The Moron Melange

Guess what?  It’s not just Todd VanDerWerff who’s the problem (although he’s the worst—the absolute worst.  I still can’t get over him stealing my goat).  Prepare yourself as we go around the internet (and print media)!  Shit’s about to get asinine.  

First stop on the tour d’idiocy: The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever, finally coming around to Community, after two and a half seasons.  

My mistake had been judging “Community” through an outmoded format — the half-hour story arc — and not by the tiny sketches sliced and diced from it, zipping past us in nanoseconds. In extracted form, online, “Community” can be whatever you want it to be. It can speak to a new era of satire, but it also doesn’t have to mean anything at all.

Sir, you are an idiot.  Apparently you believe that Community is an internet salad, involving a whole lot of slicing and dicing.  Also, nanoseconds: those are kind of short.  I don’t think you’d be able to follow the show if it were really that “sliced and diced.”  

But wait, it’s not just your writing style that’s terrible: it’s your ideas too!  Don’t you get it—it’s precisely in the realm of the “half-hour story arc” that Community is so ground-breaking and successful.  It transforms that traditional “story arc” into a Law and Order episode or an action film, etc, etc.  It you’re just watching it for the “nanoseconds,” you’re really missing the point. 

And yeah, of course it doesn’t “mean anything.”  Haven’t we established that already?

Mostly it’s a way in which members of a vast, savvy tribe recognize and salute one another.

This discourse particularly bothers me.  It’s not some endless self congratulatory in-joke.  It’s a really fucking funny show.  If you want to characterize this “vast, savvy tribe,” why don’t you just call them by what they are: smart people.  

Moving on . . . . How about the far more VanDerWerffian musings of Huffington Post exploited laborer Maureen Ryan:

 

What my favorite episodes of "Community" do is tie the big conceptual conceits to the characters' relationships and, dare I say it, their emotional journeys (though I fear Jeff Winger is going to appear and mock me for writing that phrase). 

He is.  And that man knows how to mock.  See, the VanDerWerff influence is making itself known—it must be stopped!  “Journey”—that dreaded, comedy-draining phrase.  But what I find particularly bizarre here is the conflation of emotion and journeys.  I have no problem with emotions in sitcoms (well, I kind of do, cause I’m a dick—but admittedly there are legitimately funny sitcoms that carve out a place for genuine human emotion).  But “journeys”?  That’s bullshit, Mo.  Every one of Jeff Winger’s big emotional speeches are exactly the same: “We need to be better people, we need to stick together.”  That’s the show at its most static.  It’s emotion, but it’s most definitely not a journey.  You want growth, you want journeys?  Stick to the comedy.  That’s where the show is ceaselessly re-inventing itself, growing and changing.  And besides, Winger is funnier when he’s mocking people like you.  

Everything that happened built on the show's perennial themes of loyalty; the search for, yes, self-actualization; and the ways in which the group tries to stick together and stick up for each other, despite their personal flaws and some challenging circumstances, including their exile from Greendale. 

Personally, I like my perennial themes made up of daffodils and rosebuds on wallpaper borders, not on my television.  And really--self-actualization? Mo, you don’t only want a therapy session; you want a particularly banal therapy session. Next up: Abed’s purpose-driven life. Chang’s five languages of love.   

"Community" is at its best when it ties pitch-perfect concepts to themes that touch on how hard it is to get perspective on your life or to reach some kind of cockamamie maturity, and you know a show is on its A-game when it can use a videogame, an undercover mission and a courtroom parody to do all that.

Writing tip number two: Don’t use the word “cockamamie.”  Unless you’re writing a Leave it to Beaver parody.  (And by all means, go ahead and do so: that’s what our culture is missing these days).  

Wait—she’s not done with her floral themes!  Here’s another article by Maureen. When you’re writing content for free, might as well write twice as much!  

When an episode's meta-commentary aspects are intrusive and/or the show continually points out its homage elements, I tend to lose interest, whether it's a high-concept episode or not. 

So you’re saying, if a show makes you actually have to think, that hurts a wittew bit in your bwainy pawts. Awww. Take some fucking Advil. 

For me, there has to be something at stake for the characters, and I have to be on board with at least a few characters' goals for me to get fully invested in an episode of the show. 

Pausing just to add: the moment people start invoking financial metaphors like “investing,” you know they have absolutely nothing to say. 

When 'Community' is clinically dissecting something in pop culture and the characters don't seem at least a little bit three-dimensional, well, that's when the show tends to lose me.

Or in other words: when the show isn’t what the show is, then I like the show. Why don’t you spare yourself some headaches and watch another episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. 

Oh, they cancelled that!  What a national tragedy!  Who’s going to replace the shoddily-built houses of the nation’s poor with more shoddily built-houses and drive up their property tax rates now? 

