Community

Friday, Jul 7, 2000 7:19 PM UTC

Feeling lonely?

A Harvard prof blames TV and boomers, but the real culprits are bowling hoodlums, beer and big business.

By John Leonard

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The sound you hear on your MP3Lit audio clip is the flushing of “social capital” down the drain, the glub-glub of expiring citizenship, the death gurgle of American fraternity, sorority, reciprocity, solidarity and volunteer-fire-brigade togetherness.

In “Bowling Alone,” Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam crunches numbers to indicate that by just about every conceivable measure — from voter turnout and Sunday school attendance to the habits we report, the opinions we express and the fears we confide to pollsters, social scientists, people meters, time diaries and the “DDB Needham Life Style” archive — we are less inclined than we used to be to leave the house for any reason except work. Nor do we invite folks over as often for games of bridge, hands of poker, kinky sex or plotting coups. Since 1968, “civic engagements” of every sort have plunged by 20 to 40 percent across the American board, irrespective of race, creed, class, income, marital status and erogenous zones. Fewer of us trust our neighbors or our institutions, volunteer our time or energy, pitch in or help out. Whether for meetings of the school board, the union local, the Odd Fellows, the Boy Scouts or Hadassah, we are failing to show up. We even write fewer letters to editors and members of Congress.

Everywhere that Putnam looks, he sees a rising tide of apathy and a downward trajectory to “malaise.” In this unbrave new Malaisia, it’s not just that we are a third less likely to attend town meetings and donate blood than Americans were in the ’60s, or that we give a smaller percentage of our income to charity — that we are less Masonic, less Jaycee and less in league with women voters. If formal religious worship has fallen only 10 percent, participation in the social life of the church or the synagogue, from Bible studies to potluck picnics, has dropped by a third since the ’60s and a half since the ’50s. The figures are likewise down, by 10 to 20 percent in the past two decades, for fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, jogging, swimming, tennis, softball, football and volleyball. All the women playing sports (after Title IX) and all the children playing soccer (now that there are college scholarships), all the 12-steppers and all the New Age encounter groupies, don’t make up for huge defections elsewhere in the culture. More than twice as many adults have dropped out of league bowling in the past 20 years than have ever been in all of the self-help programs combined, including Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous.

While the gross numbers may be up for memberships in professional societies, the proportions are down, considering how many more professionals there are now. (For instance, the ratio of lawyers to the rest of us has doubled since 1970, maybe because the rest of us no longer trust anybody unless we have a legal contract plus our personal pit bull. But the American Bar Association’s “market share” of this excess fell a third in the same three decades.) The picture’s even bleaker if we look for members who do more than merely pay their dues. And don’t tell me that you’re a card-carrying member of the ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. So am I. And neither of us has gone to a single meeting of any of these organizations. Instead, we’ve written a check for a lobbying group with a professional staff in Washington or New York. We could be living right next door to each other and not know that we are “members” of the same interest group. We are, instead, “consumers” of a direct-mail cause.

In other words, like a bunch of hippies, we are dropping out. Unless, that is, we happen to have been born between 1910 and 1940 — in which case we belong to Putnam’s “long civic generation” and can be counted on to do a lot more good than those narcissistic baby boomers, who, when they aren’t pushing money through their modems, are probably watching soft porn on cable television. When handing out blame for our antisocial funk, Putnam assigns the biggest chunk to self-involved boomers, the next biggest to time-stealing television and smaller percentiles to mobility and urban sprawl (relocation, the lonely commute), financial anxiety (fear of falling, downsized syndrome), workplace blues (what we used to call the alienation of labor), working mothers (there goes the PTA) and a general agnosticism or paranoia about reality itself. He sees little evidence that the behavior of government, the decline of the traditional family or the advent of rap music and the Internet has much to do with it. He should at least have mentioned the designated hitter in American League baseball.

Of course, Putnam is guessing. And so will I.

It’s always fun to beat up on boomers with a stick. And they will certainly be sorry. They’ll be sorry, first of all, because joining a group is good for everybody. “Civic virtues,” Putnam notes, tend to “cluster.” If you belong to a service club, you’re more likely to volunteer in a meals-on-wheels or reading program, contribute to a library building fund and vote for a school or sewer bond. Thus, as if by shrewd investment, a single act of wandering into a “domain of sociability” multiplies to help create the social capital that trickles down to benefit education, health, seniors, children and the lonely, needy and strange. (My favorite odd datum in this fact-filled book is that people who listen to lots of classical music are more likely to attend Cubs games than people who don’t.)

The boomers will be even sorrier, second of all, because joining is better for body and soul. Medical studies suggest it’s healthier to get out of the house: “As a rough rule of thumb,” Putnam tells us, “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it’s a tossup statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining.”

