Community Face Off

Todd van der Werff, meet Mike Hale.  Mike Hale, Todd van der Werff.  Why yes, it is a lovely day today, thank you.   You two might have some things in common.  Both of you seem to enjoy a certain NBC sitcom.  Both of you apparently like breaking reviewing embargos.  My, what you can learn from each other!  Shall we compare?  Mike, your lede:

One of the many reasons to watch the first three seasons of “Community,” the fiercely quirky and unapologetically smart NBC sitcom, was that you actually had to watch it. Every offhand remark, every reaction shot, every bit of physical business communicated something (usually something funny). More than any other show in prime time it demanded that you pay attention.

The sad simulacrum of “Community” that checks in Thursday for Season 4 makes no such claim on your concentration. Send a few e-mails, look at the television, order a pizza, look back at the TV. You won’t miss anything important, because there’s nothing important to miss.

The show has been dumbed down, its humor broadened past recognition . . .

Oof.  Might be a bit harsh, but still: Here’s a man who seems to know what makes Community great: “fiercely quirky,” “unapologetically smart,” above all always “funny.” 

And the new show: “dumbed down, its humor broadened.”  I’ll wait and see—it didn’t seem any worse than prior bad episodes, but certainly it doesn’t bode well.   I vaguely chuckled maybe five or six times during the episode.  No big laughs.  Not unwatchable, and maybe it could improve, but looks like NBC’s really ruined this show by firing Harmon. 

But good job, Mike: precise, accurate description—seems like a great way to lead off a review. 

Todd, what do you have to offer?

To love a TV show is to know one of two things:

Are you seriously starting off with an axiom? Are you cribbing from your Freshman Comp papers? “Since the beginning of time, humans have written about TV…”

Either it will eventually leave you, or you will eventually leave it.

Preach it.

There’s no middle ground for the committed. Once you’re in, you’re in, and you’re going to be in until the thing is canceled or until you lose interest because you’ve either figured out all of the show’s tricks or it’s just not the same anymore. That show you loved more than anything? It will eventually feel sort of old and pointless to you after a while, and you’ll have moved on to some new thing that feels fresher but will inevitably disappoint you somewhere down the line. And so it goes.

Interrupting to note that this review has not yet mentioned the show it’s supposedly about.

You’ll someday remember that show you loved with such intensity—it will probably be off the air by this point—and you’ll wonder idly why they don’t make ’em like that anymore. The answer is because you’re not who you were anymore, and you can’t fall for a show like that because you’re no longer the same person.

Afhdafa[efafa[faefaefawefaefa.  Bwa, wha? [drools].  Sorry, dozed off there for a second.  What was that, Todd?  What are you talking about?  Oh, right: the AV Club lead-in. Loosely related to the classic really bad Pitchfork music review, beginning with one paragraph of banal generalizations.  I’m glad you’ve learned a thing or two from Malcolm Gladwell about the “Straw We,” though you’ve one-upped him with the Straw You. 

You may not speak for me, Mr. Werff.  For me the grass is not always greener.  I do not have a roving eye.  If I think a show is great, in most though not all cases (I’m looking at you, The Office), I stick with it—sure the quality will probably decline, but if it was once great, barring some unforeseen development (like the forced departure of the creator, say) it’ll still be entertaining.

But I’m interrupting.  How are you going to bring your profound ideas about TV loyalty together, connect them back to the show you’re discussing?

Which, whatever.

Way to clinch it, Todd.

So let’s recap.  From Mike: what Community was, aptly described, and what Community now is.

From Todd: [Cliché], which, whatever.

Are you going to start actually talking about the show, Todd?  Is it any good now that Dan Harmon is gone?

The answer, based on just two episodes of the show’s fourth season, is a deeply qualified “maybe.”

Ok—more positive than Mike, fine. 

What does Community still have, that we all love?

It’s “well-acted, well-directed, well-written.”

Ok—not sure about that last one anymore, but what else?

If you enjoy Donald Glover and Danny Pudi singing, “Troy and Abed something SOMEthing,” well, this is still the only place on TV you’re going to get that particular gag.

