What are /r/community's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Here's the Poll for this week everyone! Hopefully this doesn't get buried. Thanks!

POLL: 313. Digital Exploration of Interior Design

Every once in a while a line from this will pop in my head and it will take me a minute to figure what song it's from.

This morning "Barack Obama is SCAAARED of me"

and last week "I'm a Peanut bar and I'm here to say"

Also, someone put it up on rap genius

It was but I couldn't find it with a ten second search just now. However all is not lost - here you go.

I would warn you about it, except I think the video description itself does a good job: "The american pilot of the It Crowd. It's amost the same script, except not funny."

That is kinda the premise for a Lupe Fiasco song called All Black Everything.

YouTube Link to the verse (2:04)
Rap Genius link to the verse

Amazon has one for $15. I’ve broken several of my husband’s mugs so I’m known for ordering them from Amazon before telling him.

Community Troy and Abed Mug https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003SXGN7K/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_a08dBbY3TGX1T

Poll for this week. Thanks!

POLL: 317. Basic Lupine Urology

And for those that are asking for results of these, I will try and get them out this week. School has been kicking my ass recently. Sorry!

I'm going to post this week's poll here so hopefully more people will see it! Thanks everyone!

POLL: 312. Contemporary Impressionists

Was searching for Community stuff yesterday. Joel McHale and Sony TV chief Steve Mosko are having a bromance evidently. Here's an e-mail from Joel after Mosko sent him a link to the press release for Chevy Chase's new ABC show.

Also, Sony execs think very highly of Chris McKenna.

Here's the poll for this week. Thanks!

POLL: 318. Course Listing Unavailable

And for anyone who didn't see them, here are the results for the first 17 episodes of Season 3:

POLL Results through 317

Dan Harmon's full interview about his return to Community (including the bit about Chevy) can be read here.

Here is the rest (sans App Development, because I messed up that week)

We're reaching the inevitable off-season and anyone who follows a TV-show specific subreddit knows it's the no man's land of worth while content. Sure, good posts will be few and far between but everyone's prepared for low res screencaps and barely relevant cast info. Why not compete this? Why not rewatch and discuss community every week. We have 97 episodes to get through which is more than enough for our off-season slump. Why not have an episode specific sidebar image for every week? Just an idea I'm floating out there to see who's down.

According to this, it got generally favorable reviews and the same exact score as the first season from critics (not from fans). I personally liked the fourth season.

Quite the opposite, actually.

And I know that it was for " "comedic effect" ", but it usually helps for a joke to make sense in context.

I think he said that during E3 when he was interviewed with Danny Pudi. I'll look for a link

EDIT:

> IGN: If Community got to come back, do you think we might see Troy at least one more time?

> Pudi: Oh-ho! Donald, break some news! Break some news, Donald!

> Glover: You guys, the Troy and Abed Hour will be out on NBC in September! [Laughs]

> IGN: Thursdays at 8!

> Glover: Thursdays at 8. NBC's like, "What? What? Did we green light this?"

> Pudi: Ubisoft should just make a Troy and Abed game.

> Glover: Yeah, Ubisoft should just do that for us. No, I mean, that actually would be kind of dope. I love that character. Who doesn't? Who watches the show and doesn't want -- because Troy and Abed were a fun part of it. I mean, I always liked the Dean the most, personally, but I think the gang is really fun to see together. So yeah, I'd be down to do something.

Full article/interview here

Vote here: https://www.facebook.com/TVGuideMagazine?sk=app_262168817154382

You can bet that the Chuck fan base is going to get even more rabid at this point, so we can't afford to get changplacent, alright? Let's do this!

Here's one with Joel griping about NBC's promotion and how Parks and Rec depends on Community's lead-in. I'm assuming the 'Bob' he's referring to as not being good at his job is NBC programming chief Robert Greenblatt.

I had a couple of "I need to pause this because I'm laughing so hard" moments with tonight's episode:

• When Shirley said something to the effect of, "Pulp Fiction? Yeah, I saw it on the airplane, it's cute. It's a 30 minute show about a group of friends who like cheeseburgers, dancing, and the Bible."
• Jeff telling Abed, "Look, if you want me to take it seriously, stop saying its name." Cougar Town is actually a pretty funny show (it was made by the creator of Scrubs), and one of its biggest critiques is the title choice. I'm glad NBC allowed that mention.