Otherwise, move to North Dakota (for reasons I won’t go into, although Putnam does at length, North Dakota is a social-capital exception to the sullen rule of Malaisia) and wait for a revival of something like the Progressive movement that saved us from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age almost exactly a century ago. (E-mail and Web bulletin boards could help if they encouraged us to meet face to face with like-minded strangers and raise some political hell.)

Rather touchingly, Putnam suggests that the goals of such a revival would be campaign finance reform and citizens who voted as if they were fans; reduction of the criminal discrepancy between rich and poor; a more family-friendly and community-congenial workplace; fewer cars and more pedestrians in our neighborhoods and public spaces; less television in our wired caves and more singalongs, theater festivals and break dancing in our streets. While he’s at it, I would like my Volkswagen bug back, the one with the daisies on it.

Thus ends the synopsis. Now begins the rant.

Let me say this about crybaby boomers. The reason they weep is that all that they wanted in the idealistic ’60s was social justice, racial harmony, peaceable kingdoms, multiple orgasms and Joan Baez. What they got, besides assassinations and the tantrums of the cadres, was Richard Nixon and AIDS.

Let me say this about television. Yes, the same people who own it also own everything else. And they commune with their mystical parts by the medium of ad agencies whose hypnotherapeutic practice is, as Barbara Ehrenreich once explained, to sell us cars by promising adventure and to sell us beer by promising friendship. And it is obviously not in the best commercial interests of such ownership to devote a lot of time to bad-news programs about declining cities, the race war, foreign-policy adventurism, indeterminate sexuality, corporate predation or anything else that readers of Putnam or Salon can be counted on to care about.

But the surprise is, if you actually watch television, it’s not as bad as it ought to be, and certainly not as bad as people like Putnam say it is. I’m not just talking about the remedial seriousness of public-television series like “Frontline” and “P.O.V.,” Bill Moyers on Iran-contra, Frederick Wiseman on public housing, Ofra Bickel on the satanic ritual abuse hysteria, “Tongues Untied” and “Eyes on the Prize.” Nor do I speak of C-Span’s pair of citizen bands, its basilisk eye on Congress and its book-chat programs. Nor Discovery’s remarkable miniseries on the CIA, David Halberstam’s History Channel account of the 1950s, Neal Gabler’s A&E meditation on Jews, movies and the American Dream, John Frankenheimer’s films for HBO and TNT on Attica and George Wallace, the development on premium cable of documentary units like HBO’s “America Uncovered” (capital punishment and homophobia) and Cinemax’s “Reel Life” (war crimes against Muslim women in Bosnia and the rape of Ecuador’s rain forest by American oil companies) and not even our very good fortune that distributorless movies like Anjelica Huston’s “Bastard Out of Carolina” and Adrian Lyne’s “Lolita” show up on Showtime.

Never mind any of this, and the Lifetime Women’s Film Festival, and Bravo’s exposis of journalists on junkets, and cable movies that take the risky sort of chances from which networks and public TV flinch. The fact remains that, in spite of Jerry Springer, commercial television, in its movies, its dramatic series and even its sitcoms, has more to tell us about common decency, civil discourse and social justice than big-screen Hollywood, big-time magazine journalism and most book publishers.

Seeking to please or distract as many people as possible, to assemble and divert multitudes, TV is famously inclusive, with a huge stake in consensus. Of course, brokering social and political gridlock, it softens lines and edges to make a prettier picture. But it is also weirdly democratic, multicultural, Utopian, quixotic and rather more welcoming of difference and diversity than the audience watching it. It has been overwhelmingly pro-gun control and anti-death penalty; sympathetic to the homeless and the ecosystem; alert to alcoholism, child abuse, spouse battering, sexual discrimination and harassment, date rape and medical malpractice. It was worried about AIDS as early as 1983 in an episode of “St. Elsewhere,” 10 years before Tom Hanks appeared in “Philadelphia.” And television — where the ad cult meets the melting pot to stipulate a colorblind consumer — may be the only American institution outside of the public schools to still believe in and celebrate integration of the races.

Until Harvard can explain why the nation got so mean while TV was telling us to be nicer to women, children, minorities, immigrants, poor people, sick people, old people, odd people and strangers, one of its professors shouldn’t say that “prevailing television coverage of problems such as poverty leads viewers to attribute those problems to individual rather than societal failings and thus to shirk our own responsibility for helping to solve them” — because it isn’t true.

And let me say this about bowling. In fact, even now, hardly anybody bowls alone. Bowling as we know it derives from an ancient Polynesian ritual called ula maika, in which stones were hurled at standing objects from a distance of 60 feet. Nobody knows why, but 60 feet it remains today. And since bowling got gentrified, with boys replaced by automatic pinsetters, alleys renamed “lanes” and the availability of slim-line plastic contour chairs in multiple pastel hues and compressed-air blowers to cool the warriors’ sweaty palms, it has become, as Putnam tells us, “the most popular competitive sport in America.”

