Community has never employed ad-libs to any significant degree.

Well, that could be gleaned from a LOT of things.

You'll have to show me how that works one day.

The "Informer" guy?

When I was growing up, there was an elderly libertarian crank named Homer Simpson who used to write into the local newspaper fairly regularly. I recall them doing a short article about that. He said he didn't like the show.

The worst thing about being James Brown is that calling yourself Jim doesn't really help that much.

I think VanDerWerff's WAS a dissenting opinion, though. There was a somewhat baffling amount of critical praise for Ben & Kate when it came out.

So sad to see a once-cool sport reduced to this.

Mark my words: "Celebrity Pointillism" is going to be the first episode of "Community" Season 5.

I'd settle for a show involving Kareem Abdul-Jabbar going around claiming to be Darryl Dawkins.

Jarrett Grode.

That's a terrible idea. The 13-episode season is barely worth doing… too tiny, too choppy. You might as well just write a movie and be done with it.

You do realize that no actor "heads up the table writing". That is literally impossible, given that the actor has to be on set while the episodes are being written and revised.

Her?

Oh, great… I hear Scott Adsit is looking for a new project.

Murray—Present — here's the thing. I'm actually not trying to compare shows here, so I'm not going to touch on that. But it's GOOD to have storylines that don't "naturally flow from the characters". Maybe not in the larger sense — you don't want a character spending a whole season doing something that's imposed on…

"You can have characters that are fully fleshed out before the first episode is even made, in fact you probably should."
Except really you can't, because it's more complicated than that.

You can say "Ron hating the government is kinda hard to avoid", which is true, but Ron hating the government is imposed on the character of Ron in a top-down kind of way, rather than being integrated into a realistic character with a plausible inner life.

Parks is definitely getting another season. The ratings are far and away ahead of every other comedy the network has (except The Office, which is ending anyway.)

Are you sure? It seems to me that Anthony's pretty successful at convincing people to watch the shows he wants to watch.