I think much of Todd VanDerWerff’s analysis of the similarities between Community and Glee in this piece is correct, particularly this:

On Community, the baseline reality of the show will change from episode to episode, with each new half-hour setting up a completely new set of circumstances for the characters to navigate through. In the second season, the basic premise of the show itself—a group of characters comes together at a community college—hasn’t always been the premise. Sometimes, they’re not at the college but in the desert. Sometimes, they’re fighting zombies. Sometimes, they’re animated. It’s been audacious, to be sure, but the series has managed to work its way through most of these episodes by keeping the characters mostly consistent. The level of detail work the writers have done on the characters is remarkable, meaning that Britta and Annie will react roughly similarly whether they’re taking a class on feminism or battling in an all-out paintball war. The circumstances of the show change; the characters do not.

The exact opposite is true on Glee. The writers of Glee will change the characters to suit whatever whims they have that week.

One thing he doesn’t mention that I think is a significant challenge for both shows is that they both run against a ticking time clock. In Glee, the main characters will graduate and go off to college at some point. Presumably, the characters in Community will finish their two-year Associations programs at Greendale and transfer to other schools to get their B.A.s, though Dan Harmon could decide to keep them there for a full four years. Either way, at some point, some of the characters have to move on.


I think Community is more vulnerable to this structural challenge than Glee is. Whatever else can be said about Ryan Murphy, his show has done a terrific job of introducing new characters and integrating them into the main cast. At the moment, it means Glee is in danger of cast overload. But in the long term, it means it will be much easier to phase characters out as they go off to college and to have replacements ready to step into the gaps that they leave. Does that mean the show can survive without Rachel, its crazed core? That question remains to be answered, but the experiment of sending Kurt off to another school has worked well, expanding the show’s universe.


Community‘s got much less flexibility built in. The show keeps introducing and building out new characters, but they remain largely at the periphery of the show. Chang isn’t even a full member of the study group, and he’s been a core secondary character for the entire two seasons. Dean Pelton’s a permanent part of the landscape, and would be an important part of the transition, but he’s an administrator, not a student. Starburns, Fat Neil, Rich, and Leonard are all fantastic parts of the scenery, but there’s no way to be able to tell if they’d be able to fill a full slot in the study group. I think it might actually be smart for Community to commit to four seasons, but be firm about ending the show after that run. The chemistry it’s created is so specific to the core cast that it would be too bad to see it falter.

I’m interested to see the point at which James Franco starts failing to deliver the projects he’s signed up for, or backing out because he’s overcommitted. And I also wonder when he’s finally going to hit on something that’s outre enough to harm his reputation as a mainstream box office draw?

They just keep coming, and they just keep ramping up: this time, he and Harmony Korine are apparently going to set up an opportunity for gang members to do some real damage to each other and hurt them. If I weren’t so disgusted, I might be bored by this. But a couple of privileged white boys getting together around a project that involves poor men of color hurting each other so they can convince audiences they’re experiencing something visceral and genuine? I’m supposed to be impressed by this? This isn’t Lady Gaga’s meat dress. This has consequences.

I respect a lot of things in the name of art, and professionalism and a moral engagement with what you’re doing are both on the list. Franco at this point just seems to be throwing a million things at the wall, enlisting collaborators who are glad to have his mainstream appeal and credibility. I would hope that he’d make those artistic choices in a way that will promote good, underlooked artists, and will produce genuinely challenging, interesting projects if what he’s interested in is being avante garde. This doesn’t qualify, to me. If there’s something he’s going to pare off his list in order to do well, this collaboration seems like a good place to start cutting.

One of my fellow critics at The Atlantic, in the course of arguing that women in indie movies are boring, dissed both Mirabelle Buttersfield of Shopgirl and Margot Tenenbaum. I did not let the insults stand:

Maybe Greenwood should have looked closer. Respecting the rich mysteriousness of a woman’s inner life doesn’t mean she doesn’t have one—and some of the women Greenwood calls out as boring are deeply sympathetic, brave characters, even if the people around them on-screen don’t always see them for who they are. And those people often get punished for underestimating these heroines, or assuming they are less complex and fully human than they are… 

Margot, like her siblings, is stuck, trapped by a false preadolescent myth of greatness. “You used to be a genius,” her adoptive father Royal tells her at some point. “No, I didn’t,” she tells him. “Anyway, that’s what they used to say,” he moderates. 

She’s not the only person who suffers the consequences of the gap between who she actually is and who the world perceives her to be. Margot’s husband (Bill Murray) and her brother Richie (Luke Wilson), who has loved her secretly for years, are both devastated when a private detective tells them that she has had an expansive and varied sexual life that neither one of them had any idea about, and that varies wildly with their ideas of her as a faithful wife, and an object of artistic purity (Richie has painted dozens of portraits of her since they were children). For her husband, the result is abject humiliation. For Richie, it’s worse—in one of the movie’s most beautifully-shot, emotionally devastating sequences, he shaves his head and beard, faces his agonized countenance in the mirror, and slits his wrists.

More to the point, Shopgirl and The Royal Tenenbaums are both movies that directly punish men for treating women as if they’re just blank screens their fantasies can be projected onto. Richie Tenenbaum and Ray Porter are audience proxies, and they pay terrible prices for refusing to understand the women they think they want.