2. Poor Packaging

That said, once you're into the show and it really gets humming with the meta referencing and whatnot, it can be really good. But it's also really not the show that NBC has been advertising since 2009. Sure they've highlighted the show's wacky theme episodes and everything, but mostly it comes across as a show about a jerky lawyer who hangs out with a bunch of weirdos at a community college and is maybe banging a blonde chick. And, all right, that technically is what the show is about, but it's also really not entirely some "community college is lame" joke or a show about the sarcastic guy from The Soup getting zingers in on everyone. In reality it's a complex (see above) screwball show about TV shows. The marketing (and, OK, this is definitely more NBC's fault than the show's) in no way reflects that heady, satirical aspect. No, instead the ads are clips of the wildly unfunny Ken Jeong doing some kind of mugging and Joel McHale rolling his eyes. Those elements are certainly part of the show, but they don't fairly represent its entirety. Granted it's probably a tricky and unique task to figure out how exactly to sell this off-beat series fully, but there has to be a way other than having the bald dean say something dumb and then cutting to an Office promo.

3. Damned With Praise

You could likely say this about a lot of shows -- Friday Night Lights, The Good Wife, Glenn Beck -- but man if diehard Community fans aren't/weren't aggressively evangelical about this show, constantly harping on people who dared to like another comedy more than this one and demanding that their friends watch the latest Troy & Abed video over and over again. (We get it, they're friends and are weird. OK.) It speaks to the inside joke-heavy nature of the show, as mentioned above, that it bred such rabid and cliquish fans -- they began to act as if they themselves were part of the texture of the series, and tended to read wayyy too much into various small, inconsequential details. It's just too much! Rabid fans of anything are annoying (just go find a musical theater person and you'll see), but there's something very particular about the Community fan, one who really takes pleasure in the "getting of" the jokes and both wants other people to experience it with them but also kinda doesn't. It's more special when it's a secret, only it's the kind of secret that they talk about whenever they get the chance. And then if one of their friends does break down and say "OK, OK, I'll watch it," they run into the problem listed up top and the circle of life (or death, as the case may be) continues.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.