Since transitioning from NBC to Yahoo Screen, Community has maintained an impressive consistency of quality and voice thanks to creator Dan Harmon, who reimagined the show yet again after another major round of cast shuffling. The most noticeable change in Community’s season-six formulation is weirder, more self-referential tags, a trend likely triggered by Yahoo’s permissive episode lengths. With up to seven extra minutes per episode, Community’s tags are no longer the exclusive domain of secondary plots and random callbacks. They’re miniature events, or in the case of the season’s second episode, “Lawnmower Maintenance And Postnatal Care,” “knee-high mischiefs,” a rough translation of the “Portuguese Gremlins” video Abed and Annie rent in the episode.
If there was any doubt as to whether Community still holds the title of “most meta sitcom ever,” here’s an exclusive clip from “the making of” that Portuguese Gremlins film. In the clip, real actors Talita Maia and Alejandro Barrios talk about their experiences working on the fake film, with the actors discussing how they brought emotion and depth to their characters, Sexy Portuguese Woman and Sexy Portuguese Man. The roles forced them to work so closely, poor Barrios seems to have developed quite a crush on his co-star. (Don’t start shipping them just yet; the feelings are not at all reciprocal. But maybe she just needs time to see that he’s the right guy? She’ll come around by the time they start shooting the threequel.)
Because the clip is a meta joke rather than an actual making of, it contains no insights into the vast internet conspiracy which has been known as the “Reddit translation infiltration” since we decided to call it that just now.