But for the pièce de resistence, let’s turn to The Atlantic’s Hampton Stevens (some name!—WASP, anyone?  Do friends call you Duck?  Is your Aunt named Fuff?)   After yachting through a largely intelligent opening, Hampton hits the last few paragraphs like a coral reef and takes a belly flop into a swimming pool full of bullshit.  (Did I just mix a metaphor?—well, just preparing you for Hampton’s prose.)

In an age when even the simplest human interaction is colored by media-created expectations, when our flesh-and-blood romantic relationships are judged against the standards of TV and movie love affairs, Community asks if it's even still possible to make an authentic connection? Probably not. But we shouldn't quit trying.  Neither should Community. The danger, for people, and for this remarkable TV show, is in no longer trying to authentically connect. 

And if your meaning wasn’t bad enough, you had to wrap it up with a split infinitive. I’d expect better from a Hampton.

Also, who knew Dan Harmon was supposed to be the second coming of E.M. Forster?  “Only connect,” y’all.  Next season the Greendale students will be moving into a provincial mansion that may or may not be a microcosm for the declining British aristocracy.  

Yes, I just got highbrow. Continue, Fuff. 

Consider a very different kind of sitcom. How I Met Your Mother, nearing the end of a hugely successful run, hasn't been on the air for nearly a decade because it wittily critiques life in the mass media consumerist simulacrum. How I Met Your Mother thrives because audiences feel emotionally connected to the characters on it.

Guess what?  How I Met Your Mother:  not that good.  A traditional, solid, kind of boring sitcom.  By all means, let’s reduce Community to How I Met Your Mother.  You know what sitcom must foster an emotional connection to its characters?  Two and a Half Men.  I guess a lot of people feel a deep bond with fart-joke-making misogynists.  Why couldn’t Community be like that?  More fart jokes, more emotional connection.  I mean, I love a good fart joke—they keep me entertained in the cold Cedar Rapids nights.  And we definitely need fewer shows that critique “life in the mass media consumerist simulacrum.” They’re crowding up my DVR! I get that every week on The Amazing Race.  Also, just because you may have heard of Baudrillard doesn’t mean you should be throwing around the word “simulacrum,” particularly as you’ve clearly only read the first paragraph of his essay during commercials of HIMYM. (Or maybe you just watched The Matrix.)  

If Community forgets that, they're in trouble.

Grammar!  It’s fantastic!  Community, apparently, is a plural noun.  Copyeditors, apparently, are no longer employed, even by The Atlantic.

No matter how inventive they may be, if the sight gags, puns, one-liners, pop culture name-drops and media-on-media meta-critique overwhelm the relationships between characters, Community will take a one-way trip to Flash-in-the-pan-ville.

I’ve actually been to Flash-in-the-pan-ville, where I had a really satisfying dinner with the Buggles.  They were so much fun.  Fortunately, I had a round-trip ticket, so I was able to get back out, but boy, they do try to keep you there.  I had to fight off Vanilla Ice and the Baha Men. When I visited, though, I didn’t notice that any residents were characters from sitcoms that had been on for three seasons.  Seems like Community kind of made a detour past Flash-in-the-pan-ville and reached The City of Enduring Classics That Will Remain Watchable on DVD (that’s actually the place Christian tries to get to in my new movie treatment of Pilgrim’s Progress 3—look for it in a theater near you!).

Oof—that was an exhaustingly poor extended metaphor.

If the show, in a gargantuan irony, stops offering viewers a sense of community, all the innovation in the world won't keep us watching.

Holy shit Hamptons, you just blew my MIND! Dude, it’s not just about a community college, man, it’s like the whole idea of community, of togetherness and shit.  Man, you’re clearly appreciating this show on a whole deeper level than me! But I’m confused. We don’t want puns right? Puns are the devil’s playthings. Doogie would never pun.

How many times do I have to say it, Hamptons, Community is great because it’s different—it shouldn’t be the same, it shouldn’t be normal.  And I’m not the only one who thinks so.   Here’s someone who gets it, who agrees that Community shouldn’t be normal (and I’m not just saying that because I know her):

“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.

Exactly.  And here’s Mike Hale, in the New York Times, demolishing Hampton’s attempt at argument:

The real danger for “Community,” from a critical standpoint, isn’t that it will go too far into fan-boy arcana but rather that it will overly indulge the sentimentality and neediness at its core — which, as in so many of our real lives, the endless chatter about movies and music and TV is designed to cover up.

Yes!  Yes!  Finally!  Someone who makes sense, who realizes what makes the show what it is.  Mayhem. Insanity. Satire. Too bad the VanDerWerfs, the purveyors of journeys and neediness and normality, have won, and Dan Harmon, the man responsible for all that was great in the show, has lost.