Heh, thanks. You should see a doctor about that cough, by the way. I know a guy, goes by the name of Submarine. "He's a good man, and thorough."

The community looks really really popular if you're only paying attention to the internet. If the opinions of people on the internet were the norm, we'd be somewhere in the fifth or sixth season of Firefly right now, Minecraft would be the highest selling game of all time and sites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks would be revered and not demonized in the media.

Besides, The Community isn't exactly an unpopular show. It's the #3 show in it's time slot. It's only slightly less popular than "Let's Misrepresent Nerd Culture For Mass Consumption" and "Stupid Human Tricks". How is that bad?

If anyone is upset about The Community getting canceled, you can blame the same people who gave Transformers 2 a billion dollars and decided that Rebecca Black deserved a million bucks for effort. IE: the 99% of the US population who will cock their head like a confused puppy if you try to explain to them how the internets work. The 99% of the population who just don't give a shit and only want to watch something that will amuse them for an hour in between eating and sleeping and pooping and working and screwing. The 99% who have no idea in the slightest that "the 99%" is a thing on the internet.

Yeah, there's a lot of factors to it. Honestly, I wouldn't know the show existed at all were it not for the internet. I don't watch it, cause I don't watch TV at all, but it's a thing on the internet, along with The IT Crowd, Game of Thrones and some other stuff.

And I think I sounded really angry in that last post. I just got off work and my poor tired brain is going off on some weird tangents to nowhere. Anyway, sorry for the angry-sounding post. I'd edit it, but then this apology post would make no sense at all.

Disclaimer: I am not Eddie.

The short reason as I understand it is that the various company logos and trademarks have not been "cleared" to appear on the show. So they blur it out because, on the one hand, a company may not want to have their logo or other branding associated with the content of the show, and having it appear in said show can give the appearance of endorsement. So the production company staves off a lawsuit. Same reason they have to blur faces on COPS or in the background of man-on-the-street interviews -- they didn't get permission to show those peoples' faces on television. This also, I believe, extends to artwork and graphic design. Just like if you want to use a stock photo or video, you need to pay for the license, if you want to display someone else's visual IP -- even something like a KFC menu -- you have to either get permission or blur it out. Additionally, the production company doesn't want to give anyone free advertising -- especially if the brand in question is a competitor of the show's actual sponsors -- so it behooves them to blur out any identifiable branding for that reason, too.

If you're seeing branded signs or T-shirts that are not blurred on American television, you can expect to see ads for that brand at the commercial break.

But nobody was blurring faces and logos in the 1960s. Isn't public display covered by plenty of case history?

Listening to the episode, you had a good talk about today's continuing story lines being made possible by DVR's and such. This is actually the second wave of such shows. As Babylon 5 came to an end, there was a brief fad with "5 year story arcs" and several shows made it to air with that intent. However... it was too soon, and all failed to survive more then a year. Also, Roseanne did some incredible story arcs in its middle seasons. They managed to make each episode self contained, but watching in daily syndication you see all these plot threads coming together. It's amazing. Call it "stealth continuity".

I prefer the word "Ninja" in place of "Stealth".

Dollhouse and Supernatural are two other examples of shows with preset, 5-year plans. Dollhouse was forced to skip ahead to the end, while Supernatural actually had its "last" episode at the end of season 5, but by then it had become pretty popular, at least in terms of The CW and Smallville was already set to end in a year.