One of the greatest, most underrated sitcoms of all time has just been added to Netflix. Here’s why you should be watching it.
Considering we’re all spending a lot of time indoors these days, the JOE team has picked out viewing recommendations for TV series, old and new, to get stuck into to keep boredom at bay.
Title:Â Community
Where can you watch it? Netflix
Number of seasons:Â Six seasons (no movie, yet)
IMDB rating: 8.5/10
Why you should be watching:Â There has never been a show like Community, and there almost definitely won’t ever be another.
On paper, it’s a sitcom set in an American community college, where a ragtag group of misfits become friends and try their best to graduate without tearing each other’s heads off.
While that might sound like a relatively mundane concept for a sitcom, the end product really isn’t.
The show somehow finds the balance between being extremely silly and ridiculous, while also being more clever than any other sitcom on TV.
The balance it strikes between hilarity and heart is something we haven’t seen since The Simpsons (and maybe Brooklyn Nine-Nine, in fairness).
Community rewards the audience’s intelligence, and is made better for those who are really paying attention, but can still resort to the lowest common denominator humour for some of its biggest laughs.
And then you’ve got the cast. It’s a cast that was relatively unknown at the time, (bar Joel McHale and Chevy Chase) but has some of the funniest actors on television in Ken Jeong, Alison Brie and Danny Pudi, and essentially put global superstar Donald Glover on the map.
In fact, it is the friendship between Donald Glover (Troy) and Danny Pudi (Abed) that is one of the greatest and most wholesome things about the show:
The show regularly pokes fun at itself, and at the sitcom genre as a whole. It takes the classic tropes that you have seen over and over again on TV, and either throws them out the window, or completely leans into them, borderline taking the piss out of itself.
One of the most special things about Community is that you could sit and watch three episodes in a row and feel like you’ve sat through three completely different genres.
It feels so much bigger than just a sitcom. Dan Harmon (the man who created Rick & Morty) is behind a lot of the show’s success, and ensures that every episode has an enthralling story that is resolved by the end.
But the grandeur of some of the show’s best episodes are largely due to the fact that they are directed by The Russo Brothers. You know, the lads behind Avengers: Endgame and Infinity War (literally the biggest movies of all time).
They are able to compact these amazing story lines into 23-minute episodes, with some of the cleverest writing that TV has ever seen.
While the magic did somewhat fizzle out by the end, watching Community will not only provide you with amazing entertainment throughout every episode, but it will also change your outlook on pop culture, and change how you consume it in general.
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