10 Things You Learn Rewatching Community
7. Danny Pudi Really WAS On Cougar Town
One of Abed's strangest running gags was his obsession on the TV show Cougar Town, a real show that actually exists and was running concurrently with Community. Well, the Cougar Town crew obviously liked the idea, so they and the community crew decided to have some fun.
In the season 2 episode Critical Film Studies, Abed mentions getting to be in the background of an episode of Cougar Town. At first you're led to believe it's just part of the act he's putting on for Jeff, but if you watched the Cougar Town season 2 finale, Something Good Coming Part 2, then you know the punchline. Danny Pudi actually appears in that episode, right behind two of the characters in exactly the scene that Abed described to Jeff.
If we get meta about this, there are a few things we can take away from this. The most obvious being that Cougar Town is just a TV show in the Community universe, instead of its own thing. Which would kill pretty much any investment in the show's narrative, if anyone but me actually cared about this kind of stuff.