Since I was blathering about Community a while back, thought I'd follow up now that I've watched most of the run. Definitely agree with fArt and Enron in that the show becomes frustratingly uneven at a certain point. I say "frustratingly" because there are still awesome and unique moments mixed in with the dreck.

Digging into the history of the show is very interesting: it is/was developed with strong input from "the fans." My personal feeling is that this is normally a bad idea (with exceptions; when EVERYBODY says your ending is bad, a la Mass Effect 3, it's probably a valid point). Anyway, for whatever reason the show spends a lot of time in season 2 navel gazing and explicitly trying to reclaim the glory of the season 1 Paintball episode. Consequently there are a lot of themed parody/gimmick episodes in S2 and they are almost without exception mediocre (including just a dreadful run early on with the Apollo 13/Charlie Kaufman/Zombie episodes [although Aeryk would probably like the Z episode]). The S2 season finale is ANOTHER paintball episode (a two-parter, actually) and that's what killed it as our nightly show. (We're rewatching Arrested Development.)

I've watched most of S3 on my own and what happens is the show stops doing parodies and just gets really weird. That actually works for me, but not for the wife. The couple of parodies they do have are way better than the S2 stuff (especially the Glee episode).

tl;dr
S1: starts slow, gets great
S2: good if you ignore any theme episodes
S3: weird in alternately hilarious/tiring ways

Better than Big Bang Theory?: yes
Better than Good Times?: not sure, been a while
Better than Arrested Development?: nothing is better than Arrested Development

If you'd like to know more, well, you'll just have to watch the show. Thanks for reading my irrelevant post!