Bowlers outnumber joggers and golfers by two to one, soccer players by three to one and tennis players by four to one. Ninety-one million of us bowled in 1996, 25 percent more of us than voted in the 1998 congressional elections. What pains Putnam is that fewer of us bowl as members of a team, in a league, in a domain of sociability where “cohorts” develop cooperative habits and skills. While the total number of bowlers in America increased 10 percent between 1980 and 1993, league bowling fell by more than 40 percent.

What he neglects to mention is that many of us who used to go bowling with our families, or on dates, were driven out of the game in the 1970s by the very leagues he celebrates (who monopolized most of the lanes) and the very teams whose dismemberment he mourns (who sneered at civilians). About these teams you should know that their principal business, in green Shantung jackets with Aztec serpent totems and bulging purple stretch pants, was to topple themselves with as many beers as soon as possible. As composer Frank Zappa once observed:

Consumption of beer leads to military behavior. One day you’re going to read about some scientist discovering that hops, in conjunction with certain strains of “yeast creatures,” has a mysterious effect on some newly discovered region of the brain, making people want to kill — but only in groups. With whisky, you might want to murder your girlfriend — but beer makes you want to do it with your buddies watching.

I am inclined to think that such groups have about as much civic virtue as, say, gangbangers, the Ku Klux Klan and the Michigan and Montana militias — all equally blotto on bottled bile. Putnam himself has observed that religious fundamentalists in general, and Operation Rescue activists in particular, are exceptions to the general trend toward Malaisian noninvolvement. Some of us are actually relieved that the annual membership renewal rate of the National Rifle Association is only 25 percent, that the Promise Keepers can no longer fill a football stadium and that the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority are as much mail-order consumer causes as the National Audubon Society and the L.L. Bean catalog. Some of us moved to big cities in the first place to escape small-town book burners.

Anyway, with the ebbing of the leagues, those of us who have tried once more to bowl find to our astonishment that we are required to relinquish one of our own street shoes before we will be allowed to borrow, for a price, a pair of ratty rentals. They don’t trust us. Imagine that.

And so I come to my last big qualm about this fascinating and meticulous scorecard on “bonding” and “bridging,” machers and schmoozers, the rise of rap and the decline of newspapers, these 24 chapters, three appendixes, a hundred charts, a thousand footnotes, this encyclopedia of industrial averages of a market for meaning so bearish that the suicide rate for our youngsters has almost tripled. I wonder if some of our suspicion — of institutions, of groups and of strangers — hasn’t been thrust upon us like a lousy credit rating.

There is the insurance agency finding a reason to refuse our claim, the HMO deciding we have the wrong disease, the bank-owned credit card company compounding its own interest and the employer who listens in on our phone calls and voice mail, reads our e-mail and computer files, videotapes our workstation and sucks our blood to test for drugs. There is the corporate branding of our commons, the spin-doctor scripting of our public life and the malign neglect of our public schools. There is soft money, hate radio, the gated communities that instruct us what flowers to plant and which colors to paint our gingerbread houses, the malls that abolish our First Amendment right to free speech and assembly and, wherever we look, urban spaces increasingly militarized — what Mike Davis in “City of Quartz” called “the architectural policing of social boundaries” and “the totalitarian semiotics of ramparts and battlements.”

So determined was Los Angeles, you’ll remember, to make sure that its upscale downtown merchants would be forever safe from another Watts riot that, starting in the ’70s, it became a fortress, with corporate citadels and surveillance towers, elevated “pedways” and subterranean concourses, “tourist bubble” parks and panopticonic shopping strips, residential enclaves like hardened missile silos and libraries like dry-docked dreadnoughts. Add to this a pacification of the human-landfill poor in strategic-hamlet housing projects, urban Bantustans and Bedouin encampments on barricaded streets in inner-city neighborhoods bereft of public toilets (“crime scenes”) and zoned against cellphones and whistling, with barrel-shaped bus benches to make sure you can’t sleep on them, caged cash registers in convenience stores, bulletproof acrylic turnstiles in fast-food joints, metal detectors in hospitals, lockdowns in elementary schools and curfews that outlaw groups of more than two juveniles from “associating in public view” in their own front yards.

And, as Davis reported in his sequel to “City of Quartz,” “Ecology of Fear,” it worked. No sooner had Simi Valley acquitted the cops who rioted all over Rodney King than “sentient” buildings with mainframe brains went into prevent mode. Steel gates rolled down over entrances to the great bank towers, escalators froze, electronic locks sealed off pedestrian passages and a financial district prophylacticked against sans-culottes went on happily recycling Japan’s trade surplus into Southland turf and surf. Too bad about the Koreans. Too late for the rest of us.

