Community, NBC, Thursdays 8pm
IMDb; NBC; TV.com; Wikipedia

Well, from the previews I read, I wasn't really expecting to like the show, even though the critics all sounded fairly enthusiastic about it. Their opinion made me give it a shot, and I'm glad I did. It really is quite funny (and perhaps at some point I'll move this review to my "quirky" section, we'll see). Anyway, there's this fast-talking lawyer named Jeff Winger, who's facing disbarrment, because it turns out his college degree was fake, or whatever (he got it from the country of Colombia, rather than Columbia University). So, he goes to Greendale Community College, hoping to get a degree fairly easily. He's smart, but that means he never really had to work for anything in life, never did anything the right way. And he sees morality as ambiguous. And um... there's a psychology professor named Ian Duncan who works at the school. He's sort of a friend of Jeff's, since Jeff had represented him in some legal case in 2002. Now Jeff wants Ian to help him get through school as easily as possible, though he seems unwilling to break the rules for Jeff. (We don't see Ian very often in the show, but he's pretty amusing, which isn't surprising, considering he's played by John Oliver.)

Meanwhile, Jeff meets a student named Britta (who we like), and he wants to go out with her. So he lies, and claims to be a Spanish tutor with a study group. Of course, there's no one else in the group, but I guess Britta invites this guy named Abed Nadir, who apparently has Asperger's. He's also way into pop culture, and wants to become a filmmaker. And Abed invites some other people to the study group, including Pierce Hawthorne (played by Chevy Chase), Troy Barnes, Shirley Bennett, and Annie Edison (who we quite like). We quickly get to know a bit about all of them, mainly because Jeff's trying to avoid studying. (At first, Jeff gets them to start squabbling with each other, but later, to please Britta, he gets them to accept each other as a kind of "community;" hence a double meaning for the show's title.) It's a fairly eclectic group. Pierce seems to think he's alot wiser and cooler than he actually is, and he's probably even more self-centered than Jeff, as well as having some archaic attitudes about various things. Annie is rather uptight, but she has a crush on Troy (with whom she went to high school), though he's totally oblivious to this. Troy was a football star in high school, and is quarterback on Greendale's team, though they're not very good. Shirley is a recently divorced, middle-aged mother, who likes to gossip, mainly with Britta. She seems to have a kind of mother hen vibe about her, although some people in the group (mainly Abed) look at Jeff and Britta as the sort of parental figures of the group. (Abed also seems to see everyone as characters on a TV show, though he knows that's not really true. Which I guess is amusingly ironic, in a meta sort of way, considering we know they really are.)

Aside from the main group, there's also the Spanish teacher, Seņor Ben Chang, who doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of Spanish, but no one else wants his job. Anyway, he's kind of... I dunno, Wikipedia says "slightly unhinged," I'll go with that. And then there's the school's dean, Craig Pelton, who is mainly interested in making the school better (or at least making it seem better than it actually is). He's kind of weird.

Anyway, it isn't long before Jeff comes to truly care about the people in his study group (even if it seems like they don't actually do much studying). And while he continues to want to date Britta, and she continues to refuse, he does seem to genuinely like her as a friend. I should also mention that Abed and Troy become close friends; the show usually ends with a scene of them doing some weird thing together, sometimes with Jeff or someone commenting on it. Also, later in the season, Jeff starts dating a statistics professor named Michelle Slater (who we like). Which may make Britta jealous, but that's... well, I dunno, it's too early to say more about that. In any event, Shirley thinks Britta and Jeff should be going out. Especially since he has been becoming a better person since making these friends. And... I'm not sure what else to say, right now. But it is, as I've mentioned, a rather quirky and really funny show. (Oh yeah, and episodes have titles that sound like college courses. I dunno how long they'll be able to keep that up with any degree of relevancy to the plot of each episode.)