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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.
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