…On the other hand, if sweeps week stunts are expressed in episodes like last night’s Community, then long live sweeps week!

I haven’t written much about Community, in part because it’s clearly been in flux over the last season. What began as something that looked very much like a sitcom with a strong streak of self-consciousness became an entirely different show last night with the episode “Modern Warfare.” Over the last several weeks, Community has been playing with how much meta it can actually get away with, and trying to find a line between being a show about community college kids that communicates by way of pop culture reference, and being a show about pop culture. The most recent example of this was an episode a few weeks ago where the study group became a mob conspiracy to control the distribution of chicken fingers in the cafeteria. Its clichés, satires, styles, and story were note-perfect, and all of the jokes about mob bosses, snitches, conspiracies, wealth, and families were hysterical spoofs of a specific genre of fiction. Underneath those comments, though, that episode was ultimately funny because a community college’s chicken fingers were the basis for a criminal organization. In the midst of Ocean’s 11 music as we watched the chicken fingers circulate throughout the cafeteria, it was the mob spoof that was funny, not the community college lunch.

Greendale - post-paintball apocalypse

“Modern Warfare” flipped the equation. It began with a fairly standard opening bit about how Jeff and Britta bicker and Shirley misses spending time with her sons, and shifted into a very Community-esque discussion of how Jeff and Britta’s lack of sexual tension was keeping them from being friends/Friends. Jeff then falls asleep in his car and wakes up to find the campus transformed into a post-paintball apocalypse battlefield. The rest of the episode follows the study group as they fight off the glee club, the chess club, and ultimately Senor Chang for the rights to priority registration, and the references rain down without stopping. Abed finds Jeff in a classic Matrix-style gunfight, the girls and the boys join forces after a classic female stealth attack in the bathrooms, and finally, a sweaty, dirty, undershirt-clad Jeff reaches the Dean’s office, railing against a war fought over a hollow, meaningless ideal. In the most obvious cliché of all, Jeff and Britta barricade themselves in the group study room and their bickering escalates into sex, before they then turn on each other. Truly, the whole thing was perhaps the most masterful spoofs I have ever seen.

Jeff Winger, action hero

Except… unlike the chicken fingers episode, where the humor came out of the absurdity of the criminal conspiracy, the humor of “Modern Warfare” was that this whole action movie was happening at a community college, and even though the bullets were all paintballs, the action movie was real. Abed begins by warning, “come with me if you don’t want paint on your clothes,” and it’s funny and stupid. Every time someone “died,” you expected him to deny the finality of his death by simply ignoring his paint-splattered clothing – it is, after all, just paint. But every fallen soldier stays dead, and as is demonstrated by the wound that kicks off the Jeff/Britta sexytime, the paintballs are more meaningful than actual blood. The spoof was allowed to expand without ever being punctured by its own silliness. It was funniest because at some point, it wasn’t even a spoof anymore – it was Jeff Winger, action hero.

It was awesome, is what I’m saying. And no, Community cannot do this over and over again, with each episode remaking Greendale into a setting for a different genre send-up. But the fact that it could do it at all, and do it so well, is seriously encouraging for the show’s future.

HBO’s new Band of Brothers-inspired miniseries The Pacific premiered last night, and although I will be watching it, I probably won’t be blogging about it until the end. (This, by the way, is one of the biggest differences between the miniseries and standard American television productions: miniseries are written with an end in mind, and usually, the whole thing is produced at once. Writing about it without seeing the whole thing is like writing a paper about the first half of a novel. In contrast, television series are a piecemeal business, and the final episode mostly likely isn’t even written by the time the first episode is filmed. They’re built over a very long period of time, often with no definite end in sight, so writing about them while in progress makes much more sense.)

Phew, where did that come from? In any event, although I’m pretty sure The Pacific is going to be amazing and make me weep and cover my eyes, I don’t want to think about it critically until the end. I do want to talk a little about its opening credits, though. (Note: this is the director’s cut version, so it is slightly longer than the one on the air. Only slightly, though.)