I also had a good laugh going from "WHAT MARKET ARE YOU SHOPPING AT?!" but didn't need to pause for that one. Hehe.

Lots of people use VPNs to view it. I understand Hola isn't great, but with my Private Internet Access VPN the streaming is in HD and it loads like lightning. So I'm assuming that's a factor.

EDIT: Also, a lot of people just don't watch TV on TV now. In fact, the majority of people I know either don't have a TV or they only use their TV for streaming. On NBC their views wouldn't have counted - with Yahoo they do.

Torrenting is still an issue, yeah, but I trust Dan - if he says the figures are through the roof, then the figures are through the roof.

That's what I was wondering! It certainly looked like him, which I imagine was entirely intentional if it's not the same guy.

20% isn't a shitty tip though, it's common for excellent service.. even trip adviser says that exceptionally nice restaurants see 25% as standard (which is still lower than the 34% you suggested).. I mean I bet waitresses really like you, but it's not fair to say $6 is a shitty tip which is over 20%

If you love Gillian Jacobs let loose, you’d love her episode on Harmon Quest - Dan Harmon’s DND show.

https://trakt.tv/shows/harmonquest/seasons/2/episodes/1

She basically ad libs the whole episode and it’s hilarious.

I noticed that the preview IGN showed used the Minecraft door sound, but it was changed when it was broadcast on NBC, probably for copyright reasons.

And reference-wise, even though it's not a video game, Pierce riding the bomb was a pretty obvious one...

I posted this when Season 6 started but got a little buried with all the other posts, so I thought I'd share again.

So far I've gotten rave reviews like "not bad" and "fun enough", so please let me know what you think. This is my first real game so don't be afraid to criticize, I know it's rough around the edges.

Edit: here's a direct link to the download

Jeff had just said, "Balance restored, I guess," which is a line from Chapter Eight of Pauline Baird Jones' WWII time travel novel, <em>Out of Time</em>.

EDIT: Just so everyone knows, this is a true fact — but totally irrelevant. lol

I took a stab at recreating this one. They wiggle a LOT.

^^^GfyIfYouLoveYourBandwidth

There's also some evidence of conflict between Sony and NBC leading up to the cancellation - all to do with money, of course. There's some quite interesting stuff if you hunt hard enough! https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/106723

here ya go

*edit and here's a widget for if the mods wanted to embed one on the sidebar

This interview suggests that he would have been more like he was in season 1, as an unintentional mentor.

At first I thought it might be weird if I posted this in here, but since people are literally just writing direct quotes from random episodes of the show as comments, here is a gfy/gif I made of the scene.

Use Zenmate, Hola works by routing you through other people who have Hola (in the country you want), so if somebody with less-than-good intentions were to use Hola and connect to your country - and it went through your connection - you could get in trouble for whatever they look at/do on the internet through your connection.

Just received one in the mail too. It's a full-size frisbee, same color and writing as the one in the photo. Pretty cool gift!

Edit: a pic of mine for those who are curious: https://instagram.com/p/0OkC8tJxm5/

Scanning through here and I agree with all of it. I just found a long lost tag we never shot for that ep, and I think you'll all enjoy it. Take another look, I added the tag to the bottom of the article. https://medium.com/p/d703b80ff3e5

https://thetvdb.com/series/community/episodes/3713171

Not according to TVDB.

But they removed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons from streaming services. So my guess is they just moved all the episodes down a number on Netflix.

If it's not internationally released just use Hola unblocker. So far all of the Community-related videos I've seen on Yahoo have been accessible in Ghana. I'm taking that, and the fact that they've said nothing about international fans having to wait, as a sign that it'll be available worldwide on March 17, probably very early on the morning of March 18 for us.

I will wake up at 3 am if need be, and I'll use hola unblocker and all of my data plan for the entire month if it comes to that.

I'm scared. I was expecting Whitney's ratings to go down. But they went up. This was actually the first week I saw a commercial for just Community and the ratings still went down. I'll plug the TV guide voting thing here.

for those who want to get it up, go here, like the page, and keep voting it up. Deadline is 31. You can put in as many votes as you want.

https://www.facebook.com/TVGuideMagazine?sk=app_262168817154382

I guess a lot of people just need a laugh track to verify what they think is funny. &#3232;_&#3232;

Ninja Edit: Sorry to hijack this conversation, but Glover needs a little bit of help on this Hulu survey

Anything is a blind spot for Greenblatt. From what I read he doesn't understand TV at all. He just said he doesn't understand why Hannibal isn't getting better ratings. How about not airing it on Friday, duh doy?

