Um, they were kinda in there all the time- hell, going in there is how the war story arc started. There was maybe half a season where they didn't go in because they'd put SPACE MINES!!! in there, but that was the only real time that they just sat there guarding it.

You might be missing the point by just a smidge.

I'm excited for this. Sorkin is just plain always going to have people who care too much about their jobs giving pompous speeches and arguing about the issues of the day. The thing is, that works pretty well when your setting is Washington or Harvard, because those places are filled with relentless, pompous strivers,…

Not necessarily. For every West Wing (which, while I love, did not shy away from liberal values at all), there's the Wire, which was entirely explicit about what parties the politicians belonged to, and never got into demogoggery or anything.

I'm trying to get my opinions on this down succinctly-

I'd also add that the meta-commentary was particularly badly handled. Simply repeating the hackneyed storytelling of lesser shows- then giving some character a one-liner about it- isn't really commentary, it's just bad storytelling with an extra joke at the end. And anyway, The Simpsons never needed to treat it's…

It's not really the continuity of it that bugs me; it's that you either have to take it two ways-

P&R. It's just been consistently great, with tighter characters, stronger themes, and better plotting (of course it matters). Community is the more ambitious show, but the danger of that is, when it misses, it misses by a lot.

I never really bought the "it's satirizing fans!" explanation of the episode. For one thing, you only ever hear it in response to the criticism of that episode. For another, it's not like fans had had such a negative reaction to a prior character change on such a dramatic scale- there really hadn't been one. So the…