“Community” Standards: Hopelessly Devoted To Joel McHale

If you’re like us and abhor your typical generic sitcom for its callow puerility, hermetically-sealed staginess, eye-rolling reliance on familial relations, and catch phrase-happy brats, then NBC’s Community may have slipped under your radar. Convention-breaking, wordsmithy, and deadpanningly unsentimental, the series — actually lensed at two L.A. community colleges — follows the continuing adult education misadventures of a motley, makeshift family of losers and wandering souls addled with neuroses and just gnawing at the bit to fuck the hell out of each other.

Their leader/lynchpin: the instantly crushable Jeff Winger, who as essayed by Nightcharm perennial fave Joel McHale is a metrosexual, borderline sociopathic lawyer attempting an honest do-over at life after his disbarment. With his choppy boy toy do’, skinny guy jeans, sexy Keebler Elf face, and looooong jock bod, Winger cuts through the collegiate waters like a shark in a cove of full of Flippers, his snap trap-minded rake nailing the hot statistics teacher (“You in the skirt! Date me.”), preening like a buck in heat to get into the pants of the idealistic young blonde thang he sets his laser sights on, and becoming the vicarious alpha male conduit through which the other male members of the group channel their geeky aspirations of studdom.

McHale — sly, ironic, playful, and boasting the most peerless “I’m a prick — spank me” grin you’ll ever see — was born to embody Jeff Winger, and anchored by his considerable charm and charisma, Community has achieved cult status with its loyal coterie of viewers. What may bring in even more ratings is the series’s unabashed willingness to eroticize his dork centerfold on a regular schedule and pander wonderously to McHale’s massive gay fan base. Just this year alone we’ve been privy to Jeff’s attempt at seduction while wearing sidekick’s Abed’s too-tight grade school boy T-shirt, his yuppie ass homeless and reduced to bathing with a hose on campus grounds, and his bellicose strip-down to shorty-shorts for an epic pool table bout. McHale, already possessing the brains to pull it all off, has hit the gym hard to be camera-ready, and if capturing every angle of those pecs, those abs, those legs, that ass isn’t the mission statement of screencapping, then we don’t know what is.