They’re gorgeous. The dominating images are super close-up sequences of someone drawing with charcoal – so zoomed in that the dust from the charcoal piles up like dirt, and the textures of the pencil, the paper, and the charcoal lines resemble a rocky, uneven landscape. The lines are stark, but occasionally zoom out into soft, shaded images of soldiers’ pensive faces, and restrained red tinting illustrates violence with more emotional nuance than actual gore. As the pencil moves across paper, fragmenting pieces of dust and charcoal are visually linked to images of battle, so that debris from a drawing looks much like shrapnel. It’s a lovely, persuasive sequence.

There’ve been two diverging trends in opening title sequences. For many network shows, they’ve all but disappeared, led no doubt by the influence of shows like Lost, with its minimalist, two second long, slowly spinning black and white title. The once longer version of the Grey’s Anatomy title sequence has been reduced to a clean, brief appearance of the title, and newer shows like The Good Wife , FlashForward, and Castle never even had a longer versions of their very short opening sequences. 24 has always had its succinct timer BEEP….BEEP… title, and even some sitcoms, once the bastion of the TV theme song, have abandoned traditional opening credits for an abbreviated animation and a creator credit (How I Met Your Mother, Community).

The reverse has also been true, largely for high-brow cable and premium cable programming. Over the past decade, it’s become the norm for HBO shows to come stamped with trademark artsy title sequences, sometimes nearly two minutes long. The best of these are completely gorgeous little films that tap into the show’s thematic content and organizing aesthetics – Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Rome and True Blood all have powerful opening sequences that go a long way toward establishing the shows’ tone. True Blood in particular has an opening sequence that does an immense amount of atmospheric work. Those ninety seconds build an entire fantasy world, connect it with the politics, racial history, and cultural battles of our real world, and then anchor it all in a detailed, distinct American South. (The best embedded version I could find has an HBO watermark on it.) Showtime’s Dexter also must go on this list: never, ever have I seen creepier footage of food, and a jaunty, devil-may-care music that accompanies images of coffee beans being pulverized, a knife cutting into a runny egg yolk, and fingers clenched to pull shoelaces tight sells the show’s juxtaposition of quotidian horror as effectively as Michael C. Hall’s performance.

Oddly, these opposing methods of building framing devices for television shows are seeking to address the same realities of TV viewership. The supershort title credit builds a show’s brand while also making it far too short to skip – there’s no point in reaching for the fast-forward button on the TiVo if you know it’ll only be five seconds long. You may not get a whole lot of establishing information about the cast, characters, or tone, but at least you can’t skip over what little there is. On Community, for example, the thirty second sequence often gets clipped into a pithy title bit that blasts you with a brief melodic phrase, one line of a song, and a nice animation of a cootie catcher with funny doodles in it. The word “Community” appears in block, collegiate text, annnnnnd we’re done. You get a hefty dose of COLLEGE, a whiff of snark, and you’re launched into the episode. Conversely, the ultralong HBO-style credits open themselves up to skipping because they are so long, but if you do sit through them, you’re rewarded with a surprisingly rich little meditation on what you’re about to watch.

The ultralong title sequence also serves an important purpose for weekly viewing – certainly this is not always the case, but over the past decade, the cable shows with super long credits have often also been narratively complex, multi-plotted shows. Sitting down to a new episode of The Sopranos a week later, a minute and a half of Tony driving through the Holland tunnel may not remind you of precisely what was happening in the episode last week, but it helps pull your mind back into the show’s aesthetic, its tone, its atmosphere. It also establishes the episode as an event, something that requires some introduction and unpacking. It’s cinematic – this hour of your life is a separate experience, encapsulated from whatever you were just doing, and you need this title sequence as a bridge between the two spaces. Conversely, the long credits have the opposite effect in DVD viewing. I am much more likely to skip one of those long title sequences when watching several episodes at a time (which, ahem, happens not infrequently), because they interrupt the rhythm and immersion of the storytelling. I don’t need a ninety second reminder of what the show’s like if the thing I was doing two minutes ago was watching the show.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good title sequence. But I wonder if their presence at the beginning of every episode in the DVD format makes the rhythms of the show a little too pat, and the endings and beginnings of each segment super conscious reminders of time passing. A title song that’s familiar quickly becomes canned, and then annoying, and then it breaks you out of the duration of the show when you hit fast forward – the equivalent of skipping that one paragraph that’s repeated in every Nancy Drew novel (oh Bess, you always were a little plump). If nothing else, the title sequences are enduring markers of one way television will always be different than a novel, even when it’s at its most literary. The methods of production are much closer to the surface.

