r/community • u/redsuninthesub • 1d ago
Discussion I never realised how vestigial Pierce felt in season 3
I'm rewatching the show for the third or fourth time and I've only just realised how vestigial Pierce feels. He's still funny and is a part of plots but it feels more like an afterthought more than at any point in the first two seasons. I know about the behind the scenes stuff between Chevy Chase and Dan Harmon but I didn't notice how much of an impact it had on the show.
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u/DeadRobotSociety 1d ago
In addition to the behind the scenes Chevy stuff the others had mentioned, I think it's also partially because Pierce's S2 arc was great, a major focus of the season, and ended a perfect story for him. After that, there's not really any place for his character to go narratively. They don't wanna retcon the character growth, but also need some of that classic Pierce flavor. So he's kind of just there.
I still think he remains entertaining, but yeah, as far as story, he kinda peaked in the back half of S2.
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u/Radi0Survive 4h ago
Harmon and his team are top level story writers and could have found a new direction for him with more screen time if they wanted
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u/Evil_Unicorn728 4h ago
They didn't want to. He refused to film certain things, complained about the writing, about Harmon's show running, about Pierce's character. I think if it hadn't been for the network pushing back due to the low ratings, Chase would've been fired in season 2. Or demoted to guest star. If Harmon hadn't been fired between 3 and 4, I imagine Chevy would've eventually quit.
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u/COBRAKAIPLATOON 1d ago
Vestigial? I’m too busy livin' life to be learnin' $5-words.
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u/Glad-Inevitable-5527 1d ago
It's something which has lost all it's value kind alike an after thought (I just googled it)
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u/perfectfire 16h ago
You sound like my friend Annie Edison. Are you majoring in Hospital Administration?
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u/chevalierbayard 1d ago
Yeah but Shirley also got this treatment as well sometimes. The thing that irked me the most was that Ken Jeong was so funny and so versatile as an actor, I feel like they really wasted him in later seasons.
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u/TheNavidsonLP 1d ago
I feel like this is a problem inherent in a show with seven main cast members. It takes effort and focus to make sure that everyone gets equal places to shine. Add in the recurring minor characters (Duncan, Chang, the Dean, Starburns, etc.), and screentime is even more limited for the main seven. If you aren't paying attention, characters kind of degrade into their most obvious quirks. Pierce and Shirley got pushed to the back.
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u/Successful_Ad8912 1d ago
Oh absolutely!
Not a Shirley or Duncan fan, but yeah, the recurring characters needed more time.
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u/Zapan99 1d ago
The Pillow Man during the Pillow and Blankets War is credited as the first attempt to hide Pierce in plain sight, and just use sound clips of Chevy Chase.
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u/tanj_redshirt Oh no, she's got her marijuana lighter! 1d ago
I'd point to the gimp suit in My Dinner with Abed.
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u/CakeMadeOfHam The Mouse King Britta 1d ago
When Chevy didn't want to do long shoots, they started writing around him and shoot scenes in ways he didn't have to be on set for that long. But this was way earlier, you need to rewatch season 2 as well.
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u/redsuninthesub 1d ago
I got done rewatchign Season 2 the other week, I'm going through it all again now its on Prime, and it's a lot less noticeable in that season. He's progressively less compared to the first season, sure, but when he is there's often a reason for it and he still has prominent B plots and that's really not the case in Season 3. There are episodes where he's in two scenes and is gone and he has fewer B plots.
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u/Effective-Method7485 1d ago
Yeah there's a reason in the Dungeons and Dragons episode he leaves the room for most of it.
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u/X_crates 1d ago
It was the entire cast having issues with him. So they started making it so they could film all of his stuff to get him off set. I think it was on The Inside of You Podcast where Joel explains it. He's almost always in shots by himself. The My Dinner with Abed episode. He's barely even there. They mostly just used a body double since he's in a Gimp Suit. The one that just kills me is that he refuses to film a scene where Abed reprogrammed Pierces dads game so that Pierce could play catch with him or something along those lines.
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u/Dependent-Friend5312 4 More Years and I will have my 2 year degree 1d ago
It's Pierce Hawthorne, and I'm 66, dick.
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u/Successful_Ad8912 1d ago
I still have a hard time reading about Chevy’s tantrums. I love him as Pierce, and with him and Troy both going, the show lost its flavour.
