The best TV article I've read this year
For Slate, Bill Wyman analyzes "the most insanely self-referential 22 minutes in sitcom history," also knows as Community's "Paradigms of Human Memory" episode. I love the show, and I loved this episode. I wanted to explain it to my friends but couldn't. Why it was ridiculously great was too hard to explain. But here in essay form, Wyman nails it.
You can reflect that Jeff, Abed, Britta, and the rest are just caught in their character straightjackets, trapped in the rubber room that is the conventions of the contemporary American sitcom. But that, too, was one of the recurring flashback scenes in the show. You could go further and say that, in "Paradigms of Human Memory," Community has just taken everything that has ever happened on the show and shoved it up its own ass. The fact that that's just a line from the same show doesn't make it any less true. But finally, it's also true that, in its own twisted, self-referential, postmodern head-up-its-own-ass way, the episode does with an almost giddy profundity encompass multitudes, if multitudes can be understood to include television tropes, forgotten pop culture, and plushie jokes. What show on TV is as blithely, pointlessly ambitious?
If you watch the show, read the essay. If you don't watch the show, read the essay. There's enough explanatory material to get you by. You may well come out of the essay with a desire to tune in. Which is right. Community, through two seasons, to me, is TV's best comedy.
October 11th, 2011 at 6:45 AM
[...] the writing process, the creative forces, the influences, the way scene slips to screen. Just like August's Slate analysis of one of Community's best episodes, Wired's story on the show's boss, Dan [...]