Streets Ahead: A Community Retrospective
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- Опубликовано: 8 июн 2024
- Booyah.
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#community #sixseasonsandamovie #videoessay
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:20 1, Why Community’s Pilot Was Streets Ahead
00:13:57 2, How Anthropology 101 Changed Community
00:26:11 3, Biology 101 and the Cost of Community’s Greatness
00:39:13 4, Community, History 101, and the Gas Leak Year
00:53:45 5, How Community Came Back from the Dead
01:07:25 6, Ladders: The Many Facets of Community’s Last Start
01:25:40 Conclusion
Sources / articles / videos referenced, by section:
1 -
CaptainMidnight video: • How Community Changed
www.cracked.com/blog/3-classi...
2 -
earnthis.net/community-season...
www.pastemagazine.com/tv/comm...
www.avclub.com/community-pasc...
3 -
/ season_3_episode_1_bio...
/ community_season_3_epi...
tvline.com/news/nbc-schedulin...
4 -
screenrant.com/community-dan-...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communi...)
• How (Not) To Revive A ...
5 -
www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/...
6 -
www.yahoo.com/entertainment/b...
/ did_harmon_want_to_do_...
www.thewrap.com/com munity-creator-dan-harmon-not-writing-season-6-as-if-it-were-the-end/
S6E1 commentary: • Community - S06E01 | C...
www.slashfilm.com/923546/dan-...
/ why_does_season_6_feel...
www.tvguide.com/news/communit...
SEO for the algorithm, from Wikipedia and IMDB: Community is an American television sitcom created by Dan Harmon. The series ran for 110 episodes over six seasons, with its first five seasons airing on NBC from September 17, 2009, to April 17, 2014, and its final season airing on Yahoo! Screen from March 17 to June 2, 2015. Set at a community college in the fictional Colorado town of Greendale, the series stars an ensemble cast including Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, Ken Jeong, Chevy Chase, and Jim Rash. In Community, a suspended lawyer is forced to enroll in a community college with an eccentric staff and student body. 
Развлечения
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Season 6 is easily the most underrated season of the show. It has some of my favourite episodes of entire show. 'Basic Email Security', 'Advanced Safety Features', and the last four episodes are absolute peak imo. 'Wedding Videography' is easily one of the funniest episodes of the entire series
I always enjoyed those episodes and upon rewatch, the darker, cynical pain of the characters is very powerful.
Elroy is genuinely one of the funniest characters to grace the show. "Yes they are, leave them alone!" and "Now this is a man who knows how to marry his cousin!" are among the absolute best lines in the entire series
The tags in S6 should be released on DVD.
Gillian Jacobs has said this same thing! So true!
Ladders
"What sort of board certifies a tutor?" is the perfect line to introduce Annie
I loved when dean yells “JESUS WEEPPTT!“ while wearing his vr headset😂😂😂😂
Alison Brie's acting as the lovestruck teeny-bopper Annie in the S2 opener is so hilarious
Frankie and Elroy carried season 6.
Elroy STOLE Wedding Videography. In my brain that entire episode has been reduced to a montage of Elroy hyping up white people
To the funniest moments in "Ladders" I would add Britta's line: "Abed, don't make this more dramatic than it is. It's just a blood oath to defy evil."
My single favorite moment in all of the first episodes is the focus on Annie as Jeff & Britta do their awkward kiss in the Anthro class in the S2 opener. Such a great choice of shot and Alison just knocks it out of the park
_so… it begins_
@@PillarofGarbage cue romantic music by Academy Award winner Ludwig Goransson
Also Annie very obviously peeking through her fingers when Jeff plays pool lmao
My favorite part from Ladders was when Abed was doing a montage of emails and Frankie gets on to him about changing his shirt.