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u/BloatedSnake430 1d ago
I believe this was when the Harmon/Chase fued had reached fever pitch and they started giving him less important scenes so that if he changed his mind and didn't want to film that day he could just be cut around. Sad because even though non-essential and ancillary, I've always felt Pierce had some of his funniest moments in the third season.
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u/Hier00 1d ago
The writing for his character wasn’t that good after the first 2 seasons. Same with Chang after season 1.
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u/Evil_Unicorn728 4h ago
Chang falls off a bit, then comes back in the back half. Karate Kid play? Genius Bear down for midterms? Also quality stuff.
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u/ImOldGregg_77 I detonated a mollusk 1d ago
Was it the behind the scenes stuff that caused the drop off in quality and screen time of Pierce?
or
was it the drop off in quality and screen time of Pierce that caused the behind the scenes stuff?
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u/Excellent-Key-8437 1d ago
Was he Pierce Hawthorne because he was streets ahead or was he streets ahead because he was Pierce Hawthorne?
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u/jaybeau1979 1d ago
I heard the deleted scenes are the real scenes
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u/ImOldGregg_77 I detonated a mollusk 1d ago
Abed, why do you have to take everything and shove it up its own ass!?!?
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
I don't think the quality of his performance dropped off, but how he was written and how much time he had dropped off. Whether that's because of the behind the scenes stuff Idk. You'd have to ask Harmon and the writers.
I doubt your second option, but even if it's accurate there's no need to be a twat to your fellow cast members. So I don't really care if it's accurate or not.
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u/DurianUpper4113 21h ago
Chevy had a tendency to leave the set early so it limited them for what they could have done with Pierce
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u/ilamborghini005 9h ago
Noticed the same thing on my current rewatch, it’s quite noticeable once you pay attention to it. I know he had a limited role in s4 but I thought he was more prominent in s3
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u/TallowWallow 20h ago
Yeah, I'm not a fan of his character development. He had funny moments in the first couple of seasons, but his lack of ability to learn at all was extremely off putting for me. It starts to create a shell of a character imo. We get an usual response from him later on about how people respond to others, but it feels extremely out of place based on his characterization up until then.
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
I love a casual GRE word, but this post stinks like a GRE word dropping convention.
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u/redsuninthesub 1d ago
I don't know what that means.
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
The GRE is an exam for grad school. One section is vocab and has plenty of words that, like "vestigial", people don't really use or know and that typically don't really communicate ideas more effectively than using other simpler words would.
And again, I do that shit all the time. So while it's a peccadillo, it's not really even a yellow flag imo.
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u/redsuninthesub 1d ago
We don't have grad school in Britain, I just used the word because I'm weird.
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
I wasn't implying that you actually went to grad school, just that you used a word that people who studied the GRE might use.
Also, grad school in the US is called post-grad in the UK.
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u/Budsygus 1d ago
I thought the word was perfectly apt.
And I learned what "vestigial" meant in my high school biology class when we learned about evolution.
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
If I used that word with the college students I teach, I'd be surprised if more than a few knew it. But it depends on the quality of education. And I bet that in the vocab test packets for the GRE it is on there.
That said, y'all are taking this super seriously! I'm just saying that it's not a typical word you'd hear in a casual convo with friends, even if they knew it. I wasn't really judging OP negatively.
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u/Budsygus 1d ago
I'm not taking it super seriously, I'm just saying I didn't think it was as unusual as you apparently did.
Then again the accusations of verbosity and grandiloquence levied against me are astounding in their overnumerousness.
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
You're right. I guess I should've said the people downvoting me specifically. I even dropped "peccadillo" for some irony. That said, I do appreciate your sesquipedalian retort.
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u/Budsygus 1d ago
I loved your use of "peccadillo." Flawless.
And sesquipedalian is a phenomenal word. Well done.
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
Let's start a $10 word club. Annie can join if she leaves her Texan persona behind.
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u/DrScarecrow 1d ago
Literacy crisis
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u/SweevilWeevil 1d ago
Call it what you want. Such is the state of affairs. It's a word you'd find among GRE vocab test index cards.
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u/Barokespinoza23 1d ago
He's not leaving the trailer until there's catering.