behavior — that’s a tenet understood perfectly well by another new ensemble comedy with quirky characters, “Modern Family” (ABC, 9 p.m. Wednesdays). The characters here are just as unfamiliar to prime time — a gay couple with an adopted baby, a May-December romance. All together, “Modern Family” ends up riskier and stranger than “Community” but never feels forced.

Consider the shows’ use of music in its plot lines. Earlier this month, a “Community” secondary story revolved around a character writing a bitter breakup song about his ex, Britta (Gillian Jacobs), called, imaginatively, “Britta Is a B.” That resulted in an intervention by Pierce (Chevy Chase), who joined the band, then quit it, resulting in a second song: “Pierce Is a B.” Neither was memorable beyond the punch line.

By comparison, last month on “Modern Family,” Dylan (Reid Ewing) wrote a song for his girlfriend, Haley (Sarah Hyland). The result, “In the Moonlight (Do Me),” was sharply written, funny and memorable (boosted by a closing sequence when several other characters find themselves humming the song and an online companion video).

What do you think?