Fun in the ruins of Community

"Wait a minute-- something's changed," Donald Glover says just moments into the premiere of the (likely) final season of Community , NBC's rococo and weirdly earnest meta-analysis of the sitcom form. For Glover's character, the Greendale Community College student Troy Barnes, the thing that's changed involves the appearance of his old friend Pierce, the avuncular racist grudgingly played by un-avuncular diva Chevy Chase.

For Glover the actor, there's another change: In this episode's opening, this single-camera, often cinematic show steeped in a continuity as complex as X-Men comics briefly regresses to a traditional sitcom of canned laughs, set ups, and catch phrases.

And that is a joke about the biggest change, the one faced by Glover the Cult Phenomenon as well as the show's cast, writers, and intense internet fanbase: Community limps into its final thirteen episodes (premiering February 7) bereft of its creator and guiding spirit, Dan Harmon, a TV auteur canned by NBC for reasons likely having much to do with his piss-poor Chase-wrangling. From the outside, there seems something idiotic about the firing of the show's most essential creative force because of his feuding with the show's least. It's like if George Clinton got tossed out of Parliament because he had beef with that dude in the diaper.

But the show never caught on with viewers, much, despite much critical attention and one of TV's best (and best looking) ensemble casts, so it was reasonable to assume the network had other reasons, too-- especially as the scripts became more dense, more dark, and more likely impenetrable to a free-TV audience. Maybe they were bringing on new producers David Guarascio and Moses Port to make Community accessible.

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The speech is over, the lunch is finished, and the parade is complete, but we're still here in New York. While you're unlikely to make it to DC in time for the balls and even more unlikely to gain entry despite how spot on your Joe Biden impersonation may be, there's no reason you can't enjoy some politics today.

And what better, or more American, a way to celebrate anything than to watch television? Here are 5 shows that will cure your hankering for government gals, legislative agendas, and backroom deal boys of all merits without having to sit in traffic all the way down I-95. Remember: the best kind of political party is one with a television.

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If you were a baby of the '80s, you'll know that, while boys went nuts for Hulk Hogan and Macho Man "Randy Savage," we girls had our own burly heroes in Sally the Farmer's Daughter and Vine. Yes, GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) was a groundbreaking television show that ran four seasons, from 1986 to 1990, and featured female wrestlers who, we now learn, were actresses, models, dancers, and/or stunt women hoping to break into show business any way they could.

But what happened to them?

Director Brett Whitcomb takes us into the lives of this tough group of women in his documentary GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling from the initial open-call auditions, to the grueling training with wrestling legend Mando Guerrero, to overnight success and global recognition, and the show's unexpected cancellation. 92YTribeca is hosting a screening of this documentary Saturday night. This includes a Q&A with original GLOW girls Gremlina, Little Egypt, and GLOW referee/writer Steve Blance. Comedians and GLOW fans Glennis McMurray and Matt McCarthy moderate the discussion. We caught up with former GLOW girl Angelina Altishin, known as Little Egypt, who has since become a successful real estate agent. Right before she caught her flight to New York, she took the time to chat with us about being a GLOW girl, life after GLOW, and the touching reunion with the rest of her wrestling team mates. More »

Lights, camera, action. This Tuesday, WikiLeaks founder and hacker superstar, Julian Assange, will premiere his new show, "The World Tomorrow," on the Russian government's satellite channel, Russia Today. It will be broadcasted online and on air in English, Spanish and Arabic - three of the most widely spoken languages in the world - and is sure to piss off the top echelons of governments across the globe.

The promotion above, released internationally Friday, is a snippet of what's to come the most authority-hated, pursued man in the world. And, boy, does it look interesting.

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When Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi started writing the offbeat Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete in the early nineties, they didn't really know what they were doing. Much less did they expect that 17 years later, the quirky experiment in children's programming would amount to three sold-out cast reunions backed by a sizeable cult following of grown-up nineties kids on a nostalgia kick.

The cast and crew of the whimsical tribute to suburban youth greeted a packed auditorium last night at the Bowery Ballroom. The audience was peppered with smartphone-toting twenty-somethings donning flannel and thick-rimmed glasses -- characteristic nineties traits recycled into hipster stereotypes.

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Lucy Cooke may have one of the best jobs on the entire planet. She's a documentarian, a sloth documentarian; you've probably seen her work in the happiness-producing "Meet the Sloths," her video about the Aviaros sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica. Animal Planet has realized her talents (and the great power of sloths) and will air an hour-long documentary called Too Cute! Baby Sloths this Saturday at 8 p.m. The trailer is above. Set your DVRs now.

We got in touch with Cooke, who is also writing a book called The Little Book of Sloth, to ask her a few questions about our possibly most favorite animal, aside from the slow loris. Our Q&A, after the jump. Happy Friday.

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Americans may be fatter than ever, and getting fatter, but it's not because we're sitting in front of the TV with our Doritos. Instead, we're sitting in front of our computer with our Doritos. So there. Nielsen Media's latest survey reports a drop in the number of American households with television sets -- that number "is likely to fall" from 115.9 million homes this year to 114.7 million homes next year. Granted, 114.7 million TVs is still quite a few, but nonetheless! This is progress, of a sort, particularly considering that the overall number of households (and people in them, individually speaking) continues to grow.

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Last night, the gallery world's Top Chef eliminated our man Sucklord, the Chinatown-based bootleg toymaker we splashed on the Village Voice cover in September. Throughout the course of the first six episodes, the Sucklord was the reality competition's clear breakout personality: the Sucklord got the most airtime, the most character development, the most massaged subplots, the most televised quotes about "balls," and even a chance to spraypaint China Chow's (clothed) breasts.

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BRAVO

Tewz on Work of Art

One of the more intriguing aspects of Work of Art, the BRAVO reality show we've been following, is that the show's producers chose a handful of cast members who'd already had a presence in the world, whose self-propelled careers could exist apart from the reality-television lens. Along with Sucklord, who's semi-miraculously managed to survive four rounds, there's also Tewz 1, an accomplished street artist, painter, musician, urban explorer, printmaker (and a lot more) from Chicago whose work tends to get lumped into the lowbrow-art genre. Last week's episode saw Tewz's dismissal from the contest, along with Sucklord emotionally defending his pal's piece before the judge firing squad. (In true Sucklish: "I think this thing has balls!") We spoke with Tewz about making a friend cry, his pal Sucklord, and how Work of Art was a little like jail.

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Andrew Eccles/Bravo

Jazz-Minh Moore

The fourth episode of BRAVO's Work of Art airs tonight and miraculously, our favorite contestants, Sucklord and Michelle, are still in the competition. Michelle didn't do so well with her Coke Zero tribute in last week's pop-art challenge, but the official casualties were artist Leon Lim and Manhattan-based painter Jazz-Minh Moore. (Previous cast-offs were Brooklyn photographer Kathryn Parker Almanas and West Coast artist Ugo Nonis.) Sucklord accidentally spilled paint on Jazz-Minh's self-portrait diptych, yet she claimed to love the effect--but then got eliminated for the piece. Did she secretly blame him? Is she tired of everybody making fun of her name's spelling? Was she really bad at translating pop culture because of her hippie upbringing? No, no, no, and you'll just have to read the rest.

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