Community for whom? It smells like team spirit. I look at what they have done to us and I am reminded of an old English proverb: “They agree like bells; they want nothing but hanging.”

John Leonard is the Culture Watch columnist for the Nation, media critic for "CBS Sunday Morning" and television critic for New York magazine. More John Leonard.

Thursday, May 24, 2012 4:00 PM UTC

“Community” botches damage control

A leaked memo reveals Sony's social-media blunder -- and its belief that the cast and fans are easily herded

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

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Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs in "Community."

It’s adorable the way Old Media keeps forgetting that we live in the age of transparency. Hey, Sony Pictures Television, your metaphoric fly is undone.

You’d think that after that ranting, complaining voice mail that “Community” star Chevy Chase left showrunner Dan Harmon went viral this spring they’d have learned. Or maybe after Harmon responded to his dismissal just last Friday by spilling his guts on Tumblr. You’d think the muckety-mucks would have figured out by now that the best you can do when there’s tension in your little creative family is to be forthright and creative about it.

Note, for example, how the show’s star Joel McHale spent the spring diplomatically – and wittily — handling the talk-show circuit after Chase’s meltdown, joking that the voice mail had to be fake because “there’s no way Chevy could figure out voice mail.” See, it’s glib and funny and sounds magically off-the-cuff! Get it? The cast of “Community” — which includes the incredibly on-the-ball Danny Pudi, Alison Brie and Donald Glover – knows how to handle itself.

So here’s what you don’t do. You don’t send an email saying you “wanted to forward some messaging we hope our cast will find helpful as they navigate questions that will undoubtedly come up.” Oh God, “forward some messaging.” This won’t be good. And sure enough, in a memo obtained Wednesday by the Hollywood Reporter, the talking points sent from Sony to the cast reads like a ransom note. A poorly written one. My friend Jay at the Takeaway suggests reading it in the dean’s voice, but in my head, I can’t hear anyone but Chang.

“We’re hoping that the news will lose some steam over the next day, especially if we’re not perpetuating the topic in any way,” it reads. Then it goes on to suggest the cast just tell the press, “We’re also excited that we’ll be back on NBC’s schedule in the fall and are looking forward to working on those episodes,” “I am looking forward to starting our next 13 episodes of ‘Community,’” “We’re looking forward to working with David Guarascio & Moses Port on a new season of ‘Community.’” Also, guess what? “We’re looking forward to the stories our characters will find themselves in come Sept.” I’m not sure I even understand that last sentence, but you get the gist. Coming this fall! “Community”! REMAIN CALM AND STOP PERPETUATING THE TOPIC.

As one Hollywood Reporter commenter brilliantly opined, maybe now “the cast will all recite the entire memo, verbatim, in interviews. Like hostages reading off cue cards.” It’s just like when Avery Jessup had to do the news in North Korea! Wait, what well-regarded yet low-rated NBC sitcom are we talking about here?

This kind of thing is insulting on so many levels. Primarily, it’s a dis to the cast and team of “Community,” who this weekend managed to tweet gracefully their gratitude to Dan Harmon and his “dementedly awesome brain” without coming off like network-destroying loose cannons. And don’t even get me started on how idiotic Sony must assume the press is to send out something like this. Guys, it’s not all one big Mario Lopez-fueled parade of butt-kissing out there. Worst of all, it’s a shameless slap to fans, who expect that the people who give us a weird treasure like “Community” know how to be funny and sarcastic and sad and real when there is a major shakeup in their ranks — oh, and who also know enough about social media to know you can’t stop a dumb email from getting around. It’s not about sticking to some rote company line. It’s about cultivating the very authenticity that makes “Community” so friggin’ special, and respecting the fans who watch it. And it’s about getting that the title of the show isn’t just about a mythical college. It’s about us.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012 3:15 PM UTC

More sex and disasters, please

TV season finales used to be about crazy couplings and exciting explosions. Where did the fun go?

By Willa Paskin

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Gabriel Mann and Emily VanCamp in "Revenge"

There are a few times of year when network television can typically be relied upon to be as interesting as cable: The fall, when the networks vomit out dozens of new programs; February, when the networks cough up a dozen or so more; and May, when all the series that have survived the year try to end in spectacular fashion. During this last period, season-finale time, couples couple, get married and have babies; characters quit, get fired and die; disasters occur; buildings explode; guns blaze; hatches are discovered and protagonists are left dangling off cliffs, both actual and metaphorical. It’s the TV equivalent of blockbuster season, and like blockbuster season, it can and should be fun. Though in recent years cable shows have been responsible for a disproportionate number of the “Holy crap, did that just happen?!” finales (hello, Gus Fring and his brand-new face!), network shows are usually good for at least some insanity, some drama, some transcendent event that will get people talking around the storied watercooler. Not this year. Nope, this year, season finale season has been a bust.

