Jewcy patron saint Alison Brie (née Schermerhorn) and her band Alison Brie and the Girls are back, performing a soulful, slowed-down cover of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend”—and it’s pretty great.

Brie, who plays the comically oversexualized Annie Edison on NBC’s tragically overlooked Community as well as Trudy Campbell on Mad Men, is almost unfairly talented, doing that whole actress-with-an-all-girls-cover-band-on-the-side thing and totally pulling it off:

Previously on Jewcy: Alison Brie, Jewish Actress from Community and Mad Men, Totally Rocks
Watch Alison Brie Dance the Charleston During a Photo Shoot
Network Jews: Annie Edison from NBC’s Community

(Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Irina Shabayeva)

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Rachel Berry moved to New York and we stopped watching, Annie Edison and the rest of Community was pushed to 2013 (though that didn’t stop us from getting our Alison Brie fill in other ways, and we’re still confused about how we feel about Shosh (but not Zosia, never Zosia) making 2012 very much the year of men for our Network Jews series (with sincere apologies to Hanna Rosin).

While there were many worthy candidates, here are the Top 5:

1. Schmidt:

Our first Network Jew is also our favorite. While we remain mixed about the merits of New Girl (even if it did lead to this) we can always rely on the real star of the show: Schmidt. He may have started out as a douchebag, but somewhere along the line he’s become, as Willa Paskin dubbed him, an “aspirational douchebag”—somehow going from disgusting to endearing.

Of course a major part of all this is his Jewishness. But perhaps the best part is that the actor who plays him, Max Greenfield, is up for anything, whether it’s dressing up as a Jewish Assassin or making in-character spin videos. Let’s just hope he stops guest–editing GOOP.

2. Saul Berenson:

Dov Friedman called Mandy Patinkin’s turn as the CIA Middle East division chief “the most accurate depiction of an American Jewish identity ever portrayed on television.” And for good reason. Homeland finished off it’s second season [spoiler alert] with Saul saying kaddish yet again as David Estes and a whole bunch of other characters were blown to smithereens. It isn’t just Claire Danes who thinks of challah (or was it holla?) when she sees our favorite bearded CIA agent. Just watch this video.

OK, we may be getting distracted, we’re talking about Berenson, not Patinkin, though it can be difficult to separate the two. Inspired by the Israeli show—and some would say superior—Hatufim, there’s at least one place where there’s no competition: the character of older, wiser intelligence officer. We only hope that in Season 3 they figure out some way to let him sing.

3. Max Blum:

Probably the most underrated show on this list, Happy Endings’ six-person ensemble is held together by Max Blum. I know, I know. We just talked about how great Schmidt is, and here we’re saying that Happy Endings’ anti-Schmidt is also our favorite. You know what, we can have our cake and eat it too … with Max, while listening to Mandona.

The pop culture-obsessed sarcastic slob of a gay best friend is everything you’d want in a pop-culture obsessed sarcastic slob of a gay best friend. Don’t just take our word for it, Emily Nussbaum thinks the man who brought us Boyz II Menorah is Amahzing too.

4. Eli Gold:

The Good Wife may have started out as an Eliot Sptizer-style, ripped from the headlines, procedural-style show, and it might still be that, but somehow it rises above. While there’s lots to say about the shows women, and even Jewcy favorite Josh Charles, the biggest surprise has to be Alan Cumming’s Jewish turn as Eli Gold.

As Abe Fried-Tanzer wrote, “It’s no coincidence that Gold has been compared to a real-life famous Jew with a similar profession. Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff for President Obama … has quite a reputation for winning at all costs, and Gold has managed to earn that same status in what could easily have been (and originally was) merely a guest-starring role. Gold may reinforce the stereotype of Jews wanting all the power, but he’s definitely someone you’d want on your side.”

5. Ruxin:

There’s no getting around it: Nick Kroll’s Ruxin is a self-assured asshole. (In one episode, Ruxin defends a paint company whose cans explode by arguing that anyone buying such a cheap item should have “a reasonable expectation that that product will explode in your face.” “And, morally, you’re good with this?” asks his friend, Pete. “There was just one word in there that I am not familiar with,” Ruxin responds.) But, for Sala Levin, this is all the more reason to love him—and love him we do!

