Community Fan For Life!!!!
The show has gotten almost no major award love, mainly because so few people actually watched it and the reliance or references to nerd-culture or niche items like Dungeons and Dragons (which resulted in one of the finest episodes not just of Community, but of comedy period in the last 20 years), puppets, paintball (two amazing episodes here), Doctor Who (Inspector Spacetime), The Right Stuff, M*A*S*H, spaghetti westerns, Batman, Who’s the Boss, and so many other strange tidbits probably just flew over the head of the voters. While Downton Abbey has been racking up hardware, Community has been racking up cool points. That’s about as accurate a description as is available to explain how the program has been on for five years, delighting a vast majority of critics, but never making a dent in the mainstream or on the red carpet. In this case, it’s less a disappointment than it is expected. It doesn’t matter that Community isn’t highly decorated. We all just know it’s fantastic. That’s enough.
NBC did a horrendous, almost non-existent job in advertising the show or acting as if they cared whether it was on the schedule or not. Despite those shortcomings, Community is going to be with us forever. Six seasons when it felt like three might be the ceiling. Six seasons when the creator and lifeblood of the show was fired after the fourth year. Six seasons when NBC brought it back and burned it off, then quietly axed it. Six seasons because Yahoo offered Harmon a chance to keep it going on their new Yahoo Screen technology and finally, because, as Harmon himself described it at last year’s Comic Con:
Yahoo called me and they seemed really smart and cool. I thought – I cannot be the one to not do this.
And, Dan, as a result of your unflinching vision and your willingness to risk it all every week to tell the story you wanted, outside of the network that seemed merely to tolerate your show, as a result of your amazing cast, almost all extremely likable on and off screen, and as a result of something truly unique on a medium that can fall into extreme malaise, particularly in comedy — as a result of all of that.
You’re number five bro. And that’s, in the words of Abed, “cool cool cool cool cool.”
All five current seasons of Community are available on Hulu and the sixth season will begin in March, exclusively on the new Yahoo Screen streaming service. You’ve got time to catch up.
via Top 10 Comedies: #5 Community | FOX Sports.