The dearth of enjoyably over-the-top finales both is, and is not, a coincidence. Some of the shows that went big in the past opted to take a more low-key approach this May. Last year “The Good Wife” ended with Alicia and Will finally smooching outside a hotel room; this year it ended with Kalinda sitting in her apartment, gun in hand, waiting for her front door to open. Last year, “Community” wrapped up with its balls-to-the-wall, two-part spaghetti-western paintball extravaganza; this year it ended with a relatively understated episode about Evil Abed, leaving everyone to talk about Dan Harmon’s firing instead.

What isn’t a coincidence, is that there are very few good, tentpole network dramas, and it’s those dramas that usually provide the crazy come finale time. The two long-running series that ended this year, “Desperate Housewives” and “House,” both ended quietly, which is to say in exactly the mediocre fashion they’ve been plodding along in for years. For either of these shows to have had must-see finales, they would have had to wrap up seasons ago, before they got creatively stale. Meanwhile, many of the new shows that started the season with the sort of mythologies that tend to make for the most memorable finales flamed out in one way or another: The mediocre “Alcatraz” and “Terra Nova” were canceled, “Person of Interest” exists in the CBS procedural ghetto, and very few people watch “Awake.” The only show left that could plausibly deliver a juicy season-ending event is ABC’s super-soap “Revenge,” which finishes tonight. Its creator has promised someone “important” will die. My fingers and toes are all crossed.

Even the shows that have heeded the command of finale time — go big — have felt flat. On “Castle,” the show’s longtime will-they-won’t-they couple finally fornicated, following a very by-the-numbers “here I am on your doorstep all wet from the rain, at long last ready to have sex with you” moment. Last year had an equivalent event, when “Bones’s” longtime will-they-won’t-they couple Dr. Brennan and Booth paired off, but in a stranger and therefore more interesting way. Without so much as an on-screen kiss, Brennan told Booth she was pregnant with his baby. As far as twists go, surprise baby trumps emo sex against a wall.

One show that did bring its A-schlock game to its finale was “Grey’s Anatomy,” which stranded six major characters and a pilot in the woods after a serious plane crash, and crushed one to death underneath the fuselage. (At the time the episode was written, the cast members had yet to re-sign their contracts. Presumably, had they failed to sign, there would have been more fatalities.) This amount of carnage would have been a lot more stupendous if extreme violence wasn’t a staple of “Grey’s,” which had a grieved and crazed gunman shoot up the hospital and its staff two finales ago. The characters have long since taken to calling their workplace “Seattle Grace Mercy Death,” a joke about the number of horrible coincidences that have befallen them there (car accidents, fatal bus crashes, shootings, suicide attempts, exploding bombs, etc.). At this point, I wouldn’t bet against a dirty bomb showing up in next year’s finale. Which, come to think of it, sounds just insane enough to be spectacular.

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Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.

Monday, May 21, 2012 3:30 PM UTC

What’s “Community” without Dan Harmon?

Less ambitious shows might survive losing a creator. But firing the prickly showrunner bodes poorly for next season

By Willa Paskin

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Dan Harmon (Credit: AP/Matt Sayles)

A recent episode of NBC’s “Community” floated the possibility — debunked by episode’s end — that the seven main characters had not spent the previous three years navigating life, each other and paintball fights at Greendale Community College, but instead, had only been imagining them. In the episode, the recently expelled Greendale Seven found themselves in a group therapy session with a nefarious shrink, keen to keep them away from their college using any psychological means necessary. The therapist temporarily convinced them they had spent the previous years in a mental institution and that everything they remembered happening at school, except their friendship, had been a collective fantasy, a “shared psychosis” dreamed up in the asylum.

As I was watching this episode, “Curriculum Unavailable,” I remember calmly thinking something like, “Huh. That would really explain Leonard.” The possibility that “Community” might be about to “St. Elsewhere” its audience (“St. Elsewhere” ended on the reveal that everything that had happened in the series had all taken place inside the mind of an autistic boy) was not particularly alarming to me. Group psychosis explained a lot about the show’s extremely dark psychology, and, anyway, on “Community,” stranger things had happened.

As of late Friday evening, when “Community’s” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was abruptly fired by Sony from the show he obsessively oversaw, I’ve realized that the real reason I was unphased by “Curriculum Unavailable” was because I was already very comfortable with thinking about “Community” as the figment of someone’s feverish imagination. That someone was just Dan Harmon.

Writing about “2 Broke Girls” recently, I noted that there is a fault line running through television where art rubs up against commerce. I should have saved that metaphor, because this “Community” situation is like an 8.0 on the art-commerce Richter scale. Consider the aftershocks: The perpetually low-rated, but fanatically beloved “Community” was just renewed by NBC for a fourth, 13-episode season. Why renew it just to fire the guy responsible for it? To escape the bad press of canceling a critically acclaimed series? Or is it the opposite impulse — to make enough episodes to get the show into syndication?

