Thursday Funnies, or: The NBC Thursday Night Comedy Line-Up Is Akin to The Best Supergroup You've Ever Heard or the NBA All-Star Game

Maybe a little superfluous, but let me explain.

From what I understand from reading "trades" (ugh.), NBC seems to be a 4th place network in a 4 man race (The CW isn't even running at this point, chugging along out of breath at about the 2K mark, if you wanna run with the metaphor, and make bad puns about running with the metaphor about running), and it's not exactly helping its own case most of the time. That guy with the chin that won't go away now takes up a full hour of primetime every evening, even though nobody (don't let the ads fool you) asked for that kind of "gift" from NBC. But if NBC doesn't have the best one-night lineup in all of television, I couldn't tell you what does. And that night is NBC Comedy Thursday.

Lemme break it down for ya:

Community
The new kid on the block, Community had the privilege of debuting with a lead-in from The Office, before being pushed to the beginning of the night to give 30 Rock its seat back. Community is like the DJ that spins at the party early, before anybody cool really shows up, but is playing deep cuts off The Knife's Deep Cuts for nobody but himself. This is a show that is in love with itself, though without a chip on its shoulder, a show that is too good for an 8pm time slot, a show that holds its head high in a crowd of giants. There are a few good reasons for this, but number 1 with a bullet in my book is Donald Glover.

I'll devote a lot more time and effort to the laudable qualities of Donald Glover here, but to put it shortly, I've never seen anyone on TV that makes me crack up like Donald Glover. Charlie Day comes close, but think about it: Donald Glover wrote for 30 Rock, jumped that ship (that's right. He was too good for 30 Rock) to star on Community, along with producing albums, updating a very funny twitter account and posting a blog with Kanye levels of cool shit, and generally being the funniest person on NBC. Aziz Ansari has been outstanding as well (more on that below), but Donald Glover has a je ne sais quois that makes me giddy. Check out this clip from this week's episode:



That is a dedicated delivery. Plus, Troy and Abed are truly a Dynamic Duo of Comedy. Those two could have their own show and I'd watch it. But aside from my career-crush (not a man-crush, but similar) on Donald Glover, the cast is solid (Joel McHale and Chevy Chase are two more strong points, as well as Annie, the most hopelessly pathetically endearing character on primetime), the writing is solid, the setting is solid. A good start to the evening. Which brings me to...

Parks and Recreation
NBC made a good choice putting its two most similar (and probably strongest, viewer-wise) shows in the heart of the order. P&R is the up-and-comer. No longer a rookie struggling in a new league, it's found its own way to contribute to the team, due in no small part to the mentoring it received from its predecessor The Office, a show it emulates without being a total rip-off of. Again, the cast is the show's ace-in-the-hole, with Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, and Nick Offerman standing out as the heavy hitters.

Aziz Ansari (who I once saw browsing the noodle aisle of Trader Joe's in Silverlake, which I will never tire of telling people about) is somebody to watch out for especially, as demonstrated by one particular sight gag from last night's episode that I can't find a clip of (the whole "Do I look sad? Look at my face." bit) that was particularly noteworthy. Plus he's friends with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, which I will always regret not knowing when I saw him at the grocery store, because I could have totally been friends with both of them. But yes, Parks and Recreation has gone from an awkward Office-Lite to something all its own, probably paradoxically by modeling itself after a show with its own growing pains that was based on something already beloved. That of course is...

The Office
The Office is the old veteran, still putting up good numbers but showing signs of age (though don't think it can't still hit it out of the park every now and then). It's the cornerstone of the comedy block, giving America a new, apparently much-needed Ross-and-Rachel, Luke-and-Laura situation. America needs to root for love I guess, because America is a nation of escapists, but that's beside the point (and not meant to stir up any shit), but The Office provides, and while the entire cast has arguably been turned into caricatures, the writers somehow manage to eke out new bits of character and emotion. It makes me think that this could be a show like The Simpsons (blasphemy to some people I know) that could go on for years and hit its stride somewhere between seasons 5 and 9, the difference being that it's much harder to hold a cast for that long on a live action show, and it's fairly obvious (or at least implied, if you think I'm reaching) Steve Carrell is gearing up for an exit within the next couple years, if not at the end of this one.

