TV: Community

It's been about a year since the COVID-19 shutdowns, and enough time has passed for everyone to reflect on the early days of the pandemic, when almost nothing was open and our lives seemed to be grinding to a halt. In that first month, I queued up Hulu and leaned hard on one particular show that I had never seen before - Community:

Created by Dan Harmon (who almost got himself cancelled due to his gross and unprofessional behavior towards a writer), the show focuses on a study group attending community college and their zany adventures. The rub here is that the group's misfit members have little in common and would have never met but for attending the same classes, which makes for fun personality clashes. Often entire episodes were turned over to parodies or pastiches of famous movie genres, such as the Apollo 13-esque "Basic Rocket Science":

Community was famously on the edge of cancellation for years, but eventually lasted six seasons and 110 episodes, almost fulfilling the slogan "six seasons and a movie" recited by one of the show's characters.  Well, there was never any movie, but there was a nostalgic Zoom table read a couple months into the pandemic that was almost as good: