The Non-sense of an Ending

Let’s power up the old time machine and take a trip back into the past.  Way, way, back.  All the way to April 10, 2014.  Man, life was different back then, wasn’t it?  I’ll set the stage.  Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” was the number one song in America.  Real catchy number.  Captain America: The Winter Soldier was wowing those who love extra-long movie titles.  An innovative NBC sitcom’s prognosis for a sixth season was still looking positive.  And a certain AV Club recapper was finally seeing the light.  Seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?  Let’s head back to that long-ago moment, and see what Todd has to say.    

“Basic Story” is also about how all of the characters occupy a kind of sitcom purgatory. When Jeff and Britta decide to get married, it’s a pivotal moment both for the show and the episode, but it’s mostly notable as a sign of something that can’t happen so long as they remain sitcom characters. If Community is renewed, then Jeff and Britta will be right back there [sic] squabbling; TV shows are often all about a kind of fundamental resistance to change.

Well, maybe not all TV shows.  But sitcoms?  Definitely.  I’ve been making this point for years, while Todd has gone on and on about journeys and growth and other bullshit. But I’m not here to rub salt in old wounds.  Let’s celebrate Todd’s conversion!  I’m glad he finally got it, even if it took him so very, very long.  Sitcom purgatory is actually a nice way to describe it.  They’re never going to change.  Because they’re characters on a sitcom.

And now, theoretically, the story should “end.” But it won’t get to, because this is a TV show, and God willing, there’s one more season and a movie to get to.

Ah, the irony of historical hindsight, I mutter, shaking my head ruefully.

Community has always set Greendale up as a purgatory. It’s a very TV setup—the place where you least want to be is the place where you learn who you need to be.

Or the place where the show needs to be because that’s its central premise. 

But at the same time, the whole idea behind purgatory is that it ends, that the fires eventually burn away your sins and you move forward to paradise. (This episode throws out the name Dante for a reason.)

Hmm, I sense that this purgatory metaphor might be going a bit too far. 

A TV show only ends when somebody is good and ready to have it go away, and even that might not be enough for fans, who may will new episodes into being through their imaginations or crowd-funding or something.

So that “somebody” who ends a sitcom, in this case, is a cadre of brainless NBC execs who want to double-down on How I Met Your Mother ripoffs?  Because I was not “good and ready” for Community to end.  It remains—how should I put this?—really fucking funny.

Longing for more story is just a basic human desire, and it’s one that Community is almost always careful to fulfill.

I’m not quite sure what this means.  Yes, the show tells stories.  It’s not a Hollis Frampton film.

But longing for more story also deprives the world of endings, and endings are what help us make sense of those stories in the first place (even if they aren’t as important to understanding an ongoing TV show as we’d all like them to be).

Someone has been reading Reading for the Plot!  Actually no.  But someone really should be reading Reading for the Plot.

Yes, endings are important to make sense of narrative.  But, as you kind of point out, sitcoms are the least dependent on endings of any form I can think of.  Because nothing and no one changes, as you mention.  No one really cares that the last episode of Seinfeld was kind of a let down: the show was brilliant. 

Pierce got his ending through death, as we all will. Troy discovered that his journey and evolution would have to take place elsewhere.

Wait, I thought we established this just moments before.  Sitcom characters don’t go on journeys.  No one changes.  Nothing changes.  The only “changes” are when actors (not characters) decide to leave the show.  Or when NBC pulls the plug.  That’s the ending, an ending, alas, that we’ve now experienced.

And Annie and Abed and the Dean need Greendale to keep existing, because they’re not yet done being prepared by it for whatever paradise awaits them in the next world. Greendale has always been a waystation, a place between places, but for that to have any meaning, there needs to be somewhere else to go to, and right now, there isn’t, at least not yet.

Somehow this just became Pilgrim’s Progress.  Well, with all this talk about journeys, it’s not too surprising.  Have you been saved?  Have you been washed in the blood of the Lamb? 

So you’ve gone and undermined everything you’ve just said.  Great.  No, there doesn’t need to be “somewhere else to go to”; it’s a sitcom, and there’s no change, as you began this recap by stating.  Change equals cancellation.  1+1=2.  Todd + recap = idiocy.  It’s a very clear equation. 

