Surfing Sitcoms: Community – “Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy”
These Community spoilers roll their own cigarettes and like the same video games as me, so you can’t bone them…
First off, the big, awesometastic, somewhat unexpected news… NBC renewed Community Thursday for a third season, along with new orders for Parks & Recreation (yay!) and The Office (yay?). It is one of the lowest rated comedies on TV if you just look at the Nielsens, but it has a huge following online and on DVD, plus it’s not like NBC has anything real great lined up to replace it.
It was in this happy time that “Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy” aired, a surprisingly dark episode of the show that may have been written by a writing staff that thought they had no chance in hell of getting renewed, so why not make things as twisted as possible? This was one of the few Britta-centric installments of the series, and this worked out because I have always considered Gillian Jacobs the show’s secret weapon. Allison Brie, Donald Glover, and Danny Pudi are the big finds, Chevy Chase is a superstar, and Joel McHale is to all intents and purposes the lead, but Jacobs makes a lot of their bits work and can also be very funny by herself, as seen in her hilarious, awkward, slow-motion reading of the line “Maybe we do.”
So Troy and Abed have started hanging out with an immigrant from the Balkans named Luka (Dollhouse‘s Enver Gjokaj, of all people) with whom they like to play violent video games. They’re afraid if Britta goes out with him she’ll “ruin” him, but when Britta does in fact go on a date with Luka she discovers he’s actually a former soldier who remember his participation in genocide fondly. So how does she get Troy and Abed to stop hanging out with him without “ruining” him for them? I would like to emphasize once again that this is a comedy. There are actual dead baby jokes in this episode.
Meanwhile, Shirley and her husband Andre try to get Chang to sign a paternity waiver, but Jeff (seeing an opportunity to get Chang out of his apartment) tells Chang he can be part of his possible kid’s life if he gets his act together. This quickly spirals out of control until Chang has Jeff arrested for kidnapping the children of an innocent woman named “LaQuonda”, causing Jeff to offer to Shirley that he will testify Chang tried to sell the children to him so that he can go away for twenty years for Human Trafficking. Again, played for comedy. I would say that neither plot is wholly successful and I would not rate this as one of the show’s better outings. Weirdly, Annie and Pierce are almost entirely absent. Still, the fact that Community is the sort of show where the problem with Britta’s new boyfriend can turn out to be that he IS A WAR CRIMINAL and yet somehow it all retains emotional realism is pretty much the reason I watch this series. Also that it ended this episode by ruining Catfish for almost the entire audience. This is the only sitcom on TV that even expects its viewers to know what Catfish is.
Quotes:
-Abed: (upon presenting Shirley with a large jug of water at her baby shower) “When your baby is roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland it will have a major advantage.” Troy: “We tried to get a sawed-off shot gun, but they were really expensive already.”
-“I seem to remember a man named Joseph who was perfectly happy raising a child that wasn’t his own.” “Biggest chump in history… We’re talking about Joe Kennedy, right?”
-“Exactly like Britney Spears! Hit me with your genie’s bottle…”
-“The corpses stacked like firewood, the rivers red with their blood. I miss it so much.”
-“I’m tired of confiscating saws!”
-“Parental rights? You’re adopting me?!”
-“I can almost hear the pitter-patter of little Chinese feet across the treetops.”
-“Oh hey, is that a reason to leave?”
-“Why do I have to put the VCR on 3, if Bones is on 5?”
-“It’s for an extremely thorough documentary I’m making about my life. It’s mostly footage of me watching dailies, but every once in a while it comes in handy.”
-“In what war is he a criminal? In the battle for our affections?!”
-“It’s cool. Thought it was about catfish.”
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