Community on NetFlix.
The set up is a practicing lawyer who has been found to have faked his University degree so he enrolls in a community college. He sees a pretty girl and deceives her into joining his non-existent Spanish Study group to hit on her. She invites the rest of the characters and the stage is set. An autistic kid, a former star athlete, a Christian black divorce, a hyper-competitive, overachieving recovering pillhead, and a Boomer with no filter and a barrage of racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and every other phobe comments.
While most ensemble sitcoms usually veer into the absurd within a season or two, and eventually have characters behaving as inhuman caricatures, Community grabs the bull by the horns and veers into actual surrealism pretty quickly.
For the most part it works.
The show is merciless in its comedy, sparing no one, left/right, young/old, black/white, ugly/pretty or fat/skinny. There's not much "Let's hug and cry and learn and grow" going on.
Hypocritical leftwing virtue signaling is brutally lampooned as is eggshell walking around diversity and racism.
It's so unusual-nowadays- it's jarring. It's hard to imagine it being greenlit in today's climate of hysterical sensitivity.
Weirdly, Netflix banned one episode where the characters play Dungeons and Dragons. The Asian character dresses as a "Dark Elf"...and it's too close to "Blackface".
There are a number of incredibly imaginative episodes. A tonally pitch perfect Law and Order ep, Goodfellas in the school cafeteria, a Ken Burns Civil War documentary about a school pillow fight,the two "Paintball Assassin" episodes are unbelievably epic, and eating a pizza turns into an exercise in Chaos theory, with multiple timelines and the most elaborate and horrifyingly funny scene I think I've ever seen in any genre.
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Originally Posted by idahojess