Oh my God—I’ve just realized something.  Todd’s got in my brain, man!  He’s the Thought Jacker!  I too want growth, change, a journey.  I want Todd to learn that his criteria for judging Community are, and have always been, bullshit.  I want him to evolve towards a better, more insightful whole.  But I need to learn that, like the characters on the show, he’s never going to change.  He’s just not that smart.  Despite the relative flash of insight of this recap, he’ll just keep bringing out the whole journeys and growth and hugging mumbo jumbo.

As proof, let’s rev up the old time machine again and jump forward one week, to Todd’s final Community recap, a fitting encapsulation of his five year long engagement with the show.  Let’s start it off with a bang, shall we?

Honestly, I might be ready for Community to be done.

Me too; after watching that brilliantly funny final episode, I was like, who needs more of this?  NBC’s got a new pilot where Debra Messing plays a bad-ass lady detective who also has to contend with her school-age kids.  Dump Community, and give me more of that!

Well, you got your wish, jackass.

Its fifth season has been one of its most consistent yet, perhaps even more consistent than the vaunted season two (which had the highest highs of the series’ run but also had episodes that felt fairly phoned in).

Fifth season was the most consistent yet!  Therefore, cancel it.  Off with its head!

And yet for as much life as this season has brought to the show, it’s not hard to feel as if it’s started to run out of stories to tell, things to explore.

"When Dan Harmon saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to explore and conquer."

Yup, that’s a wrap.  We won comedy.  Let’s pack up and move the circus out of town. 

Um, Todd, aren’t those last few sentences maybe kind of just a little in conflict with each other? (Not that I should ever expect consistency from you; especially considering that just one week prior you were gunning for a sixth season). If the show’s still good (and it is), then, I don’t know, maybe it still does have stories to tell.  Is it funny?  Yeah, it is.  So don’t cancel it.  End of story. 

Don’t get me wrong: If this show gets another season, I’m going to watch it (and probably write about it), but it’s also becoming more and more clear that Community is closer to the end of its run than the beginning,

Well, yeah, I would assume that a show in its fifth season would be closer to the end than the beginning. You don’t have to know anything about the show to guess that.

and I’ve finally reached a point where I’m not necessarily going to celebrate simply because Greendale has been saved.

I know, why celebrate that the best comedy on TV is saved?  Let it pass, man.  Let it pass.  I’d hate to live in Todd van der Werff’s dictatorship.  Once someone reached the age of fifty they’d be summarily executed. Or to be his girlfriend on her birthday. “So what, you lived another year? I’m not going to celebrate simply because you’ve been saved.”

It’s a weird position to be in, honestly, where you still like a show but also are ready for it to be done, if only to preserve its own legacy in your imagination.

Ok, let’s get this straight.  You want the show to be cancelled to preserve its legacy.  This about a show that you begin this recap praising and saying is almost as good as its first two seasons.  It’s not the late seasons of the Office, where the show sucks.  It’s still great.  It’s still funny.  And even with the Office, a show with only one good season out of nine, that one season remains really great.  I still watch it.  If the show is still at least somewhat funny, why the fuck would you not want it on the air?

But I shouldn’t be surprised.  The fact is, as I’ve said from the start, Todd fundamentally, despite his protestations to the contrary, doesn’t really like Community.  Or, he doesn’t like the show as it is, harkening back to some touchy-feely emotional growth and journeys season 0 that never actually existed.  With fans like these, who needs enemies? Here’s Todd at the end of season four. 

This is no longer a show that’s capable of much beyond repeating elements it thinks the audience will like over and over again. It’s become a jukebox musical version of itself, endlessly spinning its greatest hits to a crowd that grows smaller and smaller until it finally disappears.  Even yesterday, I would have been sad at a cancellation, thanks to all of the good times I’ve had with this show over the years and even in this season. But not anymore. It might be time to be done. The earth, it has been salted.

Admittedly, season four sucked.  But Todd’s writing the same old bullshit—the show has nothing to say, it’s repeating itself, blah blah blah.  If it had been cancelled after season four, there wouldn’t have been a season five.  And we’d have missed out, n’est pas?

But let’s go further back—how about the first episode of season four?

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.

Methinks the pot is calling the kettle black, Todd, with you repetitively denouncing Community’s repetitiveness. Ok, that recap was still season four.  How ‘bout strapping on the time machine and going even further back—how about to the recap that prompted me to start this blog in the first place?

But it’s also a show that’s settled quite a bit into what it’s going to be for the immediate future. I still love the show, as I think should be obvious. I just don’t love it like I once did, and that will take some adjusting.

