The VanDerWerff Straitjacket

Todd, you’re exhausting me.  How you can turn out this level of crap on a weekly basis?  And so much of it!  You’re like the Daniel Defoe of bad television criticism.  It’s hard to keep up.  But I’ll try.  

This is going to be a controversial claim (I already can’t find any critics who agree with me on this), but I’ll make it anyway: “Curriculum Unavailable,” the show’s second attempt at a fake clip show, is better than “Paradigms Of Human Memory,” the show’s first attempt. 

I’m going to go with everyone else on this, Todd.  You’re on your own.  A very good episode, this week, but certainly can’t stack up to the first fake clip show.  That’s probably my favorite episode of Community. 

“Paradigms” is one of the show’s touchstone episodes, one that everybody immediately knows if you say even one word of its title (or mention one of its jokes). It’s the funniest half-hour the show’s ever produced, and it probably will be for as long as the show is on the air (which will, of course, be for another five years). 

It is!  We agree!  Oh, wait.  Haven’t I learned?  In the VanDerWerff world, praising a show for being funny is just a prelude to criticizing it.  

It’s packed, wall-to-wall, with jokes, and the sheer onslaught of hilarious moments makes it easy to realize something about it: 

Here it comes.

It doesn’t really have a story. 

So today it’s story that’s missing.  Too little emotional payoff one week, too much serialization the next, too little story now.  Just go with the funny, Todd, and you won’t have to tie yourself into knots of inconsistency.  

It has a revelation—Jeff and Britta have been having secret sex—but it doesn’t really do anything with that, choosing instead to repeat the same “the group nearly breaks up” story the show has done a million times before. This is not to denigrate “Paradigms,” which remains one of my favorite episodes and the gold standard for the show telling jokes. With all of that hilarity, maybe there just wasn’t room for a stronger story.

Again, WHO THE FUCK CARES about a “stronger story” if the episode is the funniest episode of an extremely funny series?  Also, you seem to expect Community to be a traditional show, but that’s simply not what it is or ever has been—you can’t go in wanting a set sitcom story or revelation.  Go watch Two and a Half Men if you want that.  What makes the first clip show great, aside from being really fucking funny, which is really the only criteria that matters, is that it functions as an elaborate meta-parody of the show itself.  So criticizing it for repeating “the group nearly breaks up” story is radically missing the point: the episode is entirely self-aware of the formulas that it occasionally finds itself falling back upon (particularly the Winger brings it all together final speech), and, in fact, is brilliantly making fun of that. 

And as I’ve said before, that episode also mocks and short-circuits the VanDerWerffian desire for the show to fall back into traditional soap-opera style plotting.  Because, as you say, the clip show subverts the whole idea of a “revelation”—the longed-for acknowledgement that in fact yes Britta and Jeff have gotten together just doesn’t fucking matter.  It doesn’t change anything because, again, it’s totally beside the point.  Funny is the point.  That’s all that matters. 

I’m not saying “Curriculum” isn’t funny either. Indeed, it’s ridiculously, amazingly hilarious, tossing off bit after bit that lands and finding new ways to make the clip show structure inventive and funny. (The asylum montage in act three—in which the show actually revisits “Paradigms” as involving the characters as mental patients remembering their own delusions—is one of the funniest things the show has ever done.)

Also a really brilliant meta-parody.  That’s when Community is at its best.  

But this episode does something interesting: Where the original clip show was a way of celebrating and mocking one of the most persistent and irritating forms of television episode, this was a way of celebrating the show’s setting. This was a way for the characters to realize both how much they’d lost when they were kicked out of Greendale and just how much they would miss it.  . . . .It was oddly heartwarming.

Heartwarming is . . . all you care about.  Heart burn is . . . what your posts give me.  Boom!  I’ll 

be here all week. 

Where “Curriculum” succeeds is in taking that conceit and using it the way memory might actually work, so that good and bad are juxtaposed right up against each other, and not everything is so clear-cut.

Is this how your memory works, Todd?  Good and bad are constantly being juxtaposed—“I have a job that allows me to write about TV.”  Slap.  “But I’m terrible at it.”  Slap.  “But I have all kinds of readers.”  Slap.  “But many of them find me insufferable.”  It’s a strange world, the VanDerWerffian mind.  Particularly because the above is a flagrantly inaccurate description of the episode, in which the good and bad memories are separated into their own montages.  Also, nice job with “the way memory might actually work.” Could you be more tentative?     

Take, for instance, the long section in act two that begins with the characters remembering how weird Greendale was—the  10,000th flush is celebrated in the bathroom, and one of the classes is apparently for “Ladders”—then shifts into them remembering all of the times the Dean helped them out. It’s an easy way to get them to realize that the Dean has been replaced by Fauxby, but it’s also a reminder of just how much Greendale has added to this series.