Harmon is an infamously — and self-proclaimed — difficult guy to work for and with. Earlier this year, he got into a public fight with “Community’s” Chevy Chase after Harmon played an incensed voice mail from Chase at a public event. Harmon apologized, though not to Chase, and a few weeks later was back to calling him a jerk on Twitter. If Harmon’s behavior was bad enough to get him fired, it was also the same crazy mentality that made “Community” one of the strangest shows to ever air on network television. How badly behaved does a great artist have to be to get kicked off his own creation without so much as a phone call?

Speaking about “Community” last week, before the news about Harmon was public, Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC, said “Shows lose showrunners all the time and do well.” This is and isn’t true. Workaday TV shows, procedurals, sitcoms, long-running dramas, change showrunners all the time. But for the growing number of auteurist series driven largely by one personality — everything from “The Sopranos” and ‘The Wire” to “Louie” and, yes, “Community” — a showrunner change is not common, and is usually about as imaginable or advisable as Matt Weiner getting fired from “Mad Men” and that show soldiering on without him. It happens — Aaron Sorkin left “The West Wing” after four years, for example — but the shows are never the same.

“Community” seems to me particularly poorly designed to continue without Harmon. If “Community” were a more standard comedy, the new showrunners — two writers from “Happy Endings” — would just have to take the seven characters and make them funny. But causing belly laughs seems secondary to “Community’s” précis, which emphasizes being exhilaratingly clever, formalistically inventive and impressively bonkers over being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Harmon’s approach to television has always been almost athletic: With each episode, he sets out to break his previous record for genre bending, to outdo what everyone else has done before. To make “Community” “Community” then, the new writers don’t just have to tell jokes, they have to maintain its outdo spirit. They have to outrun or at least keep pace with Dan Harmon’s brain.

And because of his “let’s boldly go where no TV show has ever gone before!” ethos, Harmon has long since made his brain a major, off-screen character on “Community.” More than most other showrunners, even the great ones, one can feel Harmon in each episode, egging the show on to new heights, exposing the mechanics of the genre. I could watch Troy and Abed do their secret handshake 1,000 times a day, but I don’t watch “Community” for Troy and Abed, adorable besties that they are. I watch for the episodes with multiple timelines, for Dungeons & Dragons games come to life, for claymation Christmas specials, and for “My Dinner With Andre” and “Die Hard” spoofs. I watch for Dan Harmon’s unmatched and, now it seems, unsustainable ambition. Oh, damn it. I guess I mean watched.

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Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.

Friday, Mar 16, 2012 12:45 PM UTC

“Community’s” identity crisis

The show tones itself down for its mid-season return. It should just embrace its crazy, exhausting self

By Willa Paskin

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Alison Brie as Annie (Credit: NBC/Jordin Althaus)

Confession: I have a case of “Community” fatigue. “Community,“ NBC’s low-rated, but passionately beloved, sitcom returned to the NBC lineup last night. It had been pulled from the schedule in December, kicking off another round of anxiety among fans, critics and the cast that the Greendale Study Group might not be back for a fourth season next fall. In the lead-up to last night’s episode, the “Community“ faithful hectored anyone and everyone who appreciates good television to help save the show and boost “Community“ to the ultimate goal, that longed-for TV state: six seasons and a movie.

“Community” is a wonderful, unique television show, ambitious and rare beyond measure, astonishing for the ways that it has bent and busted the limits of the genre and for the unflagging, unending energy with which it has done so. But the passion in certain parts— the parts where a TV critic spends her time— has reached such a pitch that just liking ”Community” feels inadequate. I imagine it’s a little bit like attending an N’ Sync concert in the late ’90s if you only sort of enjoyed “Bye Bye Bye.” Everyone around you would be screaming, fainting, eager to explain why this was the best boy band ever, and ready to get in a fist-fight if you had a bad word to say about Chris Kirkpatrick’s hair or how he seems a little fundamentally unlikable. (Please understand, I don’t mean to insult “Community” or its fans by comparing either to the boy band of yore. Have you seen what teenage girls are capable of, passion-wise? If “Community” had that kind of support, we’d be talking 20 seasons and eight movies.)

All this zeal is exhausting. And it makes me feel like a Grinch for saying that last night’s low-energy episode, “Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts,” wouldn’t even make it onto the third volume of “Community’s” greatest hits. (But Britta’s hair did look very nice!)