I love the quick Danny and Drew are the same person bit
I love how Ladders reflects this comfy vibe that season 6 has with the 4 original study group members. They're used to Greendale's wackiness and have a well-defined rhythm with each other. They've all taken on some common group traits and rounded out their personalities. Abed is more expressive and scarcastic, Annie is generally down for silliness like with the drinking on campus, Jeff is softer and more into the groups wacky antics and Abed's meta, Britta is... well, she takes herself less seriously and is more open to fun (a common theme for all but Abed, who was already open to fun) but her overall change as a character is harder to pin down as one thing. This is all shown by the characters making a speakeasy while Abed is the only one NOT involved in it, somehow. They didn't HAVE to theme their bat thay way, but they WANTED to, god damn it!
Ex: at the end of Grifting, they're jumping up and down, chanting as a group about getting hotdogs or something. Abed isn't too stoic for it, Jeff and Britta aren't too cool and cynical got it. They're just all sharing a moment of enthusiasm together.
I also think the meta in the final season is really razor sharp, at reflected by Ladders.
The episode structures are also the most loose and don't stick to the formats lf the typical epsiodes within earlier seasons did. (Study room opening, other scenes, mid season study room sceene, more scenes, study room closing, tag)
Overall, there's just a sense that the writers are really in the groove with the show.
Another whimsical s6 abed moment:
Abed: "can I be his assistant?"
Dean: "not for money"
Abed: "can I be his friend?"
Dean: Elroy, abed is your friend"
Abed: *smiles to himself, does a lil fist bump*
i always loved the line "men are monsters who crave young flesh!!" because it does a good job of conveying what the show wants to tell us: our characters aren't great people, but they are embarrassed about the bad parts of themselves and wish they were better, so sometimes they try to pretend they are. jeff spent that episode trying not to be a creep and then it gets stripped away and says to the audience "see, i'm not likable! can you like me anyway?" and the answer can be yes for a lot of people. and if you pretend to be better than you are, do your better actions make you better? also, it's a sarcastic joke that references media (twilight) but cuts to the core emotionality of the episode, and there's nothing more community than that. and then at the end of the day, the line makes me laugh.
Season 6 premiere basically tell us that greendale needs to go back to a grounded reality. When the show started Greendale was just a regular community college and the cast made it crazier every season. When you enter college you meet new people, you get crazy experiences, learn about some student tradition, but some day your time in school finishes and now there's a new generation that will not know what you have experienced. Greendale isn't the same school anymore and the cast realised that by seeing that they aren't the centre of the craziness anymore, and left greendale just as how they came, as a regular school.
i'm always surprised by how many people like season 4 better than 5 and 6. i Love that the last 2 seasons are more focused explorations of different aspects of the show's history
I just rewatched the pilot and the second episode of community for the first time in forever and I was really struck by how the character dynamics in that second episode come out in retrospect. The core of the episode was Jeff/Pierce, a relationship that always proved contentious and ambiguous so this first iteration doesn't feel like it ends up amounting to that much. It also continued Jeff/Britta, a pairing the show eventually gave up on. The B-plot was Britta, Annie and Shirley protesting, none of which resonates that much in retrospect - Annie and Shirley getting completely into a thing they know little about isn't that fundamental to their character or their dynamic even if it happens, and Britta herself changed as a character from being a voice of reason to being a goofball so this early iteration of her confronting her flaws isn't that resonant.
And then there is ONE SCENE with Troy and Abed who have no plotlines of their own. The relevant interaction lasts 10 seconds. It's not even *about* Troy and Abed, it's a joke on how much time Jeff is wasting with Pierce on an assignment that could be done that quickly.
And it's that scene that turns out to actually resonate with the rest of the show! That and the post-credit sequence that follows it up of course, which is itself an instant classic and I couldn't believe it arrived so early. It's the Troy & Abed friendship! This is where it starts! And it almost tracks tbh that it starts here, not even as a plotline, just as a random scene. That's how naturally those two click, how effortless their chemistry can be.
And it's kind of funny in thinking back at the card-switching shenanigans and how the show tried to make a big deal of its consequences - will Abed work with Britta? No, Jeff gets a chance with her! Oh no Jeff is going to have to work with Pierce instead, so that's the relationship we'll learn about! And it turns out the most important consequence of those shenanigans is the one we barely saw at all: Abed getting paired with Troy.