I can imagine Todd on Season One, Episode One: “I just find the show a little repetitive; I just don’t love it like I used to love it, before it was on the air.” 

Community: they don’t make ‘em like they used to!

How many months will we have to wait for Todd’s nostalgic paean to the lost glories of Community season five, a classic cancelled in its prime?  Not too long, I’d wager. 

But for now let’s return to Todd on the last episode of Community, and why he’d be fine if it were to be cancelled. 

It’s churlish, then, to hold something against “Basic Sandwich” for refusing to conform to my own emotional journey with the show.

Oh, so now that you realize that the characters aren’t on an emotional journey it’s about your own emotional journey?  Sweet.  I hope you reach the land of Sugar Plum Fulfilment and bypass the Slough of Humor. 

The problem, then, is that the episode never really makes a compelling case for Greendale to keep existing. It’s meant to keep existing, because if it exists, then we get to see Community, and if we get to see Community, we are happy.

Hmm, I think you just made the case for Community to keep existing.  It makes us happy.  Because it is a funny, innovative television program. 

The show has had some great finales in the past that have argued for the necessity of this place as somewhere that allows the characters to work on their own endless self-improvement projects.

Endless self-improvement projects! The foundation of all good comedies. Next up on NBC: Poor Richard’s Almanac! Followed by The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, starring Judd Hirsch and Christina Applegate.

“Basic Sandwich” doesn’t really bother with this part of the characters’ journey;

Funny, I read a critic the week before who said Community wasn’t about change or growth.  A certain Todd van der Werff.  Perhaps you’ve read him?

instead, it hopes to gain its emotional climax from leaning on stuff that happened in the past.

An emotional climax!  A larger, warmer whole!  Todd, think of the children.  That sounds more appropriate for the ten o’clock hour. 

And forget the past.  I like to live in an eternal present.  I got one of those Men in Black-style amnesia sticks.  What was I saying?

It felt almost too wacky for the show, which is saying a lot for a series that just a couple of weeks ago came up with a really solid mid-life crisis episode disguised as a G.I. Joe parody.

How is this any wackier than any other laugh-producing episode of the show? Remember the Ass Crack Bandit, or Hot Lava for that matter (which, by the way, was from an episode you really liked).  Staid, severe, restrained.  Like everything on the show.

Community prides itself on having its goofiest stuff be based in some emotional core,

Only you believe that.  You are the only one, Todd. Watch “Modern Warfare” again.  No emotions.  Just brilliant, goofy comedy. 

and I don’t know that this ever once worked on that level, because the salvation of Greendale was always going to happen.

Because it’s a fucking sitcom.  Until the show ends, it’s not going to blow up its basic premise.  That only happens when the show is cancelled.  Which it is.  And posting recaps like this isn’t exactly helpful for extending the life of a brilliant sitcom, is it? 

It might have worked as a hidden origin story for the school—and I did like Greendale Computer-y College—but it felt like a lot of yelling and then Jeff feeling things. Which could describe a lot of the season, really.

Or the whole show.  That’s the basic formula.  But what made it so good (have to use the past tense now, alas) was how it innovated and played on and was self-aware of that basic formula.  Exactly the things you didn’t like about the show. 

The thing that bugs me about Todd is he’s semi-self-conscious about how inane he is, but not self-aware enough to say anything intelligent, like when he commented on the pitch-perfect fake show promos that rolled in the credits.

I’d review them, too, and read way too much into minor lines that don’t really have anything to do with anything! (“As he licked the strange cupcake batter off the spoon, I realized that Captain Cook is a show about exploration. Then, aren’t they all?”)

This is such a fitting ending, summarizing perfectly the Van der Werff Experience™.   For one, Todd doesn’t seem to understand what “reading” is.  Believe me, there is no danger of overanalysis in Todd’s recaps.  Why?  Because overanalysis kind of has to include “analysis.”  And analysis doesn’t lead to conclusions about how a show is “about exploration.”  I know you’re being jokey here, Todd, but really that banality is what all your so-called analysis of Community boils down to:  it’s about exploration, dude.  The “analysis” of a stoned college freshman.  Here’s a hint for you: if you could apply that same statement to basically any cultural product, then it doesn’t fucking mean anything at all. 

Now that you’ve gotten your wish, and Community is off the air, why don’t, next time we’re provided with a really funny sitcom, you spend some time actually analyzing it.  Not yammering about growth and journeys and your other fan-fiction crutches.  Instead, bother looking closely at what’s actually there, before it’s gone.