I gotta tell you I wouldn't change how the show ultimately turned out (mainly because it changed the face of television, for the better, ever since) but I heard the original idea with Nikki & Paulo was to have several flashbacks of her being a secret agent before they hit you with the twist that she's just an actress.…

I was just starting to like him too :(

I gotta say that #1 the Rule of Cool was in FULL effect during this episode. There is really no way that Skye having any of that hand-to-hand combat skill is at all believable but it was so amazingly cool that I don't give one bit of a shit. Kevin Tancharoen is AOS's secret weapon and I hope that he not only gets to…

I recently went back and re-watched the first season and I liked it a lot more than the first time around. The question isn't so much whether any particular episode can be skipped or not but whether you should and I'd argue that you shouldn't. The first season was a lot of fun and gets a bad rap. The second season…

And here I thought, after losing 60 pounds in 6 months, that how fat you were was almost completely dependant on what you ate! FUCK I've been doing it wrong this whole time!!

I do usually call for a tight edit because I feel it most often serves the script better but there are certainly examples where allowing your work to sprawl makes it come out for the better in the end. I'm going to hold up the recent episode with Chang on stage as Mr. Miyagi as an example of a really very long…

The idea is that magical and awesome things can happen thanks to randomness and spontaneity, such that staying internal and not experiencing life means that you are actively preventing this from happening. You can't plan out every awesome thing that happens .. a lot of the time they just happen.

Jeff and Shirley playing off each other is one of the highlights of the entire show and every episode that plays up their relationship is golden from top to bottom; although that's as much coincidence as anything else.

Because all of that stuff is just surface level. If lighting and pace were what made up the real stuff of a show then Community and Just Shoot Me would be no different.

I'm not going to say you shouldn't or can't dislike what you dislike but I'm not tracking so much with the reasons you're giving here. There's never been a strong connection between the things the characters on this show do and their motivations; Documentary Filmmaking: Redux is one of their greatest episodes but…

Also, is it just me or does the AV Club frequently have people review TV shows that they (at best) don't get or (at worst) actively dislike? The reviews for The Leftovers last year were basically unreadable.

Besides, I'm not really sure how harsh of a criticism it is to say just about any season of just about any show isn't as good as the first three seasons of Community. Are our expectations really so high as to dislike something for not being as good or better than some of the greatest TV ever?

Can you define what makes a character "rudderless" or perhaps more acutely define what you're feeling here? Based on the description alone I can't say I agree. All of the characters seem to be finally coming to terms with things that have been brewing for a long time now: Britta with how abrasive and unpalatable…

Do you re-watch the episodes at all? That's really the hallmark of whether something is truly good or not, how enjoyable they are when you re-watch them. I've re-watched the episodes to varying degrees so far this season and I gotta tell you they absolutely get better. I've seen the first episode the most so far…

I think most people have forgotten how this show has always revolved around gimmicks; the only difference with season one is how easy it was for their gimmicks to revolve around silly classes and getting to know each other that the later seasons can't take for granted.

Let's just say I respectfully disagree. That episode is a treasure; mostly for the way it utilized Shirley, whose character is difficult to put at center stage, but also for Jeff's big speech.

Also, I gotta say, any comparisons of any episode this season to any episode in season 4 shows a critical misunderstanding of why season 4 was bad. It's not a flat "bad Community that we can compare other Community we don't like to" .. it's plainly a different approach to comedy that lost all of the heart of the show…

A result of the writer's room tinkering with their formula of casting characters from writing the character first to hiring the actor first. It really shows for both Elroy and Frankie but man does Keith David bring something special every time he suits up for .. well .. anything! Sometimes I even want to join the…

A person's enjoyment of Community is often directly proportional their ability to unravel the meta-commentary; although it's become more directly proportional over time, the waning appeal to those who aren't in on the joke could be a fair criticism — but since I'm in on the joke then stuff the people who ain't!

As much as I appreciate a nice feminine line you would never be able to convince me that being able to see a better shape of her ass and daylight through her legs is a "lesser" option.