Everyone likes to complain about s5&6, but w/o them we never get buzz hickey, frankie dart, elroy patashnick, and most importantly... KOOOOOOOOOGLER!
The Koog Approogs!
I'm glad Community went the way it did but God do I wish we also had that show the pilot teased
Loved this one! A video on Annie's growth from S1 to S6 would be amazing
I can't count the number of times I've rewatched (most of) Community, and your video series has pointed out so many things I've missed. Probably why I'll always love the show -- there's always more to appreciate -- and why I'll keep watching your Community videos. Thank you!
I love Community and I love you for covering it so well. Thanks buddy
i don't know if you saying danny gonzalex instead of drew gooden was a bit but it made me giggle regardless. 10/10 video, i've always really loved community and it makes me really happy to hear people talk about it so thoroughly and thoughtfully!
Many praise S2 for its concept episodes and how many of them they can cram into one season. However, I think it could only do so when the characters were already established in a much more grounded S1. A lot of the characterization that we find funny (Abed being a human computer, Jeff admiring Troy's laziness, Pierce admiring Abed's inadvertent sexism, Shirley judging Britta's sexual openness, etc.) that occurs during the excellent Bottle Episode wouldn't have had much of an impact let alone make a lot of sense without the characters having already established their traits and thoughts about one another.
I just finished re-watching community I was binging your streets ahead videos yesterday haha
excellent timing!
"Less weird than the first 2 years combined" is such a blessed line. Because it actually means that you'd need to combine the weirdness in the firt 2 seasons to be able to reach a number that's comparable to season 3's weirdness.
Thanks for making these. Community is one of my favorite series ever, and it’s always so fun to revisit, analyze and discuss. Would love to watch a breakdown of the series finale from you in the future, and don’t leave us hanging with a Britta Episode tease!
The failure of Britta and Troy’s relationship is entirely season 4’s fault. There’s a lot to dig into in their dynamic and season 4 doesn’t understand that at all. They’re right in thinking the relationship is destined to fail, but they have no idea what the pair like eachother in the first place.
Troy and Britta see in eachother a representation of what they need to most to be better versions of themselves. Troy is insecure about not being a real adult, being a manchild. That’s why Abed is such a good friend to him, he accepts him for who he is. But unlike Abed, Troy is very concerned with how people view him, so the idea of being with Britta, a ‘real woman’, worldly, older, mature, into boring adult stuff, the kind of woman Jeff would like, if Troy could be with her, he’d be a real man.
Britta on the other hand has a self destructive taste in men, and Troy is just a lovely guy, highlighted in the ‘Blade’ episode where Troy seems to have said something really nice to Britta to put her off Blade. It makes her think “why can’t I be into a guy like that?” And so Troy for her represents a healthy relationship.
The issue here is neither character is seeing the entire person. Theyre essentially using eachother to fix themselves. There’s so much room for great drama in that premise, but in Season 4 they’re just so boring. Their breakup should be a moment of such huge growth, but it’s essentially meaningless.
I absolutely love this show and these videos, makes me appreciate them more.
Wonder if some original IP might ever come out from pillars since his character development analysis is astounding
I'll probably try my hand at a novel or something eventually idk but for now all my time & effort & brain juice goes into the _video pit_
Honestly, I think you'd be good at writing. I know I'd hire you.@@PillarofGarbage
I think you could argue that the ambition, zaniness, and abstract nature of season 3 is why season 4 exists. It sets up the idea that the big draw of the show is more about absurdity than grounded characterizations. It is also during this window that (according to Dan Harmon himself), the spend really stretched beyond the budget, that schedules slipped more and more off the plan, and Dan really started to spiral behind the scenes.
While we will never know for sure, it's very likely that if season 3 was a bit more restrained, Dan is there to lead season 4.
You did all the premieres already? Jeez, I am Streets Behind.
