SALON

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

Topics: TV, Community,

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.

Continue Reading Close
Willa Paskin

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

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 15 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations