Jello Reviews - Community (ft. Will)
Added 2023-09-24 21:31:29 +0000 UTCJello (and Will!) review Jello's favorite show ever. Of course, since Jello has seen it 15+ times he has a lot to say about it.
Time to talk about the show I've watched more than probably any other. The first two seasons of Community are an absolute masterpiece and honestly my single favorite show of all time. If you have any interest in comedy or dialogue writing you absolutely need to check it out.
The rest of the show.
Hm.
I have notes! I have thoughts!
Will is here too! Will was nice enough to sit through the show with me. We rocketed through the first 2.5 seasons and then took... some time to get through the rest. I have a lot to say on the direction this show's general tone goes through. I like to describe it as "forgetting how to smile."
Much like my Columbo review, I did a watch guide for those interested. Honestly I'd just say "Watch all of S1-2 except that red episode in S1" and after that it's your choice if you want to keep going.
Comments
I finally got around to watching community cuz of this review. The writing and comedy really is amazing and I’m glad I watched it for that alone. Honestly though, even in the first two seasons, the weird inter-friend group crushes and hook ups and just general weirdness was really uncomfy. May just be me having a soft stomach for this stuff, but it’s such a real and toxic dynamic to bring into situations and it just dragged for me at a point. Also I didn’t realize how on point the self critical stuff you were talking about was. In season two, Jeff literally says “why is everyone at this school obsessed with race?”. And that line is sandwiched between two jokes about race. Like if you have the ability to write a line referencing it, maybe just don’t do it or at least change the punchline. Despite those things, I’m really enjoying the show so far. The highs have been really dang high. I’ve been tossing out quotes like a bait and tackle to see if any of my friends have seen the show. Thanks as always for the recommendation!
Rohan Iyer
2025-05-27 18:58:34 +0000 UTCI think I'd have to *re*watch it to come up with anything interesting to say about it. Some random points I have off the top of my head: - Jake and Amy is one of the best normie leading couples on mainstream TV. I actually believe that they are in love and I find their dynamic is mostly better after they've actually hooked up. - That being said the episode where Amy and the crew basically bully Jake into having a baby is hands-down the worst episode in the show and so hi-key fucked up - Wuntch and Holt have the best dynamic in the show, I'm sad she wasn't around longer in the middle seasons - I actually disapprove when people call this show copaganda. The first season has some shades of this where Diaz literally even makes a few police brutality jokes, but it's pretty obvious this season is very pro-liberal. It's got a clear stance on gun control and they even reshot most of S6 after the George Floyd stuff to change how the character handled being a show about idealized, responsible cops, which must've been an enormous financial hit in order to do a morally upstanding creative vision. I really respect that. - The Heist episodes start fun and get SO overdone even like four seasons in. I swear there are like three separate heists in the last season, it's extremely lame. - Holt starts as the show's best character and rapidly becomes its worse imo because they keep writing him being The Problem Character in the exact same way which is such a pet peeve of mine. - Hate how Gina is handled half the time.
JelloApocalypse
2023-11-11 00:55:12 +0000 UTCwow, that sure was an hour and fifty five minutes of listening to someone have the exact same opinions as me
Flare TheGunCalamity
2023-10-10 06:27:31 +0000 UTCI'd adore a Jello Review for Broklynn 99 at some point, if you feel like you'd have stuff to talk about. It's such a fun show and I'd love to see you all gush more about it!
Ace The Caesar
2023-10-06 02:06:59 +0000 UTCThis made me watch community, and Holy shit its sooooo good. Im 3 episodes in and the intro to episode 3 had me rolling with how dense and thightly written it is. And yes somehow all 3 of them have race jokes and its oddly distracting,still pretty good tho.
beau
2023-09-30 16:59:00 +0000 UTCWith all the love for Frankie, I kept expecting one of your quotes of her to be "Did we give a degree to a dog?" While it's not a majorly funny line, it's the one that has stuck with me for the last 3 years since I watched it. For a while I thought Annie was the one who said it because it would be fitting for her to feel like her degree is worthless if that was the case. By your suggestion, I went to a compilation of Frankie quotes and it was literally the first clip. Very happy I checked out this review.