In an interview “Community”-creator Dan Harmon did with the AV Club about last season, he confessed that in making 22 episodes of TV a year, some of the episodes just get crammed through to meet the schedule’s insane deadlines. (Keeping up with this frenetic pace is something all shows deal with.) Because last night’s was the first after such a long hiatus, and so carefully riffed on the show’s reputation for weirdness, it’s unlikely that this was one of those episodes, and yet … it played like one. Not every episode of “Community“ has to be a send-up of all action movies, created entirely in claymation, contain multiple different realities, or be a gonzo riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” but they are all supposed to be funny. I chuckled out loud twice (and actually clapped when Theo Huxtable danced to “Motown Philly”).

In many ways the episode was a very savvy, good faith, if probably not very successful, attempt to appeal to new viewers. The plot was as unalienating and classic as a comedy plot can be: It ended in a marriage. Shirley and her ex-husband Andre decide to get hitched again, just as Shirley and Pierce decide to start a sandwich business together. Britta ends up planning the wedding and realizes she’s very good at it; Jeff has to give the toast and realizes he’s very bad at it; Annie runs around trying to help people; and Abed and Troy decide to be “normal.” It is this last subplot — Troy and Abed’s attempt to “de-whimsify” themselves — that provides this episode with “Community’s” standard dose of meta-narrative. Troy and Abed are standing in for the show as it tries to behave in a “normal” way.

But just as Shirley’s husband, Andre (“The Cosby Show’s” Warner), doesn’t buy Troy and Abed’s attempts at normalcy — “Hey, man, you don’t have to be sarcastic,” he says to Abed — I’m not sure a newer viewer would either. By the end of this episode Britta is sobbing about how she’s destined to get married because it’s in her DNA (“This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers”); Jeff is sobbing about how marriage is a lie; Pierce, in the Gordon Gekko outfit he’s been wearing all episode, is cackling drunkenly on his father’s grave; and Troy and Abed are talking like characters from “Inspektor Spacetime.”

“Community” is not normal, and being not normal is what it does best. However well executed the more muted episodes are, the big, insane spectacles are what make “Community” so special. At this point, it should play to its base, the people who know and love it for being so unconventional. Thankfully, at the end of the episode Troy admonished Abed, “We need to be weird!” So, presumably “Community“ will be back to full-weird and whimsy next week. I’ll rest up for it.

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Willa Paskin is Salon's staff TV writer. More Willa Paskin.

Friday, Jan 6, 2012 1:00 AM UTC

Can a 26-year-old MBA become a gardener? Is that cool?

I've got a BFA too, and I've run a nonprofit, but I want to do what makes me happy

By Cary Tennis

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Can a 26-year-old MBA become a gardener? Is that cool?

(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Dear Reader,

After writing yesterday’s column, and before heading out to watch “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” at the Sundance Kabuki (and before trying to figure it out), I saw a Dec. 12 “Vanguard” piece on Current TV about Occupy Wall Street in which correspondent Christof Putzel moves into Zuccotti Park. I was quite moved by a sequence about Fetzer Mills, a retired Naval officer from a small town in Lauderdale County near Memphis, Tenn. It brought home the economic devastation that many people are experiencing firsthand.

So as my wife and I turned onto Geary Boulevard on our way to the movies, I thought about what it must be like to be living in a small town and watch the destruction of factories and stores that have been there your whole life. I realized how lucky I was to be employed and going to the movies. It occurred to me that my ideas about how an unemployed professor might cope with joblessness and “social death” may sound hollow to somebody who’s out of a job and has watched his whole town fall apart.

It’s fine to help an individual cope, but where is the solution? Are all America’s jobless supposed to just sit and meditate and read sociology until things change?

It is not enough to just survive joblessness. We must work for collective political solutions.

My role at Salon is to write about how individuals face crises. But individual crises have roots in political conditions. I don’t share the belief that we can alter our fate simply by visualization, or chanting, or that it’s enough to get into therapy to cope with our misfortune. Bad things happen to good people for political reasons. Good people get screwed over by indifferent strangers thousands of miles away because laws and regulations allow it.

The capitalist world is full of peril. Government’s proper role is to regulate capitalism so its most savage effects are managed and its worst excesses prevented.

That’s what politics is for.

I am employed. I live in a house. One day soon it may be time to crawl into a tent and spend some time with my spiritual brothers and sisters on the front lines of a new and just movement for human dignity and reform. That’s how I feel about it.

Now on to today’s letter.

Cary, please help me.

I loved your latest column because I face a similar issue, but I am at a different phase in my life. I’m 26, married and unemployed. I’m not depressed; I enjoy life and my hobbies, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have two degrees, some decent experience and no idea what I want to do. I don’t know exactly what I’m good at, so I go by what my husband and some people that I’ve worked with have said. They say I’m good with people — a relationship builder. I’m a good communicator as well. I am articulate with a great vocabulary, and have worked a lot on my verbal presentation skills. I’ve also been told I’m a decent writer. I’m good at figuring things out and getting them done — a quick learner.

