Community: We're up to the middle of season two, and you know, I think one of the things that makes me love this show as much as I do, as well as the fact that it genuinely makes me laugh - a lot - every episode, is that its soft little underbelly is real. In a lot of shows with a similar kind of sarcastic meta-humor, the "heartwarming" aspects are part of the joke, and a running theme is the characters thinking they're going for a happy moment (as they would be, in a show that plays it straight) and then getting the rug yanked out from under them. (I'm thinking here of shows like Simpsons, Futurama, Invader Zim, that kind of thing. I'm not saying they're bad shows for that, just that it can be hard for me, personally, to get into a show that's forever dumping on the characters and denying them moments of genuine happiness or heroism.)
But that's the one thing in Community that
isn't a joke: the characters' genuine love and affection for each other, and willingness to back each other up, even in some truly absurd situations.
( Very mildly spoilery question for season two episode )I started to write about Fringe here, too, but it started getting long and spoilery and I'm not sure if I'll finish writing it tonight, so I figure I'll put it in its own post whenever I finish it.
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