I know you were asking about the characters, not reality... But I just wanted to add the really charming fact that Gillian Jacobs held onto her canister. To the left of her TV, if you have trouble finding it. https://instagram.com/p/qZmL0vDFmV/

https://letterboxd.com/bookwormgirl910/list/communitys-pop-culture-references/detail/

https://www.google.co.in/amp/s/uproxx.com/tv/abedpedia-abeds-a-to-z-guide-to-pop-culture-references-on-community/amp/

Another great episode, so many good moments.

It's already been mentioned that the Dean's comment about Britta's boots was fantastic. I also enjoyed his declaration was that "it seems her only crime is being a hero and wanting to be taller"

In reference to the naked man showering with Chang and Duncan: "you're very confident, I'll give you that" "but you shouldn't be"

http://www.hulu.com/watch/102595/community-shower-conversation

Don't get me wrong, I'm not insinuating that Hawkthorne is supposed to appear to be some kind of sequel to Blackthorne, I just thought getting rid of "black" from the title and the whole brother thing was just too coincidental to have been an accident.

Thanks for the link to that website though, I used to love the Crystal maze game as a kid.

OK, so get english subtitles from somewhere like opensubtitles (not sure if that particular site has downloadable subtitles for community) and then translate them to Japanese with jubler (that only works if you can speak Japanese, if not, translate with google, they are getting pretty good these days, though not sure how much the humor will translate automatically.) Or invite me and I'll do a running live translation for your friends haha but that might be weird because 1) don't know you or your friends 2) someone speaking while trying to watch something is super distracting! anyway, hope this helps you!

EDIT: Sheeet just got real. What part of Tokyo you at ? You have this planned for this weekend ? I have no plans on this saturday or sunday so hit me up if you want some stupid idiot to try to give a running translation for your friends. hahahahaha Though, that might be weird for the reasons 1 and 2 stated above. haha

I present: 4x "Zombie Attaaaaack!"

mp3: http://www.filedropper.com/zombieattack

m4r (iPhone): http://www.filedropper.com/abedzombieattack

(sorry I dont use file sharing websites but I didnt want to use my dropbox, so I didn't know which site to use, this one seems fine though)

You'll notice Abed doesn't really finish the "ck" of Attaaaack but oh well! Enjoy

Andy Bobrow wrote my favorite episode of the series (Mixology Certification). And of course there are Scrubs alum Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan.

You can go to and look for the Community channel, or download the Yahoo Screen app on your phone/tablet! Don't know how to make it work on TVs and other platforms though. The list of countries where it's available is here, plus the different ways to watch it. If your country isn't on the list, you can try a VPN like Hola or Zenmate to get it to work!

And yeah, I agree that it's overdone, but idk, I really liked it. The second half was so good, and I think that even with the cloning, everything still felt real and emotional enough.

Do I think it would've been better if the episode was fully grounded? Yes, for sure, but I was still really happy with what we got instead. I definitely see where you're coming from, though.

Here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/TVGuideMagazine?sk=app_262168817154382

You do have to "like" TV Guide in order to vote, you can unlike it later. Also, you have to click "submit vote" instead of hitting enter (design fail).

I found it. My comment highlighting the response here, full IGN interview article here.

He said it in the interview. He's the kind of guy that doesn't like settling for something, and doesn't want to be tied down by anything in his life for a long enough time period. At the time he left Community, a part of why people think he did is because he wanted to take a more serious route rapping. But I don't think it was rapping specifically that made him want to leave, he just was done with that part of his life.

He also made indications that he wanted to be taken more seriously by his fanbase. His open letter to instagram really says it all

For science!

*obviously I know you were being sarcastic, but I figure that science is bigger than the both of us

Before the show was out and Hulu was advertising, they had this clip posted as a teaser trailer. As I was watching it, I knew that there was something special about the actors. I was super-exited for the show, but in the back of my head I thought that there was no way it could live up to clip. It did.