A retrospective on Britta’s deterioration would be great!
i have rewatched this video at least 3 times now, love community content so much and yours is by far my favorite :) thank you for putting the work in to making this and sharing it with people like me who are probably way too obsessed with that show, but i think you get it
I found it an odd choice to only analyse the first episode of each season but after the video it made so much sense to focus on the openers effect on the rest of the season. Great video!!! ♥️
Great video! I love your analysis and the way you remind the video's audience that this show could have gone in so many different directions, that the outcome that we got wasn't guaranteed. We're lucky we got something as good as we did.
You and your videos are what make rewatching this series better every time.
Wooooo new streets ahead!!! I love PoG community videos! I comment so on every one of them to make sure they get a boost in the logarithm
Much appreciated!
@@PillarofGarbage hey, much thanks for making enjoyable and insightful videos on a great show. Cheers✌️
You’re absolutely right. Pierce WAS cooking with streets ahead/behjnd
Bro I tried putting it in fullscreen and accidentally skipped so i just heard, "community was pretty good right? The end."
This was such an interesting and engaging video, I had already seen the previous parts but I watched the whole thing
You definitely get this on another level. Captain Midnight doesn't.
These are a lot more impactful strung together. Good call.
If you don’t like “streets ahead,” then you are streets behind
I had no idea that PoG was a fan of the show Community, I am completely blindsided by this.
pillar of garbage is a name thay comes from community
Great title by the way.
i thought i have had a deja vu but it was Prime's Theater Community retrospective video that i have watched recently. not that i am complaining, i am welcoming all of these Community video!
same!
33:11 I'm baffled by the fact that this first person's issue with the season 3 pilot is that the group reacts TOO harshly to Jeff violently destroying the study room table while yelling "I'm gonna kill the one thing you love". Like dude, what are you talking about. Most people would phone the POLICE if that happened. Simply asking him to leave the group and stop being friends is mild at best. Like I know Pierce was just generally a bastard in season 2, but even he didn't wield a fire-axe while looking (and acting) like he'd just gone swimming in a pool of cocaine
Maybe I need to rewatch it, but if anybody I knew did that I would at least need to have them away from me for a little while. I'd be concerned they're going to kill me.
Oh thank god it’s my day off so I can watch this right away
But also, in that Biology 101 episode, it’s unsatisfying, but not unrealistic that people would forgive Pierce for a litany of bad behavior while refusing to forgive Jeff for a single instance of wrong doing. That shit happens in politics all the time. People get to know someone as this fucking villain and they hate them for it, but when that villain appears to turnover a new leaf, a lot of people are quick to forgive, especially when someone else has committed a new “horrible” crime.
It’s like people get used to one person being an asshole, and they appreciate it when that asshole is less of an asshole. Especially when they keep that person around long term and spend mental energy finding reasons to do so. But it works both ways. The characters lionize Jeff, he has worked hard to get them to see him as a leader and a good (enough) person, so when he doesn’t live up to the standards he set, it’s fucking devastating, or at the very least alienating, for the people who had previously bought his bullshit.
Anybody who thinks it’s unbelievable that the characters would accept Pierce while rejecting Jeff is living an unexamined life.
I listened to this at work n had to pull my phone out when you mentioned danny making a community video.
Let's gooooooo!!!! I've been waiting for this
I’m not gonna lie “there was lumber involved!!!“ gets me every time 😂🤣😂
Fair warning: I will watch any video discussing any aspect of this show.
Thanks for this
the season i keep rewatching is season 6 and season 1-2. i really enjoy the tone of these seasons tbh :>
The song is back! Banger content!
Community has never failed to make me happy.
Even the absolute worst episodes. They're still better than a ton of TV
made me wanna binge community again
😊
Great video thanks.
I have always seen the Hunger Deans as a representation of how a community is suddenly divided by an outside, manufactured force and finds itself at odds with each other, not only in competing for the manufactured scarce resource but also in how they go about trying to get that resource. So in that sense I actually did think it was a good way to exemplify season 4, the different goals of the study group members and the strategies they use. I thought the games themselves were a bit meh, but I could appreciate the idea.