This week's episode reveled in the excruciating awkwardness of seasons past (always a good thing), and slowly continued the show's evolving plot of Jim's gradual decline into Michael-hood. It's really the most excruciating thing the show has ever subjected us to (and remember the Dundies? Excruciating. Am I saying excruciating too much?), watching who was once the show's most sympathetic, down-to-earth character turn into the show's most cartoonish, buffoonish, outright foolish one. It's an interesting set up, since Dwight's (and now Ryan's) plan to systematically destroy Jim may end up saving him from going full-on middle management, and becoming everything that he hates (but maybe secretly loves, or at least has empathy for?) about Michael. That is, depending on which side wins.

But anyway, The Office is basically the center star that the rest of the night revolves around, offering the peak possible comedy viewership, and for many might be the end of the evening. But those many are missing out on...

30 Rock
The comedy culmination. After an hour and a half of comedy, 30 Rock takes it to its logical conclusion: completely, absurdly insane. Those uncomfortable with 30 Rock's type of comedy most likely switch off after The Office, leaving Tina Fey for the rest of us weirdos. Sure the show saw a little boost with the elections and Sarah Palin, but that was mostly Tina Fey's exposure, not the show's, and didn't necessarily prepare anybody that saw her on SNL for the show she left it for. Because it's fucking weird sometimes.

There's been a backlash of late that 30 Rock "isn't as good as it used to be" (which in my opinion is so bullshit a criticism of any show it makes me blind, but I'll save that rant for later), and that in part could be blamed on the heaps and heaps of critical success piled onto it, as well as the SNL connection. People hear good things from so many different directions, they start to notice, and then the network notices that people are noticing, and things go to shit. In my opinion, and what is this blog but my stupid opinions, 30 Rock's been pandering a little, but not so much as to make it into King of Queens in a writer's room, and it's still capable of its former greatness, like Geovany Soto (at least I hope Soto's capable of former greatness, but that's a different blog). This week's episode was an edifying example of what 30 Rock is capable of, and what it's capable of is insanely layered self-referential winking postmodernism.

The whole show being about a show very similar to Tina Fey's old show, this week stepped it up a notch to include yet another allusion to real life: Liz Lemon leaves TGS (temporarily) to film her own talk show, and finds herself a victim of all the trappings of performing that she has to deal with with Tracy and Jenna in every fucking episode that came before, much like how Tina Fey left her (not-so?) cushy writing job on SNL to star in her own show (that show being based on the show where she had the cushy writing job that she left to star in her own show... whoa.). This is why 30 Rock is the perfect way to wash down a night of comedy. It's just absurbly meta enough to keep the smartie-pants intellectual NPR-types the show continually ironically lampoons (knowing that that's their actual audience, in yet another example of your typical 30 Rock headspin) watching, or perhaps not to continue watching, but turn on in the first place, as these smartie-pants intellectual liberal-types seem to think themselves too good for the old tricks of The Office (this smartie-pants liberal not included, for the record). But the fact of the matter is, those who decide to end their NBC viewing at 9:30 are missing out on the most demanding show on television (besides Glee, which is demanding in a different, more infuriating way).
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So why is NBC a 4th place network? My answer: Jay Leno. And Ben Silverman (the guy who ran the whole network into the ground in the past few years, who not-so-coincidentally is responsible for Jay Leno at 10pm). But that's missing the very funny forest for some stupid trees (or is it vice versa?). This is the best 2 hours on television (at least until the Lost season premiere), all on one network . Another great thing about Thursday? All your network comedy is over just in time to switch over to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Because who wants to watch the news?

Having said that (and I can now never say that without thinking of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I am considering as a topic for this space some point in the future), there remains the ever-looming quandary of on-demand viewing, where people can set their own TV schedules on a whim. I have my own personal lineup for these shows when I watch them on Hulu, but that's just my preference. In a dying age of TV programming (as in the literal programming and lineup choices, not necessarily the programs themselves), NBC has given us a lineup of Yankee-ian proportions. Mixed sports metaphors and all, it's a block I will continue to visit, at least until all these Thursday TV friends move away.