You know what, I suspect that this is the only place on TV where I’m going to get Donald Glover and Danny Pudi together doing anything.  The 4^th season of Community: it has the same actors!
For Todd van der Werff, what made Community good: one particular gag.  (that’s not even that funny).

Yet this is how Mike Hale describes it:

[B]ack to the idea of paying attention. The world of libraries and classrooms and off-campus apartments that Mr. Harmon created was highly detailed and fully realized, as were the crackpots and misanthropes who inhabited it. They might have been nut cases who negotiated reality through bad puns and movie references, but they were substantial and complex nut cases. In the new season they’ve been flattened and, especially in a story line in which Annie (Alison Brie) imagines marrying the bad boy Jeff (Joel McHale), sentimentalized. Also, they’re just not very funny.

Mike gets it.  Well-rounded characters, a carefully-detailed world: these matter, but they only matter if they make the show really fucking funny.  Community was a funny show.  Judging from this episode (admittedly, a very small sample size), it is now a less funny show.  Case closed. 

But what about Todd.  What does Van der Werff find lacking in this new Community?

Yet as it begins its fourth season, Community is also a show that’s displaying rampant signs of age. The running jokes that once seemed hilarious now feel beaten into the ground. The laughs are fewer and farther between. The characters, who once had some nuance to them, tread dangerously close to being one-note at times, and the show is more and more reliant on the kinds of hacky sitcom stories that it would have made fun of back in season one, via Abed, a character who makes fun of that kind of thing.

Ok—small sample size and all, but that seems true. 

Yet even as the show has all of these weapons in its arsenal, it feels increasingly empty. It’s a show that knows what it used to be, a show that’s a bit too obsessed with its own history and repeating it until the repetition grows irritating and finally just exhausting. It’s a show that feels tired of being Community, in some ways, with all that word implies. This is a show that once made fun of sitcoms and chewed them up as so much grist for its mill. Now, it increasingly feels as if it’s just become another one of them.

Ok, maybe.  Only one problem, Todd.  You treat the show like this is some inevitable decline, some aging process in which the show’s just running out of ideas.  In case I need to remind you, there’s a reason for this.  NBC fired Dan Harmon.  The show could still be good.  Don’t chalk it up to some condition of sitcoms.  If the show continues to get worse, blame the people who fucked this up.  Is it too much to ask for a little anger?  Ah, the complacency.  Again: IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.

But I forgot—the quality doesn’t actually matter.  Even if the show remains the most brilliant show on TV, even if the show still had Harmon, you’d probably say the same things.  Because to you a show always feels “sort of old and pointless to you after a while, and you’ll have moved on to some new thing that feels fresher.”

What else, Todd?

Community only works because it can do the wild, crazy stuff, sure, but also because it can play the more muted notes, can find the character beats

Oh, so Community is a song now?  Should it be played in ¾ time?  On a bongo in a drum circle?

and emotional interactions that are true to its vision of a world that can feel harsh and exclusionary but also wants nothing more than to pull everybody into a big hug.

Whoa, big fella!  So, in that sentence, the world itself wants nothing more than to give everyone a big hug?  Is this some tree-hugger vision here, Todd?  Personally, I don’t want the world to give me a hug.  I’d be afraid of being crushed. Write this formula down, Werff: no hugging + no learning = comedy.

That vision of life fit Harmon—who can be best described as a misanthrope who loves the shit out of people—to a T.

I can best be described as an agoraphobe who loves crowded spaces. 

There are plots here that want to be emotionally compelling, that want to be about these characters moving toward a better understanding of each other, but they play out under standard sitcom rules and guidelines.

Again, I do not want the characters to move towards a better understanding of each other.  I don’t want them to be emotionally compelling.  I do want them to be funny.  And the show seems less funny than it used to be.

Want to sum up, Todd?

This is Community, yes, but it’s a version missing the most crucial element to keeping an audience that loves a TV show in love with that TV show: its soul.

Quick, I need a soul transfusion!  Where is James Brown when you need him?

Todd—let me introduce you again to Mike Hale.  Let him be your guide to what is good, succinct reviewing.  What does he say?

The two episodes provided for review  . . . have fewer laughs between them than a single good scene from the old “Community.”

Sadly true.  And again, that’s what matters.  Is it funny?  That’s the only question.