With tonight’s debut of Community, NBC may now have their first Thursday comedy block where all four shows are actually worth watching. Perhaps without a huge dominant hit like Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers or Cosby, they can’t rely on sandwiching a piece of crap show between two big hits.
Or, at least, they will when 30 Rock comes back in place of the pointless, but not completely meritless SNL Weekend Update Thursday. The cold open, which imagined Michelle Bachman, Joe Wilson and assorted Republican crazies planning a group protest of the President’s speech to the joint session of Congress, but deciding to back out while Wilson took a bathroom break, was a relatively clever take on the meme, even though it may already be played out.
But with The Daily Show and the Colbert Report doing more incisive and edgier topical comedy every night, Weekend Update Thursday looks like the second rate fake newscast that it is. Even Amy Poehler can’t save this from being nothing more than an obviously cheap space filler until 30 Rock returns.
Amy Poehler’s other half-hour in Parks and Recreation, however, was funnier and had more of a sharp comedic point. Tonight’s episode, which dealt with backlash from a conservative activist when Poehler’s Leslie Knope married two penguins at the Pawnee Zoo without realizing they were both male penguins, kept Leslie from being too unsympathetic and oblivious.
Community may be the best comedy pilot I’ve seen in a while. I’m somewhat disappointed to understand that John Oliver won’t be a regular, as his character was consistently hilarious against McHale’s.