NBC

Welcome to this week's edition of Pop Pedestal, Bitch's series of tributes to characters we love. Today, I'd like to recognize the Greendale student whose favorite film is "a tie between Ghostbusters, An American Werewolf in London, Back to The Future, Blade Runner, Stand By Me, Stripes, Star Wars IV through VI, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Jaws, Raising Arizona, Jurassic Park, Seven, The Matrix, Goonies, Breakfast Club, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, and The Fog of War." I am referring, of course, to Abed of NBC's Community.

Image: A seafoam green television from the past, the Braun HF 1. From Wikipedia.

TelevIsm is a series about currently airing television shows. I imposed this parameter on myself so that I would not post endlessly about shows that I love that are gone, like Battlestar Galactica and King of the Hill (an excellent show that the brilliant Snarky’s Machine and I turn the discussion to in a few comment sections round these parts.) But today, I thought I’d shift the conversation to the future: the 2010-2011 network television season.

Extensions off to Jaime Pressly, one of the funniest women on TV. Her Emmy award-winning portrayal of Joy Turner on My Name Is Earl is so solid that it’s easy to forget she’s a bonafide sexpot (with credits like Playboy spreads, countless "sexiest women" list mentions, and the lead in Poison Ivy: The New Seduction on her resume). Of course, Pressly’s hotness isn’t anything out of the ordinary: she has blonde hair, blue eyes, big boobs and a button nose. Yawn, right? But it’s Pressly’s self-awareness that allows her to take her conventional looks to cartoonish heights as Joy. And therein lies the comic genius.