At the start of the 2009-2010 fall season, critics were rooting the hardest for “Modern Family,” “Glee” and “Community.” At the halfway mark, two of those early favorites have shot ahead of the pack, while the squad from Greendale Community College is still trying to catch its breath.

The debut of the NBC sitcom attracted 7.7 million viewers, but since then it has averaged 5.4 million, enough to get a full-season pickup on a struggling network, but not enough to qualify it as a hit or guarantee a second season.

“We’re No. 1 among Asian pervs,” said actor Ken Jeong, who, like the rest of the cast assembled on set this January afternoon is more interested in cracking jokes than analyzing why their sitcom is off to a slow start.

There’s every reason to believe that with some patience and promotion, the sitcom will develop into a fan favorite.

“I’m really proud of the show we’re doing,” said Yvette Nicole Brown, who portrays the gang’s den mother. “I feel like the people who were meant to find the show will find the show, and I’m glad NBC has given us a full year to find that out.”

Read the full story Modesto Bee

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.

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Jack Black has scheduled a sitcom appearance, the “Tropic Thunder” actor has signed on to guest in a January episode of the Chevy Chase/Joel McHale comedy “Community.”

“Community” — which follows a manipulative, young lawyer (McHale) whose is disbarred and forced to attend a local community college where he befriends a band of misfits — has been gaining critical praise throughout the season.
It could, however, use a bit of a boost in ratings.

Source: Zap2It

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.

Ho Ho Ho! Or should I say, Ha Ha Ha. The end of the fall semester here at Greendale is always the start of the wonderful winter holiday season. And who better to ring in the season than our very own jolly Mr. Winter! Keeping with the constant efforts within the public school system to remain PC, Dean Pelton has created a new non-religious icon for all of us Human Beings here at Greendale to worship.

Read the full Greendale Weekly at the Greendale Community College site.

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 ]

Community NBC Season 1, Episode 11: Politics of Human Sexuality

After a challenge from Britta, Jeff must find a girl for a double date with Pierce and his new girlfriend. Meanwhile, Britta and Shirley help Annie get an anatomical education for a presentation she must give at a special health fair for the school.

[Source: Daemons TV ]

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.”

Community Episode 10: “Environmental Science” — When Señor Chang assigns an absurd amount of homework to his Spanish class the gang nominates Jeff to talk some sense into him. Jeff begrudgingly agrees and the two strike up an unlikely friendship which backfires when the gang realizes Jeff is receiving perks that they aren’t. Meanwhile, Troy and Abed run into their own problems when their biology lab subject goes missing.