Back to School

I had my doubts about Community, the NBC sitcom that premiered last night. Not on any particular artistic grounds: Joel McHale is a funny dude, as is Danny Pudi, and Chevy Chase could use a good project. But I wondered if the show would be able to make community college funny without being horrendously condescending to the people who attend it, centering as it did on a lawyer (McHale) who gets caught with a faked bachelor's degree and enrolls in community college because he thinks it will be easier than getting a real degree. Luckily, the pilot succeeds, I think, because its targets are the people who think they're too good for community college--the lawyer, the conceited entrepenuer (Chase), etc. The characters who are there because they made bad choices, including "[dropping] out of high school because I thought for some reason it would impress Radiohead" are pretty frank about the fact, and no one pokes fun at the housewife who's just there to learn. The humor comes from the fact that the characters are strange, not from the idea that they're stupid.

And the writing strikes me as pretty smart, so far, although perhaps I'm just a sucker for any line Joel McHale deliverse. "There's a guy trying out for the track team who's older than the game of poker," he declares as he tries to talk one of the college's professors, a former client of his, into getting him the test answers for his classes. "He's kind of truckin'." Later, rallying his study group, invented so he could spend time with an attractive woman in his Spanish class (she's the former Radiohead devotee), McHale declares: "People can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an Academy Award for screenwriting." And watching Pudi deliver John Bender's speech about Christmas from The Breakfast Club as a way to get people to stop arguing was pretty priceless. For now, consider me enrolled.