Shortstop
2023-09-27 04:22:31 +0000 UTCThis is a really great quick way to summarize it.
JelloApocalypse
2023-09-26 22:53:18 +0000 UTCI watched 2/3 and thought it was like. Fine:tm:
JelloApocalypse
2023-09-26 22:52:42 +0000 UTCConsidering how much you love Community, I recommend you check out Arrested Development, which IMO is its only rival in ability to tell killer jokes at a relentless pace. It also has some of that early-2000's-hasn't-aged-well-humor (probably more than Community has) but the brilliance more than makes up for it. Best of all, you can probably check out, like, three episodes before you decide whether or not it's for you because it comes in having immediately figured itself out.
Legend Account
2023-09-26 22:00:23 +0000 UTCIt’s still kinda crazy that even after the almost complete drought of decent ideas in season 6 that Frankie could still turn out as good as she did. Carried by that actress for sure.
Will
2023-09-26 02:30:41 +0000 UTCmy favorite callback in the show is the third time anyone says beetlejuice in the show, beetlejuice appears in the background
Flare TheGunCalamity
2023-09-26 00:05:11 +0000 UTCI just finished my own re-watch of community last month so this is perfectly timed. I felt the same weariness about bad trends when I watched season 3 as well. It was a bummer to get reminders in season 3 that the show didn't get bad all at once and there were seeds of it earlier. I have some quick snappy thoughts on the latter seasons. Season 4 has good vision and intention with middling execution. Season 5/6 have bad vision and intention with high quality execution.
I have nothing BUT contempt for this court
2023-09-25 17:50:08 +0000 UTChttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u34f3Q6dxMM unrelated, but please be aware of this suspiciously familiar game from a bunch of folks that were at Overworks back then
mkb
2023-09-25 06:26:47 +0000 UTCSeason 3 is worth watching too if you liked 1/2. I just have trouble with it because any time i try to revisit it I can't help but see the first symptoms of the things I dislike about the second half of the show everywhere.
JelloApocalypse
2023-09-25 05:43:09 +0000 UTC"I think Coolsville sucks!"
JelloApocalypse
2023-09-25 05:42:15 +0000 UTCDang, I actually only ever watched 1 and 2 and just forgot to keep up with 3 halfway through, and it sounds like I dodged a bullet. But... I don't know if I'll watch the whole rest of the show for this, but the recommendation to go look up a Best Of compilation for Frankie was a good one, oh my god. "What if Percival King, Towa Herschel, and Dwight Schrute did the fusion dance and then had several simultaneous mid-life crises" is such an A+ character. *Tragic* that she's stuck in the latter half of Community. I would watch a whole show of her desperately trying to rescue a succession of different Greendale-esque comedy disaster workplaces from themselves.
Benedict Ide
2023-09-25 04:57:10 +0000 UTCGonna clip that line of you saying "I fucking love Franky" and confuse the people watching the one piece book club
Drednot
2023-09-25 03:22:22 +0000 UTCI got a pretty strong stomach for media that’s kind of cynical and perhaps a little asshole-y, i like stuff like Venture Bros, Always Sunny, Metalocalypse, Morel Orel, etc, but I think the rub I have with Community is that unlike those shows it didn’t feel like that was necessarily the intent going in. Season 3 is probably still my favorite because i think it adds in that sort of cynical spice while still holding over a lot of the good will from the previous seasons, but as you said, the whole show afterwards reeks so hard of this behind-the-scenes bitterness that its kind of the only thing you think about while watching it. Not that I think that’s even a bad thing on it’s own either, End of Evangelion (fucking bold thing to compare this too, i know) is infamously (and even somewhat disputably) a project born at least partially out of bitterness and anger following the tumultuous production of the original series, and its one of my all-time favorites, but the thing with that is that Evangelion was already this sort of brooding arthouse thing from the jump, and the context within the show leading up to it makes it so that the general tone of the movie makes total sense, but here it just kinda feels like watching a guy slowly get more and more bitter and jaded as he takes it out on the characters he made for the fun sitcom he was writing and he ends up shoving characters into boxes they dont really fit into because he didnt really elaborate on why they’d end up there in the first place. like, when i saw the sort of cynical aspects of Season 3 i saw it as like, something that was going to be paid off at some point, but it never really does. That unfortunately makes it so that my favorite season, while good in a vacuum, is this portent of missed potential to come. I’m usually all for Sad Guy media and I’m even sometimes for something that starts out fun but gets progressively bleaker, but at least in this instance, i did not like it when a nice thing eventually grew into being not nice.
