Jim Rash, better known as Dean Pelton, will be shown on this Wednesday’s episode of Top Chef Masters on Bravo. On the show, he introduces one of the coolest challenge on this season yet: crowdsourcing ingredients at an improv comedy show.

Something Weird is Happening

The chefs are at The Groundlings for a good time but something doesn’t seem right about this improv performance.

The New York Magazine has an interview with Community Creator Dan Harmon. Here are the highlights:

When I first started watching the show, I was initially turned off by McHale’s character, Jeff. And then very quickly, it seemed like he turned into a nice guy. Was that always the plan?
When we started out, I wanted to spend the first twelve episodes telling the story of this guy who’s this lone wolf, having his membranes dissolved by a new community. That plan sort of went awry in that I think we were more successful than we predicted we would be with making the audience comfortable with this group as an unlikely family. So really, by the Halloween episode, it already felt like we’d told the story of Jeff growing on these people and vice versa. We also didn’t predict that people would adore every single one of those characters for different reasons. It feels like we jumped light years ahead of schedule, and could do this ensemble-comedy show. … And Joel McHale can do his own thing in the background that can be some sort of geek psychological story about him overcoming his pettiness. That’s an upcoming episode, by the way.

What’s up with Jeff and Britta (Gillian Jacobs)? Are they going to be the next Pam and Jim?
That’s actually another important thing about the pop-culture aspect of the show: The characters have all watched Friends, they know Star Trek, they’ve watched The Office and 30 Rock, even. Much like the audience, they’re not going to tolerate having a “will they/won’t they” shoved in their face. The nice thing about having a character like Abed is that you can be meta, and the audience can trust you because you can send them little signals that you’re on the case.

And what about some of your other pairs, like Abed and Troy. They’re such a funny duo; was that a casting choice?
No, it was way more organic than that. I remember the writers and I being very excited about Chevy Chase’s character and Troy, how they were going to be the Beavis and Butt-head of the show. But we sort of abandoned that story, because it didn’t germinate as quickly. And then when we did that first 30-second tag that goes on the end of an episode, that rap with Troy and Abed, and people loved it so much, and you could feel the chemistry while we were shooting, it was instantly apparent that that’s the thing you go towards.

How long do you think the show can last?
Jeff is going to get a bachelor’s degree, and contrary to popular belief, you can get one of those at a community college. And so we’ve got that four-year story — is his life changed or the same? Or is something going to happen to derail the whole thing, for example, the cancellation of our show? I don’t have any ambition to be the next Laverne & Shirley, and have it run two decades. Jeff’s not going to grow a beard and start teaching there while the rest of them open a pet store across the street.

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.

This is a shot that just came out in the new issue of BlackBook magazine. From the photographer:

The magazine said the issue was the “spotlight” issue, so, every picture had to in some fashion incorporate a spotlight effect. I wanted to do something funny and goofier then my normal somber pictures. I also figured the actors would have an easier time if they could goof around with each other instead of trying to be serious or sexy. I had this vision of Mr. McHale and Ms. Jacobs as rich, NY socialites who had t break out of prison. The idea being that they are caught in the searchlight trying to escape. We had so much fun doing this and had many crazy fits of laughter. I’m a big fan of this shot. It was also, believe it or not, the very first shot we took. I’ve included the visual reference I had which was the iconic WINGS Band On The Runalbum cover.

Source: This Photo Life

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 ]

Abed started copying his friends life and turning it into a student films. These films, which include The Guild’s Sandeep Parikh playing Pudi’s Abed character, can be viewed on the Greendale Community College website on the AV Department page.

Episode One of a new web series by GCC film student Abed Nadir.