Community mid-season finale review comments reach 30,000, possibly attain sentience

By Emily St. James | March 9, 2012 | 12:00am

Aux Features TV

Around 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, the comments on our review for Community’s “Regional Holiday Music,” the show’s mid-season finale and Christmas episode, which would be the only new episode to air for just under three months, hit 30,000. Needless to say, this was unprecedented for our site, since before this, we'd never had an article hit 5,000, to say nothing of the 10,000 comment goal review I set for those crazy kids more as a joke/dare than an actual mission. But the article crossed the 10,000 comment threshold within a month of the show being off the air, inspiring excitement among devotees, confusion among the show's anti-fans, and an earnest “What’s Community?” from people who don’t read The A.V. Club. In the quest for 30,000, the regular commenting community on the article has faced down everything from people wandering off to do other things to the dreaded 502 bad gateway error message, and the article will be up to 50,000 comments by the time the show returns next week if those people know what's good for them. (We’re just kidding. We think.)

Honor for the 30,000th comment goes to Snowmania, whose post kicked off much celebration and claims of “I do not own this,” an oblique reference to a YouTube video of Alison Brie’s Annie Edison saying “Yay!” that has become popular with the group. In the time since the show went off the air, the dedicated group posting in the thread has become a weird A.V. Club within The A.V. Club, just like in Synecdoche, New York, though we don’t know if the group is also publishing a miniature newspaper and website within the newspaper and website. Not all 30,000 posts are about Community, probably inevitably, though many of them are. There’s the usual Community quote and picture spam, but there are also earnest analyses of the ratings performances of the show and its main competition for renewal, reviews of nearly every episode of season one (including one by this dumb-ass), and live blogs of the Republican presidential debates (seriously). If you’ve got time, it's well worth a stroll through those comments, or at least a quick jump in to congratulate all involved on this A.V. Club milestone.