TV to See: Community - "Paradigms of Human Memory"

Now I (Kyle) know what you're thinking. First of all, there hasn't been a blog in a while. My bad. Secondly, when there finally is a blog, I'm apparently just blogging about the same thing that Ben did. Now let me set the record straight. If Ben hadn't blogged about Community, I still would have done this blog. This is completely independent of his. I'm focusing on a specific episode, because when I see a really good episode of television, I want to blog about it. That's just the way I am.

So, thanks to Ben, I don't really need to explain this show. He already did that. Personally, I think Community is the funniest show on television right now (that I know of) and they are at the top of their game creatively. The show has become extremely good at doing parodies focusing on genres of movies and TV, while still maintaining character development and hilarious jokes, and this episode is no different.



For this episode, Community tackled what is an old sitcom standby: the clip show. Whenever a sitcom has built up quite a bit of material, sometimes the writers will just take a break for an episode and make a clip show: an episode which features various clips from previous episodes. That way the writers don't really need to come up with new material. Unfortunately, an example of this would be The Office, which resorted to a clip show last season. Shows will usually do this when they are a bit later in their lifespan, but Community is only in it's second season. And one other thing: all of the clips from the clip show in this episode were completely new, but played off like it was things we had seen before.

The episode showed us "flashbacks" of the group in ridiculous situations, like a western ghost town, a mental asylum, and various other locales. There were even scenes from previous episodes, but from the perspectives of others that we didn't see before. It also included jokes making fun of Glee, the NBC show The Cape, and jokes about people who make "fan videos" about the show on Youtube. But the best part of the episode is that it wasn't only hilarious, but it tied everything together and had some great character development as well. We got to see back stories for characters that will probably have implications for future episodes.

One of the many supposed "flashbacks".

Overall, I can't recommend this show enough. What makes it so great is how self-aware it is. If there is something that you could criticize about the show, then the first people to criticize it will be the show itself. It's smartly written, and always hilarious, and sometimes just plain awesome. If Ben's endorsment wasn't enough, hopefully this will convince you to check it out for yourself.