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[nigeltde]

End of Community S1
I finished this off last night. Community hasn't been registering with me like Parks and Recreation but there were some pretty great episodes building towards the end of season 1 -- not including the finale, which had some great lines but consisted mostly of shunting characters into various places (it's a sign of how well they've built the distinctive voices of these characters that I was pretty taken aback to hear Britta say "I love you" so desperately, although "He's been to flavour country now!" is pretty genius) and dipped into the Jeff/Annie well too early -- and I appreciate the line the show toes, revelling in pop culture references but not celebrating its own cleverness; it's not smug at all. And there are people doing some great work on it; Donald Glover, Alison Brie, Danny Pudi never fail to crack me up. If they can get more absurd while keeping the characters this human next season it's going to be awesome.



Mystery Team
Speaking of Donald Glover, Mystery Team is bloody funny and while the ending here was pretty bumpy as well the preceeding hour and a bit is just really enjoyable comedy that hits some worn notes -- foul-mouthed kid, delusions of strength, etc -- but plays them pretty well any way. This movie is pretty much entirely Glover's malleable, mugging face, and he goes big but stops shy of breaking the fabric of space and time, and it's awesome. I think Aubrey Plaza's thing works better on Parks and Recreation because she can temper it with the terribly sweet Andy thing but she doesn't exactly have much time to build a character here.