According to Erik Charles Nielsen (Garrett), &quot;Danny Pudi was in Vancouver shooting his pilot that week.&quot;

Here ya go.

Loved the deleted scene from season 1, but for my money the Mind Jacker stuff was funnier. I stopped being able to breathe during this scene from laughter. But to each their own, I guess I just prefer this type of absurdity.

Came here to say this, I'm in Ireland and I need my fix! Am I right in saying the episode starts at 20:00 (EST)?

Oh dang, really? That’s sad, but... This video is sponsored by NordVPN. Staying safe online is an ever growing difficulty and you could be exploited by hackers. NordVPN allows you to change your IP address, making you harder to track, securing your privacy. You can even change the country your Netflix and watch shows not available in your area. Check out the link in the description to get 20% off for the first two months and thank you to NordVPN for sponsoring this video.

DVD Special Features Include:

• Commentary on every episode
• Outtakes
• All-New Featurettes ("Re-Animating the ‘80s," “Advanced Television Production: 5 Days, 2 Scripts, No Sleep”)

Source.

Nielson and Twitter are creating a partnership to measure the activity a show creates while its on and create better ratings. You can read about it on Tech Crunch. In other words, twitter chatter will start to matter more!

Urban Dictionary is eerie sometimes. At least, it always reminds you that you didn't come up with a term, you heard it before, had it buried in your subconsciousness, then later remembered it when it was appropriate.

I knew some guy who was convinced he coined the term "bananus" for the brown part at the bottom of a banana. Turns out somebody put that up in 2003!

Pssst, I tried. You can hear it's a little messed up, but I think it should be passable, especially on a phone. Editing audio on such a tiny scale was new to me. If anyone's better at this, please do go ahead. http://www.filedropper.com/kenphone

Señor Chang/seasons 1-2 cause frankly he hasn't been well utilized since

E: Had to correct the original quote and I found the clip, so I added it

Here's the iMacro I'm using in my Firefox:

VERSION BUILD=7110203 RECORDER=FX TAB T=1 URL GOTO=http://www.hulu.com/bestinshow TAG POS=1 TYPE=A ATTR=ID:0-1 TAG POS=1 TYPE=IMG ATTR=CLASS:btn-vote

u/CalvinsCuriosity I'm pretty sure his ideal race is southern, protestant white of English decent (the term WASP comes to mind if you've ever heard it. White/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant). According to Ancestry.com "Hawthorne" is an English last name ( https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=Hawthorne ), and historically there were many wealthy land owning English throughout the south of the US.

Websters -

"Ship - To pair people or fictional characters romantically, or to create a romantic pairing between two people or fictional characters."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/ship-words-were-watching

I think a VPN is your best bet. Set it to USA for Yahoo/ Hulu and UK for Netflix.
Don't use Hola though. I use DotVPN but I'm there's others. I'm sure more technically minded people than me, could steer you to the best one.

Don't use Hola., hit the "on" toggle, and you're all set.

If you use Hotspot Shield free VPN software you can get around the Hulu region block. I watch from Canada.

This way, it still counts each ad that I am shown and each hit that I give them. I'm pretty sure it helps.

INTERNATIONAL FANS:
1. Download Hotspot Shield HERE, Install and run it.
2. Watch Community on NBC SITE HERE
3. Comment, rate, click ads, and enjoy!

edit: changed HULU link to NBC link since HULU apparently doesn't help ratings.

Rob Schrab seems to have been on set yesterday as well. He posted this instagram from the set and 15 hours ago tweeted "THESE PAINTBALLS ARE FILLED WITH SCHRAB BLOOD."

This is the interview in question.

Relevant quotes:

> IGN: The staff is mostly represented by male characters. Is there going to be any female representation on the Greendale staff's side this season?

> Harmon: [...] We had talks at several instances about the possibility of bringing back Slater, but all the people that we lost this season, they were all men. [...] With Pierce and Troy going away, we were definitely looking to bring in male energy, so we talked about Jonathan Banks early on, and John Oliver was always this big thing we'd always resolved to bring back, because I’d always felt like that was a big mistake, not bringing him back as much as possible.

> IGN: But when Season 6 hopefully happens, that can change?

> Harmon: Right, exactly.