I hope you do the same thing for sll the season finales, it will be a bloodbath
He’s already got my view if he does that series.
Interesting idea! One to think about…
@@BradsGonnaPlay an hour long essay on paintball and leader Chang
The season six cappers were all gold. You G.D.D. you.
The Vaughn-style original track at the end was streets ahead 😂👍
community
the 'Danny Gonzalez made a video' bit was gold
*sigh* I guess I have to watch the series again!!
The reason for the Hunger Deans is actually not as absent as you may fear: it's about emotional commitment for Jeff, the Dean even says it at the end of the episode, which, while a bit on the nose, I think works because if the point is to confront a character with their need to emotionally commit, having to smack them in the face with it emphasises the depth of their failure to genuinely engage with their surroundings. The episode is about Jeff going from committing for purely selfish and pragmatic reasons to realising that his commitment has to be emotional for it to be ultimately meaningful.
The episode has other purposes- it's also about Annie figuring out who she outside of the framework of "student" in which she's spent her entire life up to this point- not just in it, but immersed in it. Being a student IS Annie's identity, and this episode is the point in her life where she confronts the limitations of that identity and recognises her need to open herself up to more complexity. Troy and Britta need to open themselves up to complexity in the form of a relationship neither of them were really emotionally equipped for, Jeff needs to open himself up to complexity in the form of not just confronting his emotions (his arc for the first 2 seasons) but actually committing to them.
The purpose of the episode is to show how at this pretty pivotal point in the characters' lives they all have to expand the scope through which they understand themselves, and it tries to bring the audience into that journey.
I absolutely grant you that it's not diegetically sound, but I'm okay with that. Sometimes you can just have farce for its own sake- again, it's TV. It doesn't have to make sense to anything but itself, and even then it isn't chained to sensibility.
I think he meant the connection to the theme of the episode to the actual Hunger Games
@@dame7664 i think demanding a purely diegetic reason for the Hunger Deans doesn't actually make sense. He says there were diegetic reasons for the paintball games getting out of hand, (the prizes) but there weren't really reasons for the games being planned in the first place. Why did the dean throw 5 dances? Why does the dean get so attached to the study group in the first place? If you demand a reason for everything you just unravel a thread that doesn't go that far back because it's a TV show and the reasons for stuff aren't as important as how it happens
community!!!! :)
When I first watched season 6, it was my least favourite season because it just seemed so different. I never warmed to Frankie. But my opinion has since been reversed and I love both Frankie and season 6 now, they’re fantastic.
Also the Sub to POG song is great.
Good video
Wow that Jamer guy sounds awesome
I remember watching Biology 101 when it came out and immediately noticing a difference in the look and tone of the show. The show went from looking cinematic to weirdly cheap and cartoony. Britta felt like a completely different character and never really recovered. Ludwig Goransson's score started becoming less prominent. I still like season 3 but when watching it for the first time it never quite felt like the same show as the first 2 seasons.
paget brewster was so good
Very cool vid
What was that, Tiny Chips? You all want to fight with me? This is best idea.
Omg omg omg!! ❤❤❤❤❤❤This is amaaaaaziiing!! Cant wait to watch, after work.
As a Muslim i love Abed so much! Even though some parts...😅
Overall love Community!! 😊We need more innovative shows! ❤❤❤
I myself (with some friends)
Am making a Video Game 🎉
Good luck with the game!
@@PillarofGarbage thx!! ❤️
How can I contact someone from streets ahead podcast as I found some of their equipment in the road.
is the song at the end new? because if so that's a really funny nod to the show.
I made the acoustic bit as a fun little ending for a Community video a while back, but the ‘rock’ bit is new, yes :)
the inside jokes you have lol "this is the thing" shows a picture of The Thing. "Daddy Gonsalez" shows drew gooden
Best I can figure re: The Hunger Deans
Everyone was being incredibly cutthroat about taking the class which was not only a complete gimme, but would have been awesome because ice cream. The rush to secure a spot in the class was frantic, not unlike the scramble at the beginning of Hunger Games for the weapons/supplies in the centre of the arena. Plus, I refuse to accept that the Dean putting on a whole "Hunger Games" type extravaganza is somehow out of character for him. The man dressed as "the Duali-Dean of man" to deliver good news and bad news ffs. lol He's sort of a "go big or go home" kind of fella. Plus ... ice cream... eating... hunger. Meh. Thematically, it's a pretty big stretch, I know, but I assume the new writers were doing their best to stay true to the material and this was their first go-around. (I admit, they got varying results as time went by. The puppet episode just hurt.)