Justice Hainsworth
2023-09-25 03:05:04 +0000 UTCI'm gonna listen to this despite not having watched Community yet but planning to You and Will doing a review together is too good to skip
Bran Garbaj
2023-09-25 01:27:13 +0000 UTCYeah cynical circle jerk shows aren't my cup of tea. Main reason I dropped the other Harmon show Rick and Morty after season 3. Like, there's only so much misery a person can take. And I hate that so many people, including the shows creators are like, "Well actually it's about why cynicism is bad." And I'm like, "is it though?" Sure, there is plenty of episodes where characters get punished for doing bad things, but I don't think there is a single episode where characters get rewarded for good things. I feel like that was a problem with some later Community episodes too.
Folkloric
2023-09-25 00:49:46 +0000 UTCIt’s funny The Soup with Joel McHale was exactly the reason I started watching Community too.
X-ian
2023-09-25 00:45:26 +0000 UTCYeah even if they WERE closer in age, it definitely wasn't healthy. I actually kind of enjoy the finale for Annie fully recognizing that and Jeff recognizing it at some level. I just don't like all the episodes it took to get there.
JelloApocalypse
2023-09-25 00:17:18 +0000 UTCHoly shit, I always considered Jeff and Annie’s relationship bad. They always seemed bad for each other. And I always felt like some of the writers were wanting it to have it happen while the other half desperately wanted it to stop. I had so many reasons why I didn’t like it. It never even hit me about the age gap between the two was the biggest reason why it’s horrible. When you brought it up I was like “Holy shit it was!”
BigMoffers
2023-09-25 00:05:39 +0000 UTCI haven't watched the review yet but yes Highschoolers episode sucks so much ass. Between that and season 4 it's the only part of Community I skip. And while Chaos Theory or Abed Christmas might be the best episodes, Pillows and Blankets is probably my favorite, cracks me up in ways few episodes have.
Folkloric
2023-09-24 22:42:47 +0000 UTCHonestly I think you might've made the right call. My tl;dr about Community is this: The first two seasons are perfect. The third has a lot of high points but it's during the third season where the show begins tipping from "setting of lovable plucky misfits learning and growing together in a comedically incompetent school" to "Greendale is a sad place for bad people and they will never escape it". Then when Harmon came back for S5 he leaned FULL-ON into the latter, partially fueled by bitterness about S4. The show outright ignores everything the characters learned and went through together in the early seasons. It becomes a series where the moral is 'We're bad people, but that's ok because everyone is a bad person. We do not need to be better." It's really bizarre to watch Harmon try and justify all the character being sad, washed-up has-beens when Troy is still there because you can see them awkwardly try and write around how Troy is actually really happy. Nothing bad has happened to him between S4 and S5, and they're just praying you forget he still has god-tier air conditioner abilities that could net him a cushy job for the rest of his life whenever he wants. It's after Troy leaves that the show *really* tilts all the way into its own misery. But at least Franky shows up in Season 6 and she's the best so there's that!
JelloApocalypse
2023-09-24 22:08:27 +0000 UTCOh heck yea I loved community when I binged it for the first time a few years back, although Ended up stopping like an episode or two after Troy left. Been meaning to rebinge it tho
Julia Yaniger
2023-09-24 21:39:38 +0000 UTCOh sweet a thorough critique of Artistically Significant Sitcom “Community” from the Thorough Critiques Guy and a new viewer! Something to look forward to after I’m done doing almost nothing for hours here at work
Flaming Olive
2023-09-24 21:35:39 +0000 UTC