Well, what are my passions? Aside from reading a lot of advice columns, I want to become enlightened, I want to help people, and I want to help the creatures and plants on this earth. Being drawn to sunlight and plants, I worked at a greenhouse in high school, and later as a community garden coordinator (my first “real job”). I learned a lot in the two years as a garden coordinator because I was the only employee. I did fundraising, grant writing, community building, press stuff, and the basic work of the organization. It was a great experience, but I became cynical and soured quickly.

I have a BFA and an MBA, but I don’t have a passion for art anymore, and the business degree I got in order to help with the nonprofit administration, which I clearly didn’t continue with. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the things that I value in a job. I liked the readings that you linked to, especially the whole “work for meaning vs. work for money” dichotomy in “So what’s work?”

I have thought a lot about that, because I’ve never made enough money to survive in my entire life. (My social conditioning says that is pathetic, a comment I try very hard to ignore.) My husband makes enough money that we live comfortably and I’m extremely grateful for that. He thinks it’s safer not to be completely dependent on one income, and I agree.

It is for this reason that I want to work, but also because I want to contribute. I want to participate in life. I know above all, I want to work with nice people … but I need direction. I thought about getting a degree in horticulture, because that is the only thread I can follow in my very short “career.” But what in the hell am I going to do with that degree?

I’ve thought a lot about economics, which perplexes me, and I’ve thought about trying to change the entire field from the ground up. I have only taken one very basic course in this subject, mind you, so I’ve considered auditing some classes in the subject. I want to start a municipal compost program in my city, but I don’t work for the city, and I am a bit daunted by the task that I don’t know anything about, and the fact that there is no one lined up to pay me for it. So I’ve come up with some grandiose ideas about things I want to do, but “practically speaking” it just seems like a crazy fantasy that has nothing to do with an income. Cary, what should I do with my life?

In a Morass

Dear In a Morass,

You like gardens. You like helping people. You like working with money.

Gardens. People. Money. I suggest you follow a path back into the garden, where there are people and also money. There may also be education there. What if you could combine gardening, money, people and education? What if you could teach people about money using the garden as a foundation? What if you could create a nonprofit organization that teaches people how to manage their money by using the garden as a metaphor or experiential teaching ground? That would be interesting.

That’s one idea. There are lots of ideas. But you are in a prime place to do something extraordinary. You don’t have to limit yourself to dull, salary-making activities. Now is the time to dream up something unique and wonderful.

It’s not always going to be like this. Anything could happen. You could have a kid. Your husband could lose his job. One of you could become ill. This is a golden opportunity. So get with somebody who can help you plan and do the paperwork, and come up with something original and wonderful.

Now, ideas are cheap. Advice is cheap. This advice, in matter of fact, is free. And there’s a lot of advice on the Web. One thing I do that others don’t is I try to bring your attention to small events and decisions that may have long-lasting consequences. I look for the little swerves in life that we don’t realize we’re making.

For instance, your disheartening experience with community gardens. You may think that you simply came to some conclusions — that the nonprofit world sucks, that people are insane, etc. — but you may also have unconsciously plotted a path away from the very thing that makes you happy. So it is crucial to look at this two-year community garden thing you did. First, appreciate it for how great it was. Really. It’s one of the coolest things imaginable. You may have understated just what an accomplishment it was.

Next, ask yourself exactly what happened. Were there conflicts with others? Did you get in a power struggle? Were you blindsided or betrayed in some way? Did the project fail, and did you experience feelings of grief and hopelessness at its failure? Did you see other people behaving in ways that are dishonorable, and did that sour you on working with others? Tease it out. It might help to write it out, maybe in the form of a 12-step inventory.

I really think you will benefit from examining in detail what happened, rather than closing it off as simply an experience that soured you and made you cynical.

Besides, if we look at the origins of cynicism, we see it taught that “the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature.” So when you became “cynical,” it may be that you are seeing into the true nature of people — that they can be duplicitous, shallow, manipulative, mean-spirited, self-destructive, conniving, etc. True enough. Welcome to humanity. People are like that. That doesn’t need to make you bitter or dispirited.

The question is, How, therefore, shall I live?

You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity right now to create something new, fun and wonderful, and to be in charge of it. I’ll bet there are foundations that would willingly fund an innovative program for helping people learn how to manage their money, meet their neighbors and grow vegetables at the same time.

Like I say, it’s just one of many ideas. The main thing is, follow what you love. It will lead you to what you need. And you’ll end up helping others along the way. As you work, you will experience setbacks. At times, nothing will make sense. At times, you will wonder if you’ve done the right thing. No one job or path is going to eliminate worry or uncertainty or random misfortune. But your best bet is to seize the opportunity right now and follow what you love.

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Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

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