A requirement needs to be getting the original writing staff together to work on it. Getting all the actors was obviously necessary too, but if they're not saying anything funny, it doesn't matter.

The key is going to be the writing. The Office has been going downhill for years because so many excellent writers left to work on Parks & Rec. And I think AD spun off a lot of fantastic writers to 30 Rock and other places after it ended. It's not just about getting all the actors together, they really need to get the…

1) I second this. I really think six seasons would be ideal. And I could get behind a movie, although I mostly care about the seasons.

I will be devastated if this gets canceled. This was an admittedly weaker episode, but I didn't think that cancellation was really a possibility. If everything NBC is doing is shit anyway, why get rid of shows with devoted fan bases?

I can understand the C, but the grade in my head is about one lower than this. It's not about the loss of Steve Carell. It's the loss of Greg Daniels and Mike Schur. The show has been on a downward trajectory for a really long time now. Every character moment now feels like it's making the show smaller instead of…

I haven't seen the show, but Playboy the magazine, as opposed to the club, did have some pretty awesome journalism and interviews, and was generally liberal and advocated for social change. But it was and is still sexist. You'd think that inherent conflict, being liberal in some areas, but horribly conservative in…

I just had an epiphany. Now that he's out of a job he's going to run for city council as Leslie's opponent.

I was thinking the same thing, and thought Ben was going to bring it up. If she wins and is a City Council member, then he's no longer her boss. There's no real conflict, even if he's a city employee.

Wow, 39 reasonable discussions (when I started writing this) and mine has to be the first to really say that this was super weak and gives me no hope of the show getting out of it's "recession." McNutt makes a fine case, but it feels a lot like the folks on MSNBC saying that everything's going to be alright because…

Ok, so I had heard (but not seen previews) that Patricia Clarkson was going to be Tammy 1, and this entire time I've been thinking of Patricia Richardson (Tim Allen's wife on Home Improvement and one of Alan Alda's campaign staff on West Wing). I was really thrown for a loop. Now I look at Patricia Clarkson's IMDB…

@avclub-99602e0a06f8326026c128b4be089ae2:disqus said, "I remember when I sat through shows to get to Community."

And I'm grateful that the movie-homage setpiece wasn't with the classic 2001 music and the table floating through space. Not that the opening scene would have tied in as well thematically as the ending scene anyway. I have friends who didn't make it to the end of 2001 and will now miss out on that reference, but…

True Story. When I was 8, I thought I had invented a song where the refrain was someone singing Free Falling over and over again. A couple years later, when I was older and starting to listen to music, I was shocked that Tom Petty had stolen the idea right out of my brain from my younger self a decade earlier when I…

Maybe you should lay off the crazy pills.

Same here. It's incredible how that knowledge does nothing to stop her. I usually catch about 30 minutes of it when we pretend to eat dinner "together" on Monday nights.

She'll be respectful, compliant, and appreciative, the way a woman should be.

Actually, most midwest towns of that size usually have a poor, black (and yes, just as fat) part of town. For a one-off midwest town to get to that size, it must have had a manufacturing base at some point, and plenty of blacks would have come up during the second great migration. These days, for a town of that size,…

I think some of it is just that Schur has already been part of a popular show that had huge opportunities to fail, and in both cases he's under the guidance of Greg Daniels. Harmon had never worked on network before, had he? I watched a downloaded copy of the pilot for Heat Vision and Jack in college almost 10 years…

Serious Conversations
It wasn't this episode, but my dad explained to me at a young age that every company he had ever worked for was Wesayso, and that I would probably end up working for Wesayso too. He really loved this show, just for that element, and this show really did have a unique take on life and the sitcom.…

I've heard other people say things like this (mostly on these boards), and I just don't get it. The first three episodes cover the span of maybe 36 hours, and have the insane tension of whether Walter will kill Crazy 8. I'm not remembering the exact chronology, but isn't the end of the second episode the one where the…