Audacious, weird, and icily ironic, Community was a kind of geek alt-comedy portal, packed with science fiction references, in-jokes that quickly metastasized into their own alternate universe, dark conspiracy-tinged humor, and a sharp yet loving deconstructions of the sitcom genre. At the same time, it also turned into a thoughtful and heartfelt rumination on loneliness, identity, and purpose. The story of Community is the story of the evolution of American comedy. Its creator, Dan Harmon, was an improv comic with a hyperbolically rapid-fire and angrily geeky style. After getting his shot with Community, Harmon poured everything he had into a visionary series about a group of mismatched friends finding solace in their community-college study group. Community: The Show that Broke Television is an episode-by-episode deep-dive that excavates a central cultural artifact: a six-season show that rewrote the rules for TV sitcoms and presaged the self-aware, metafictional sensibility so common now in the streaming universe. Pop culture experts Chris Barsanti, Jeff Massey, and Brian Cogan explore its influences and the long tail left by its creators and stars, including Donald Glover’s experiments in music (as rapper Childish Gambino) and TV drama (Atlanta); producers-directors Anthony and Joseph Russo’s emergence as pillars of the Marvel universe (Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War); and Harmon’s subsequent dramatic success with the anarchic sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty. Covering everything from the corporate politics that Harmon and his team endured at NBC to the Easter eggs they embedded in countless episodes, Community: The Show that Broke Television is a rich and heartfelt look at a series that rewrote the rules of TV sitcoms.

This book investigates the discourse on idolatry and images, especially statues, in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, with a particular focus on his numerous accounts of a contentious and at times iconoclastic relationship between Jews and images. Placing this narrative material within a wider comparative context, both Jewish and non-Jewish, demonstrates that the impression of strict aniconism uniform and categorical opposition to all figurative art emerging from Josephus is in part a rhetorical construct, an effort to reframe Jewish iconoclastic behavior not as a resistance to Roman domination but as an expression of certain cultural values shared by Jews and Romans alike. Josephus thus articulates in this discourse on images an idea of Jewish identity that functioned to mitigate an increasingly tense relationship between Romans and Jews in the wake of the Jewish revolt against Rome.