Maybe they can play sound then, I'm not sure. But the vast majority of the times they're used, they are used purely as a gif replacement. I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put it besides "you thought wrong". The purpose of HTML5 over .gif is much smaller compression, which leads to far less bandwidth usage and almost instantaneous load times.

gfycat is one of the primary websites leading the drive to switch to HTML5, their website's about page has a great explanation

View this Gif as a Html5 Video!

GIF size: ~1252 kiB || GFY size: ~67 kiB || Compression Ratio: ~19

^(Gif2GfyBot here, I convert GIFs subreddit to bandwidth-friendly and quick loading HTML5 videos!)

Look at metacritic.

That link is for season one specifically, but you can look at the other seasons individually and notice that the scores for the subsequent seasons rise. Anyway, there are individual scores for professional and amateur critics alike, and you can read what everyone has said about the show and get some insight from that.

When a show kicks off at around a 7/10 (where the professional critics put the first season even when most of the reviews came out within the first few episodes), each 8-10 review helps it less than each 0-2 review hurts it. When an amateur critic (who has no idea how to be measured in praise or condemnation) weighs in, they tend to allot points based this structure: 7-8=I liked it, 9-10=this is my favorite show ever, 0-2=I didn't like it/claim to hate it.

Also, some of those negative reviews are funny to read. "Five minutes in and my wife and I turned it off. 0 out of 10."

this is why i post the gif, each character is still in his role, even John Olivier is the center of attention at this moment.

-Britta checked

-Abed seems to search a TV reference for find a way to react in this case

-Jeffrey seems to be more classic: WTF and don't make eyes contact, don't check (i"m pretty sure he checked too, but the frames don't appear in the gif)

Edit, i'm just starting to gif, and it was the first time with this software, so thanks for your advices. For those who want to try to do gifs, i used QGifer, it's free and easy to use, http://sourceforge.net/projects/qgifer/

There was a ton of overlap when I had it but Netflix has let a lot of series go without trying to reacquire them. They seem to be more focused on movies and original content right now.

Your best bet is to look at this site and see who has what and if those shows would be worth the fee for you.

The link is always posted in the rewatch discussion threads.

I've actually been interested in this too -- I found a bunch of bands through this show! Here's a site I've used, they list most of the songs used in each episode.

Yeah, he talked about it on Leno. Seems quite fitting. On second thought, I think I first heard it on Carson.

sucio/sucia can mean dirty as in "soiled" as well, but when talking about people rather than clothes or a room it's used interchangeably with "dishonest" or "guilty."

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/sucio

Google exists with or without millions of people being on the "bleeding edge" of technology. There's a market there. I know plenty of people my age that don't know what the fuck a Hulu is, so consider your point made there. But there's a market, it is profitable, and it does have a built in audience. Google was suggested for a reason. Or are you saying emphatically that there is no market for Internet TV right now at all? Plenty of arguments against that, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don't mean that.

Hola works pretty well - just go to the address, press a button, and you're done. A lot of people use it. It's worth noting that they do grab some of your (anonymous) info to sell for marketing and stuff though.

>Btw, was this episode shot while Danny was doing the Strange Calls pilot?

According to the guy who plays Garrett, yes.

It's not official licensed merchandise, I dont know if there is any or where to find it honestly, but if you're looking for a "Troy and Abed in the morning" the one you can find on Amazon is high quality. I've used mine for a few weeks now every other day or so and it hasn't lost any color or anything.

I think Media Link is, I tried Zenmate on a blocked youtube video, it loaded, but was incredibly slow, but with Media Link it was completely fine for me. But I guess everyone's experience will differ depending on where you are and who your ISP is.

I changed Hola for Zenmate back when I learnt that Hola was not safe. I've been using it for a while and it's fine, but sometimes I wonder how it works, and if it might be unsafe in some way like Hola. Could you give some kind of details on why Zenmate should be ok?

I've been quite lucky, not had any troubles streaming so far. Use Zenmate to skip the geolock then turn it off and it buffers through my relatively nice speed, and all is well. Is it a problem first thing after it becomes available for people or just generally?

Hola has been having issues for Australians in regards to Yahoo Screen - I couldn't get it to work at all, and there's been a bunch of other people with various problems. It'd been suggested that you use Zenmate - no idea about it personally, I'm watching it through Stan, but check it out. Otherwise you can always wait for the inevitable torrent.

