I think there's one thing we can all agree on: bring back Jean-Ralphio.

yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup. Honestly, Parks and Rec season 4 has broken the P&R / Community tie for me, in favor of Community.

Even stuff like Ron making eggs loses some of its punch because, of course he's making eggs, we know how he eats.

And Tom being a decent guy is basically in Informed Ability territory at this point. There is zero reason Ann should date him, and really, when we see how self-aggrandizing and self-absorbed he's been all season, just about as much reason we should root for him to succeed at anything.

Community has had plenty of pretty crappy episodes.

It's funny that these posts are back to back. Comedy, like everything has diminishing returns, Jean-Ralphio is so consistently funny because he can swoop in tell some awesome jokes and disappear for 6 episodes. It's funny how in sports everyone realizes that a 31 year old player isn't going to be elite for much longer, but on TV it always shocks audiences/critics. I can only think of a couple shows that continued to produce consistently strong episodes after they hit 100 episodes and most of those are viewed as all time classics.

I think Jean-Ralphio would be helpful in this spot inasmuch as he can help humanize Tom. Maybe this works a lot better if you make him the devil on Tom's shoulder telling him all the things that Tom is instead saying out loud himself. (like say JR shows up with those hats and pitches them to Tom, who has a moment of clarity and realizes Ann would hate them).

But yes, overall less is more and people clamoring for JR (or Todd Packer, or any other one note character) tend to kinda miss what works.

Community also has much higher peaks than P&R. P&R can win on the strength of its consistency when that consistency is A-level. It can't if it's being consistently B-level.

Couldnt have said it better myself. Every ep lately i feel like yelling "lets go", like make something happen already.

exactly. it's like, get on your feet, get up and make it happen.

tom/ann relationship is worse than anything in the abomination that was season 1

I honestly just have to thank all you guys for hating Tom and Ann as much as I did. It was bothering me to the point where I felt like I was getting a bit out there.

Also, P&R is still way better than Community imo. Community plays much faster and looser with character consistency and is prone to the occasional massive faceplant. If last night was the worst post S1 ep for P&R, it was still decent.

I don't think last night was the worst ep since S1 by any means. I just think that the show has stopped being fresh and started settling into routine, and that the entire Ann/Tom subplot is a huge misfire. It's a show that's gone from consistent A/A- work into B+/B work.

Tom and Ann are horrible. The Valentine's Day date was a sweet idea, but it's a massive fail on the writers to put them together. I mean, they are completely opposite characters, and they made an entire storyline pointing that out to us, just so they could bring them together. Nobody is "ooohing" and "ahhhing" at this storyline.

Maybe on some level people want them find the right ones, but each other? GTFO.

They do this a lot on shows, have a legit clever joke where most of the cleverness is subtlety and then are so proud of their cleverness they draw attention to the joke and explain it to death (or maybe they just assume everyone watching is too stupid to get it otherwise)

The Tom and Ann thing is so stupid and fake I hope they abandon whatever plans they had for it.

haha, good joke

This is right.

Tom needs Jean-Ralphio bad, or at least something outside of the office. He's like the annoying friend who can be ok in small doses, but you would never want to live with him. He wears on everybody in the office (and by proxy wears on the viewers) if he's always around. Tom should be doing his own thing most of the time because he thinks whatever he's doing out of the office is cooler than what they're doing, so he should have to be dragged to whatever office event against his will, rather than just always being there.