Season 1 was amazing. Every episode had me in tears.
Season 2 was crap.
Season 3 I've not bothered with.
What happened to this show after season 1?!
People run out of funny, I always say in those "why do people hate EA" threads, that its not EA that ruin franchises, 99% of people have one great idea... use it, then reuse it, then reuse it again and try and add some new twist... which fails spectacularly.
In general every single show gets stale, how much you love a show before it gets stale normally helps you to see past it. Friends was epic for a few seasons, good enough for another couple, poor for a few and flat out awful for a few... but when you loved it by season 5, you forgave/ignored season 6.
The drop off in community has so far been far greater, far sooner.
Season 2/3 weren't horrific, but they are significantly below season 1. Sometimes its writers running out of juice, sometimes its time constraints, sometimes its network support, money, many things.
I'd guess in a lot of shows cases the creator is working while also coming up with his own show, he spends 5 years coming up with the best 6-12 episodes he can write, puts his time/effort/love into it, it finally gets made... season 2 needs writing in 2 months, not 5 years, and to do so they bring in a room of writers... so you get an almost entirely different show basically.
You also get in this case a cast of relative unknowns(3-4 of them, one past it megastar and one well known but not exactly a-list wages) making a cheap show so a lot of the budget can go into location, extra's. Second season its been picked up, wages on known stars goes way up, money for location shooting/extra's go way down.
Just watch how "open" the first series is, all across campus, shoots in daytime in the grounds with hundreds of extras, series 2/3, entire episodes shot in one of their appartments, the library, canteen, its mostly on set now rather than on location.
Oh, and Matt Lucas cast in it couldn't be a worse possible sign, though maybe without him writing he might be capable of being funny.