After all, “A man who coasts through life on his assimilated rudeness but maintains some iota of his people’s historical dread is, after all, every girl’s dream.”

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• Yiddish sure has a lot of mean names for non-Jews.

• Looks like Roseanne Barr will not be a Green Party presidential nominee.

• AMC’s hit show Breaking Bad: “Old Testament at its core.”

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of eternal 10 Things I Hate About You fame, talks about his new movie and playing a young Bruce Willis.

• Alison Brie continues to be our favorite person ever:

The post Daily Jewce: Breaking Bad’s Judaism, Considering Nose Jobs and Yiddishisms appeared first on Jewcy.

Previously: Alison Brie, Jewish Actress from ‘Community’ and ‘Mad Men,’ Totally Rocks
Network Jews: Annie Edison from NBC’s ‘Community’

(Photo credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

The post Alison Brie’s Band Covers Hall and Oates’ ‘Rich Girl’ appeared first on Jewcy.

And as Community itself has gotten both progressively weirder and less easily classifiable, Annie, in turn, has begun to shed her Flickian skin. Season 1’s Annie was an academically focused but emotionally fragile innocent who proudly proclaimed that she was “totally comfortable being uncomfortable with [her] sexuality.” (Her only sexual encounter hadn’t exactly been worth writing home about: “I had relations with my high school boyfriend,” she told fellow Community members Shirley and Britta. “We did it to Madonna’s Erotica on the floor of his walk-in closet … He’s gay now.” Incidentally, this incident recalls one from Brie’s own past.)

Two years later, Annie hasn’t exactly learned to cut loose—but she has morphed into an infinitely more complicated character. The Annie we know today is still an ambitious, rule-abiding gunner who records all her classes to facilitate easier note taking. She’s also still more comfortable playing yenta with the members of her study group than taking charge of her own romantic destiny. But at the same time, Annie’s proven she has a wild streak that enables her to transform into, say, a badass, paintball gun-toting action heroine if need be. Season 1 Annie would have confessed immediately if she had broken her roommate’s priceless Dark Knight DVD; Season 3 Annie elects instead to stage an elaborate fake robbery, claiming that a mysterious stranger nabbed the DVD in question.

And though Annie still retains an aura of erotic inexperience, she’s somehow become Community’s most overtly sexualized character as well. See, for example, “Teach Me How to Understand Christmas,” an absurd and dirty number Annie performs in Season 3’s musical holiday episode. The thin premise is that Annie doesn’t get how to celebrate the season because she’s a Member of the Tribe. Though the song is obviously meant as a send-up of bawdy carols like “Santa Baby,” parodic suggestiveness is still suggestiveness; Annie performs the tune in a barely-there Santa costume that puts the “ho” in “ho ho ho.” By its conclusion, she’s straddling arrogant ex-lawyer Jeff and cooing, “Boopie doopie doop boop, sex!” (That’s literally the last line in “Teach Me.”)

Annie’s evolution is likely the result of the show’s scripts mining the discrepancies between Brie herself—the sexually liberated, worldly actress in her late 20s—and the character she plays. But there’s also an in-universe explanation for her development. It all comes back to Annie’s own fractured childhood: While she identifies as Jewish throughout Community’s run, in Season 2 she reveals that her dad—like Brie’s own—is actually a Christian. Before her parents got divorced, she explains, the holidays at her house were always “a minefield of overlapping rituals.” Annie reacted to the chaos of her broken home by prizing order above all other virtues—a choice that eventually led to an Adderall addiction, which is what landed her in community college in the first place.

But prolonged exposure to the nuttiness exuded by the rest of Community’s cast has thwarted Annie’s best efforts to stay disciplined. Now, with every episode that passes, she’s becoming more like them: unhinged and unpredictable. And as Annie moves away from personifying the archetypal brittle overachiever, she just gets more interesting. This shift means that as the show moves forward—hopefully all the way to a fourth season—we may be less likely to, say, see Annie bristle when her friends call her a Jew rather than Jewish (“Say the whole word!” she urges in Season 1’s “Comparative Religion”). Ultimately, though, it’s a positive sign of growth—even if in this case, growing up means growing progressively more unglued.

Last week on Network Jews: Schmidt from New Girl

Hillary Busis writes for EW.com and tweets here

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