Ha ha, Thursday nights! A new episode of The Office! And Bones, and Fringe, and Parks and Recreation! And by next week Thursday, there’ll also be new episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and Flash Forward, and then in October new episodes of 30 Rock will be on! In other words, ha ha, Thursday, the night that totally overwhelms my meager resources as a grad student/spare-time television blogger!

I love The Office so much it’s almost physically painful, and I’ll also admit to a soft spot for Bones and a love-hate relationship with Fringe, so I’m sure I’ll get to them all eventually. But last night definitely belonged to Community, the brand-new sitcom starring Joel McHale, my snarky TV commentator muse. Wait, stop. Stop right now. If you have ever laughed at some terrible reality show but never seen The Soup, go watch clips on hulu. On hearing McHale’s new pilot had been picked up by NBC, I had a brief nightmare that he’d stop filming The Soup, but apparently he’s able to do both, so I’m able to watch Community without feeling resentful.

Gillian Jacobs as Britta, Joel McHale as Jeff and Chevy Chase as Pierce Hawthorne on Community

Community has gotten some great buzz, including this NYTimes piece and some love from Televisionary and slate.com. The setting is a community college, where the main character Jeff Winger has enrolled to keep from being disbarred as a lawyer (he had previously been practicing with a fake degree). There are so many great things about this pilot episode. As the NYTimes article points out, the humor is largely based on allusion, so the script is peppered with Breakfast Club jokes, shout-outs to Bill Murray and Michael Douglas, and at least one super-meta-reference to The Soup. The acting is good, particularly Chevy Chase and John Oliver, who alas appears to not be a series regular, and the premise feels both fresh and relatable. There are also countless opportunities to mock a community college, but for the most part Community goes for the funny and avoids the low-hanging fruit. (In the pilot’s opening, the dean addresses the students after playing a tape recording of a collegiate-sounding clock tower.) I should probably also mention that I have been whistling the show’s absurdly catchy score for about twenty minutes now.

Danny Pudi as well-meaning but social inept Abed

Without those things, the show would be mediocre at best, but the true gem of the show is the main character Jeff. Although an entirely different personality, Jeff is built on the same ambiguity of The Office’s Michael Scott, slipping easily between ego-obsessed scholastic ennui and brief moments of sympathetic self-realization. Because he already has a successful law career, Jeff’s entire motivation is to get a degree as quickly and easily as possible, which includes regularly deriding the school and bribing a professor for test answers. “Why do people keep trying to teach me stuff in this school-shaped toilet?” he wonders. In the pilot, Jeff starts a Spanish study group just to hook up with his attractive classmate and then capitalizes on the study groups’ insecurities to escape his study-leader responsibilities. Jeff is a jerk.

Except, in a really lovely little piece of emotional development, Jeff ends the episode with just the slightest twinge of conscience. Abed, a classmate who registers on the autism-spectrum and has an unhealthy obsession with pop culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s, offers Jeff some useful information on Britta, the girl Jeff’s trying to attract. “Abed,” Jeff says in mock wonder, “I see your value now.” As Jeff walks away, Abed thinks for a moment and awkwardly raises his finger before replying, “that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” By the episode’s conclusion, Jeff has realized he can’t get the test scores he needs and admits he never learned how to study because he’s always gotten by without actually working. The study group admits that even though he manipulated them, Jeff was a helpful member of their group. “I’m sorry I called you Michael Douglas and I see your value now,” Abed says. Rueful and only half-joking, Jeff ends the episode by muttering, “well, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.

I have a lot of hope for Community – like Glee and The Office, it’s an incredibly tricky balancing act between sincerity and mockery, but shows that successfully navigate that maze can be rewarding television. If Community lives up to its promise, I might even forgive Joel McHale for shifting his focus away from The Soup. (Please don’t do it, Joel! The void left in my heart where Chat Stew used to be could never be filled.)