The first season of NBC’s Community was something of a suicide mission, albeit one with some crazed integrity. Launched into the network’s Thursday-night lineup alongside stalwarts like The Office and 30 Rock, it was intended to be another of that evening’s “smart” sitcoms that eschewed the live studio audiences and crudely normative, housebound mechanics that kept powerhouses like Two and a Half Men chugging along, no matter how unfunny they were. The tradeoff made sense for the network: build a clutch of boundary-pushing shows that might attract smaller but (it must be said) more educated audiences that advertisers would pay to reach. (Why the network thought the disaster that was Outsourced fit into this mold is another question.)…
