boogieman03

Ha. I panicked during the intro. I thought they had changed formats for a second.

Howie2000

Dragon Tattoo

Boo, Hiss! New writers! No Harmon! It sucks...but I'll still watch it.

This thread in a nutshell.

JTH182

I liked it

fumanstan

I didn't care for the frequency of the AbedTV stuff, but the rest of it seemed fine.

SiberianLlama

Maybe I was looking for reasons to not enjoy it because Harmon left, but this episode just fell completely flat for me. Nothing was particularly funny or enjoyable. I'll probably end up watching the rest of the season, but if the new writers were trying to convince me that the show will be just as good, this wasn't the way to do it.

TheKing

I liked it if for nothing else it had Fred Willard replace Chevy Chase in Abed's head.

Now they have an easy way to replace Chevy.

Happy Endings already did the car full of popcorn gag. Of course this one was probably filmed first.

Felt like Community to me. I mean it wasn't paintball, but it wasn't bad.

Goat3001

I didn't think it was bad at all. Not their best but not bad. Let's not forget, season 3 had its handful of misses too. There were some episodes from the first half last season that were flat out bad. This show always tries to be different and sometimes that leads to some classic episodes and sometimes they just fall flat.

scorpion

Me too. Thought they had added a laugh track.

Lord Zarak

I laughed out loud at the gag where the Dean kept his student records in a Microsoft Paint file.

RichC2

Wasn't the best episode, wasn't the worst episode. It reminded me of the Season 2 premiere with Betty White.

Jim Rash (Dean Pelton, Oscar winning writer.) penned Episode 10 for this season, curious to see how that turns out. Megan Ganz is penning the season(series?) finale.

It also appears Paranormal Parentage will air as episode #2 instead of Conventions of Space and Time (which was one of the two episodes sent to critics).

joefrog91

I too felt the episode was a little off. I'll keep watching, but this seems to be a different show from the last three seasons.

Troy Stiffler

Did you notice anything "off" about the end of Scrubs (whatever that was ... a weird half season after a moving finale ... or whatever)? You didn't see a difference between X-Men 2 and X-Men 3, did you?

starman9000

The Fred Willard stuff was great. I liked them mocking the worried fans with the laugh track.

Not the best episode, but it was enjoyable at least.

Goat3001

The final season of Scrubs wasn't 'off', it had an entirely new cast and focus point. It makes no sense to compare that to this one episode of Community.

And no, I don't think this episode was 'off' at all. It wasn't very good, but it wasn't any different than any other times the show has tried something new and flopped, like Abed's Christmas episode.

madcougar

I feel the same way. I don't know if I was watching it too... cautiously? I chuckled twice. Twice. That was it. With only 12 episodes left, I'll hang around just because I love the characters so much, but the rhythm of the show was off. Also felt like they had a lot of close ups. Weird.

Gizmo

Discussing ratings from 2 years ago makes no sense. NBC was in a better position. Look at Fox. Glee was pulling in high 4's and 5s two years ago and now it can barely manage a 2. Viewers have fled.

There is no indication Outsourced would have continued with "good" ratings - which were less than Community's at that time. Community had (still has to) face Big Bang Theory and Idol.

GoVegan

Same here. "But our warranty isn't being honored by the restaurant which used to be a Circuit City!"

Meglos

Was trying too hard I felt. But, as someone else further up pointed out, there were quite a few season 3 episodes that were trying too hard too. There are some days when I miss the more low-key shenanigans of season 1 (blasphemy!).

Paradoxically, though, I'd like more Fred Willard please.

Michael Corvin

It had all the earmarks of a great episode(Hunger Games, Inception, Bosom Buddies, Fred Willard as Pearce!, mocking multi-cam sitcoms, etc.) but it definitely fell flat.

The Hunger Games parody fell real short, IMO. It should have been epic like the paintball episode. It felt like a once great idea neutered by the budget.

RichC2

It was more of an Inception episode than Hunger Games.

Deftones

Intersting in concept, failure on execution. Not many laughs. I did like Abed's fictional tv show in his head, though. It pretty much made fun of all the crap shows that are on now that use laugh-tracks.

rocket1312

The problem is, I don't think they were trying anything new at all. I'm not a fan of BBT and while I took some pleasure in them mocking it, it was really just a one note joke. It brought nothing else to the table. Compare it to the musical episode last year. Obviously it was a not-so-subtle jab at Glee, but it works great on it's own. It's the perfect example of how Community likes to have it's cake and eat it too. They're making fun of musicals but at the same time putting out a pretty damn good musical of their own. Last night's sitcom riff was mostly funny, but once you get past the inital joke of "hey look, they're making fun of traditional sitcoms" there's nothing left.

Add to that the fact that the whole "Abed is crazy and lives in his own world" thing was well played out by the end of last year. We already had closure on that through line last year and so for me, there was no emotional weight to anything that happened last night. It's like the writers were just mimicking older episodes.

I still laughed, and because of that I'll continue to watch, but there wasn't a whole lot going on beneath the surface. I'm not a total Harmon acolyte (I was listening to some of the season 3 commentaries the other day and sometimes his neurosis is just too much to bear). Part of me was even hoping Harmon's exit would get rid of the angst that permeated a lot of last season. A lot of season 3 didn't work for me, but I always appreciated what they were trying to do. And to Harmon's credit, he never felt like he was just going through the motions. Unfortunately that's what last night felt like to me.

RichC2

Well hopefully it didn't run too many people off, ratings:

NBC Community -Season Premiere 1.8/6 3.98m
NBC Parks and Recreation 2.0/5 3.83m
NBC The Office 2.1/6 4.25m
NBC 1600 Penn 1.1/3 2.81m
NBC Do No Harm 0.7/2 2.18m

Terribly low, but by NBC standards a 1.8 for a sitcom is renewal territory these days

1600 Penn and Do No Harm are gone.

To note the competition at Thursday at 8:00 --

CBS The Big Bang Theory 6.1/18 18.85
FOX American Idol 4.1/12 13.15
NBC Community -Season Premiere 1.8/6 3.98
ABC Shark Tank - R 1.3/4 4.78
CW The Vampire Diaries 1.1/3 2.50

SpanishTechno

I thought it was a respectable episode, not amazing but pretty solid. I don't think one episode is enough to decide "something's off" since Community has always had its ups and downs and can be pretty random from episode to episode.

I remember people complaining that the Hunger Games thing was them 'selling out' in order to draw in more viewers but that didn't seem to be the case at all. This episode was as insular as any and would make a poor entry point for a new viewer.