Okay, a few things:
1) Sony Pictures Television — the production company that makes Community for NBC — made a video that asks viewers to help save the show by watching it live. We previously saw this kind of thing when ABC made a video begging viewers to help save Happy Endings.
2) The Happy Endings one was infuriating, as Josh pointed out at the time, because the entity that made it, ABC, is also the entity that kneecapped the show by bouncing it around the schedule and that will eventually decide if the show lives or dies. This gave the whole thing a very “kidnapper demanding ransom” feel to it, and it made me want to scream “WE DON’T NEGOTIATE WITH TERRORISTS” at my computer, like a crazy person.
3) This video is less infuriating, I think, because it is made by the production studio instead of the network. They don’t get to make the final decision on the show’s fate, and would presumably like it to go one for as long as possible, so at least it rings kind of true. Yes, they are shamelessly jumping onto a fan-developed movement that was created out of appreciation of the content and they are using it as an attempt to line their pockets with a little more of that sweet, sweet syndication money, but adversity makes strange bedfellows, I guess. (As for whether the show deserves to be saved in its current post-Harmon, post-Chase iteration, well, that’s a different conversation. One that the Internet has had. A lot. And that a lot of you will have in the comments after reading the headline and skipping over all these words.)
4) While this one doesn’t fill my soul with white-hot anger, it does feel a little sad, like a balding 35-year-old narc in an LMFAO t-shirt sauntering up to the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria and asking if they know where to score Adderall. Let’s really think about this. It is a video, that they posted on the Internet, aimed at the hip, Internet-savvy community that created buzz about the show through GIFs and Tumblr and their own fan-made content, in which they ask said hip, Internet-savvy community — members of which are increasingly using hip new time-shifting techniques to consume entertainment — to consume their show without the Internet, in real-time, because the networks still value this type of viewership over all the others. I get that everyone’s in a weird spot while advertisers and networks try to figure out how to monetize DVR and streaming numbers, but still, that seems a little goofy when you zoom out and view it from 10,000 feet, no?
5) I imagine the idea for this video came from a 50-year-old man in a suit who told one of his underlings to make, “one of those whatchamacallit viral video things.”
(Via Comic’s Comic)