I’m glad you appreciate how the episode reminded us of “how much Greendale has added to this series.”  As if we were ever in doubt that the setting of a community college might be kind of important for a show set at a community college.  It’s like in Cheers, I just always took for granted, even sometimes forgot, that it was set at a bar.  And then the show reminded me of that, in a heartwarming way.  Oh, right, that’s why they’re always serving people drinks.  That’s what they do at bars.  

No, the reason the story works so well here is because each clips package advances it. There’s a very simple structure here, but it feels like an actual plot, not like the weird meandering of “Paradigms.” Somebody will say something that inches the plot forward, then we’ll get some clips to back that up. Somebody says something else, and we get even more clips. “Paradigms” took the form of an argument the group was having, and, as such, it felt like a long conversation interspersed with assorted memories the characters were having. “Curriculum” feels like a mystery.

Here’s your problem, Todd, in a nutshell: you simply have no conception of what makes Community a great show.  As I mentioned in regards to last week’s post, you seem to want to make each show into a “formula” with a “solution.”  But that’s not how comedy works, and again, WE’RE TALKING ABOUT A FUCKING COMEDY HERE.  Comedies don’t have rules or formulas—that’s kind of their definition.  Look—should all shows be like Community?  Are all great sitcoms like Community?  Of course not.  The Cosby Show works on account of repetition, comfort, familiarity, and feeling.  It works really well.  But you simply cannot apply those criteria to a show like Community.  

How does Community work at its best?  Well let’s take my favorite episodes, just off the top of my head: Ken Burns parody, Law and Order parody, first paintball episode, first clip show, Christmas musical episode.  These may not be your favorites, but I think most people would agree these are near the top.  Well, what do they have in common, despite sharing the VanDerWerff kiss of death of being really fucking funny?  They systematically subvert all expectations for what a sitcom can be, particularly when it comes to genre and narrative structure.  Poor Todd wants it to have a story, but the whole point of Community is that it can function—indeed, it functions best—when it disrupts all of our narrative expectations, getting rid of a story (or including fragments of stories that we don’t get access to) as in the last clip show, or short-circuiting our (or your) desire for Jeff and Britta to get together, in “Modern Warfare.”  The show can be film noir, or Law and Order, or Ken Burns documentary, or Die Hard.  It can even be a My Dinner with Andre parody, audacious enough that it features a five minute monologue, with no obvious jokes, about Cougar Town, one that gains its humor from the sheer gall of it playing so blatantly with our expectations for sitcoms.  On a week to week basis, I simply don’t know what to expect.  You know the reaction I have during my favorite episodes of Community, like the parody of My Dinner with Andre? I can’t believe this is on television.  It’s so different from everything else, even other great, but slightly more traditional, sitcoms like 30 Rock.  So don’t try to fit Community into a straightjacket (Boo Ya--see how I tied that into this week’s episode).  Don’t make it into a formula, as you constantly try to do, criticizing it for departing from the most hidebound and lazy templates for sitcoms, all of your own devising.  It may scare you, it may offend your tender sensibilities that don’t like mayhem or shows that challenge you, but it will be really fucking funny. 

However, having just a 13-episode order could be good for this show in creative terms. It would mean all involved would hopefully buckle down and just create the most solid 13 episodes of the series’ run. That’s easier to do with fewer scripts to turn out. At any rate, it’s great news. Here’s to season four! 

Fuck you, you fucking fuck.  Don’t find a fucking silver lining here.  It’s great the show is back, but 13 episodes, that’s worse than 22.  Don’t give me that “creative” crap.  I want more Community.  A bad episode of Community is still better than 95% of stuff on television.  I find this attitude enraging, and one that your compatriots there at the AV Club share.  Here’s Meredith Blake, writing about 30 Rock: 

While my head tells me it’s always better to go out on a relative high, my heart just wants to scream out, “Don’t goooo!” That’s a fundamental conflict for so many TV fans: Do we want more of a diminished product, or less of something that we can remember fondly? It is better to burn out, or to rust? I know what I’m supposed to say as a Sophisticated Viewer Of Television, but with a show that’s still as good as 30 Rock, I honestly don’t know. I’d take four more years of B- episodes of this show over 30 seconds of 2 Broke Girls. 30 Rock might not be at the creative peak of its early seasons, but when it’s gone in just 14 more episodes, I’ll be one sad lady.

I’m glad she finally comes around, but what is this fucking lie that the attitude that shows should “go out on a relative high” is the attitude of “Sophisticated Viewer of Television.”  It’s the attitude of an idiot.  It’s one thing if, like the current incarnation of The Office, it’s become unwatchable.  But even a mediocre 30 Rock is still great.  Plus, 30 Rock, this season, is decidedly not mediocre—it’s on a fucking roll, though no one on the internet seems willing to acknowledge that, since consistently telling brilliant jokes seems no longer to be anyone’s priority in a sitcom.  Give me more episodes of funny shows.  Do I need to put this on a blimp and have it circle over Chicago?  That’s all I ask.