Get a VPN with a server in Canada. I recommend Private Internet Access. Probably cheaper than Hulu+, and then you can also get British Netflix, which already has the most recent season of Breaking Bad and probably other good stuff too.

I'm outside the US and I use the program TunnelBear to access the content. It's really easy to use and it works really well. If you use it for free you have 500mb available but if you have more than one email you can have more by creating different account. Hope this helps!

, and use Hotspot Shield (also your adblock needs to be off for hulu to work). This is by far the best method, because people associated with Community/NBC have said before that online hulu views do count for something, so even if you're not in North America you don't have to resort to torrents.

I managed to find all the episodes easily but the extras on the NBC site are hard to find and most of them had missing parts.

I even installed itunes hoping they would be for sale on there but I was disappoint.

Incase anybody is interested, I was able to watch them from with a firefox plugin called 'FoxyProxy'

I had trouble finding a proxy that worked but FoxyProxy have a service where you can purchase a proxy from any country you select. So i purchased a US proxy for £6-8 per month. If you cancel within 3 days no charge is made.

I watched all the videos and then cancelled at the end of the night. paypal confirmed the cancellation... I got to see Señor Chang shoot fricking lazer beams from his eyes!

Everything went better than i could have dreamed.

Can't you just watch it at this link? I'm in Canada and nothing appears to be region blocked for me.

However, if they do region block it, just use Hotspot Shield. It's free VPN software that will make it appear you are in the US. I use it to watch Hulu from Canada.

I use Hotspot Shield and Headers on Firefox, Hotspot Shield doesn't work for Hulu or NBC for me (it did once) and Headers was fine with the NBC site, but now that's stopped working :( (and I set it to run all the time)

I'm watching it right now :d

It's a bit ambiguous, but hey that's almost appropriate. The Dean says, "ohhh what a surprise" after Jeff says the song title, which I'm going to interpret as feigned surprise, which I think The Dean is portraying from the get-go of the scene to try to make it seem more real to the waiters / mariachis / anyone else looking on at the restaurant / himself. He has a similar reaction after Jeff orders his food for him and calls him a gentleman.

The Dean's cough before Jeff orders is telltale that Jeff has been instructed on how to act in the restaurant.

Edit: lol @ "top nachos" (on which Joel puts a strange emphasis to draw slight attention). Jeff is definitely the "bottom" in context. Great writing & acting. There's a shitload of depth to this scene (no puns intended <shudders>).

Donald said in a ign interview this month, "I'd be down to do something." if Community was revived. http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/06/12/e3-2014-donald-glover-and-danny-pudi-talk-far-cry-4-and-the-community-hulu-talks?page=2

I was reading Cnet's hand-on-review of the HTC Vive at GDC (http://www.cnet.com/news/watch-out-oculus-htc-vives-vr-experience-is-astonishing/) and this particular quote made me think of the dreamatorium:

>"Then I saw the wall: a glowing grid gently appeared, indicating I'd found the boundaries of my physical space. The grid-wall grew brighter, and spread across part of the deck. I reached out and touched the actual wall, right where it was supposed to be."

Never in my life have I ever thought I would seriously be considering setting up a real "dreamatorium"....now here I am.

Quick story: So, I was writing a spec script for the show, and it was going to be about Pierce and Shirley working on her business. All I got to was the cold open, but I needed to share it before people think I stole the idea from this episode, that I swear I knew nothing about (except the wedding).

Anyways, thanks for your time everyone. I need to go, as the commercials are almost over.

Edit: fixed the link

I really hope she marries David Mitchell, that would be all kinds of awesome. Seriously if you have NetFlix watch Peep Show, or watch it on Hulu. It's in my opinion at least, the funniest show since the UK Office.

If you listen to the full version of the song and look up the lyrics (i'm not sure if these are one hundred percent accurate, but they are definitely really close), I think the song is about being in a relationship that is falling apart and not being sure if you should stick it out and try to fix it or give up and leave. In a round about way, I think that's pretty thematically fitting for Community.

This. Dan mentioned his plan for dealing with Troy's departure in an interview.

They actually explain it here.

Basically it's not a documentary of a family, but a show about a family shot documentary style.

Also, Ty Burrell (Phil Dunphy) made a good point about the only people that acknowledge the camera is family members so it makes the audience feel like part of the family.