I’ve kinda just left sitcoms behind me as I get further into my 20s than I care to divulge. Not out of some sense of superiority or whatever, but because they’re just so much work – the American production schedule is hellish, typically requiring 22 or 24 episodes of any hit comedy show, at least before the introduction of mass streaming and the slow death of broadcast television finally convinced the big networks to adopt something closer to the British model of brevity. Community getting cut clean in half Solomon-style from the end of Season 3 onwards, getting just 13 episodes per season until the end of the series, actually got me interested in watching Netflix’s latest sitcom acquisition.
I’m surprised that it is over 10 years old, it usually felt pretty relevant or up to date, probably because of how it jumped right into meta jokes via obviously planned breakout character Abed from the very first episode. There’s a lot to say about the trajectory of the show that I simply cannot fit into a review, so I’ll summarise: Jeff & Annie was a fucked up subplot, the Dean was their only good (and great!) recurring character, Ken Jeong is fucking awful, Abed carried the show, Britta deserved much better writing, the G.I Joe episode is my favourite one, Chevy Chase being a cunt IRL made the show better than it would have been otherwise, and Paget Brewster should have been brought in much earlier as she was perfectly casted.
7/10: It kinda Britta’d itself
