Monday, April 25, 2011

Community Highlights

I recently came back from the National Association of Broadcasters' conference where I heard director, Joe Russo from Community talk. He said Community loves doing genre episodes and will continue to do them as long as the audience follows - they're reprising "paintball" for a two episode season finale. He also mentioned that when an episode goes over their regular 5-day shooting schedule, they compensate on other episodes by making them more straightforward to shoot. When the "Halloween" episode took 7 days to shoot, they filmed the easier pen-stealing monkey "lock-down" episode.

So this past week we get another genre episode - the montage or highlight show. Shows do this all the time to save money or production schedules by just filming new intro stuff and then the editors go to work collecting footage from past episodes. And you always feel cheated, because it is a cheat. Nothing new comes out of these episodes - there is no progression. But Community took it another step and showed highlight footage that was completely new! They took it and flipped it - pretending the footage was all old stuff. Loved it! It felt simple in that the present footage all took place in the study room, but I doubt they saved much time on this episode with all the extra footage they shot. Awesome!

3 comments:

Lindle said...

This is a show I have not caught too many of, but the few I did see were certainly different. If they took the formulaic "montage" show and shook it up, that shows they really do like to surprise their audience and blow them out of the water. I will try to catch that one either on demand or in repeats. Thanks for the heads up.

Mil said...

Desperate Housewives does this too so you don't feel cheated. They do it quite well, in fact, inventing histories for side characters that become quite rich. But I agree, in general I'm not a fan of the but and paste montage shows. BTW, been watching Mercy Hospital a bit here, which you posted about some time ago. Not so bad though a bit melodramatic at times and they are quick to hop into bed. But a bit more compelling than Grey's Anatomy and I do love Michelle Trachtenberg. Such a fresh actress.

Mil said...

Oops, I meant CUT and paste.