NBC Comedy Thursday Nights

I like Thursday nights on NBC. I find the shows to all be hilarious. The only downside is that 3 hours of television is too long for me. In fact I really feel like anything more than 2 hours is too long.

I'm willing to not watch Outsourced. So the choice is either miss 30 Rock or Community. Both are solid shows. Tonight's Community was surprisingly not that funny.

Don't get me wrong I laughed. There were some great moments and plenty of good lines. However the general tone of the show was not humor. The general flavor of the episode was serious. It was weird to see Danny Pudi showing so much emotion. His performance as "Chad"-Abed gave the episode a ton of gravity. It was weird even after he returned to the Abed I'm used to seeing. In fact that seemed to highlight the differences of his earlier actions even more.

All of the jokes seemed less funny. Troy's antics and Jeff's willingness to let Britta lose her job didn't seem that funny. The montage at the end when they act out different parts of Pulp Fiction didn't make me laugh at all.

It was awesome. It wasn't funny, but it was still really good. Community can pull off genuinely touching moments. It generally weaves them in with the comedy.

Troy is the funniest character on the show. I've had this discussion with my wife many times and I stand by that statement.

I think my favorite though is Abed. His status as the outsider is clear. A man always on the outside observing the lives of the people around him without ever really being on the inside. I think that is what gave "American Poultry" so much weight. The homage to mafia movies was hilarious. However the naked vulnerability throughout the episode (and series) of Abed using culture to try and establish connections with other people is intense.

In American Poultry the balance between comedy and seriousness clearly leans toward comedy. "I dressed like a crazy Pharaoh for you man". Tonight's episode leaned the other way. Abed's commentary on a revelation is more poignant when we realize it isn't real. Maybe it's how he think he should be or how he thinks he would be in that situation.

At the end of the day the story is about someone who longs to feel the touch of the people around him. Who wants to stop being on the outside and feel like he thinks other people feel.

Abed is the, superficially, least deep character. He is a machine to allow the writers to comment on culture and be geeky. However when you look you see that he is in fact the deepest character on the show. He so clearly conveys his desperate need to connect with people by completely dedicating himself to the one medium where he can do exactly that.