To address the "starting sensible" point, the escalation kind of happened off screen, leaving us already amidst the mayhem - countless students either trying to keep their established spot in class, or take it from those who had already signed up. Anyway, just my flimsy take. Feel free to tear it apart.
Jim Rash is very pretty in that blue dress though
I think I figured out the point of the hunger deans: The hunger games are a show put on by a tyrannical authority to provide fictional problems to focus on and distract from the actual problem of tyranny itself. Similarly, the dean uses the elaborate setup where Jeff has to compete for a spot in the history class to distract from the fact that this scarcity is artificially imposed by him in the first place. So the parallel is clear: Craig is abusing his power to get what he wants. He is the tyrant. And the point is to not play the game, but to find out why it has to be played in the first place. Which Jeff does.
The reason it doesn't work is because 1.) The game is fake, but Jeff is not shown to struggle at all with this. The scam is so easy to figure out that Jeff does it off-screen. And he doesn't have to do that much to subvert the game and play the system instead. Yeah, he is savvy enough to pick the dean himself as his dance partner. But contrast this with App Development and Condiments which also uses the political abuse of power from dystopian fiction as a parallel to small scale abuse of power in personal relationships. The drama and pain leading to the scene with Shirley and Jeff out in the cold in front of a wrecked school vs. Jeff having a back-and-forth with Craig during their dance. Maybe cutting that plotline back to such a bare form was necessary though, because 2.) The hunger deans are a spoof episode happening in the same 20 minutes as another spoof episode (The Abed TV plot), and they are not just competing for time, they also have nothing to do with each other thematically. The fact that Jeff's plot is irrelevant to Abed's plot is even lampshaded in a way with the joke about Abed not needing the Winger speech because he just gave it to himself in his own head.
i absolutely loved frankie and elroy
wooo !! LADDERRSSS !!!!
What does he mention at 51:37? Is it the SA/SH situation?
Community :D
i’ve always thought season 4 got too much hate. yea it’s not harmon perfection but dan didn’t write it and for what it is it definitely has good moments and good episodes and doesn’t deserve to be ignored completely
Cool, cool cool cool
Cool cool cool
It bothers me that every premiere gets its own video except for the 6th episode.
I'd prefer releasing it individually, and then releasing the compilation later. For conceptual symmetry.
Did you intentionally mix up Drew Gooden with Danny Gonzales?
Oh, Britta's in this?
The pilot is a weird one. It is a perfectly serviceable TV episode, but it's not really a Community episode. I'd never show it to someone who has never watched the show. I'd go with the Advanced Dungeon and Dragons, Modern Warfare, or Remedial Chaos Theory.
Enjoy the taste of hat. But also some of those jokes were funny.
I think both sides are right in the “S6 is the brightest/darkest season.” Like the set design is inherently more vibrant and colorful, but then someone came in and turned the actual lights down to 70%.
This is day one of asking for a Manifest tv show thematic analysis vireo
Abed's "get it, callback!" intro in RePilot annoys the beep outta me. It feels like Family Guy, explaining the joke when you're barely laughing. The latter seasons lost sight of his character, stuck between "third wall break" and cartoonishly oblivious dick. Nitpick,I admit but it bugs me. Great video! This'll get me through several shifts at work.
Hey can you do a video on jesse grant
The west has truly fallen
your mic is way too loud/too much bass compared to the rest of the audio.
By the way, still waiting on the Britta video.
You need to talk about Anti-Woke Gamer and potential serial killer, Synthetic Man. His garbage takes are ruining gaming.