Painfully Obvious

Maybe the reason why I take so much time away from milking cows out here in Eau Claire to lambast idiot reviewers of TV comedies is because film comedies have dived to such depths of un-funnyness. Exhibit A: The way all comedy film titles today sound like pitches in a boardroom rather than anything that might have been on top of an actual screenplay. Plenty of people have already complained about the lack of interesting female leads in our brave new Bromantic world, but back when we had Rosalind Russell and Katherine Hepburn we also had movies called His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby. Their crazy, convoluted plots could never have been summed up the way The Proposal, It’s Complicated, Knocked Up, or even (sorry Ms. Wiig) Bridesmaids can be merely by checking the local movie times. Imagine if The Shop Around the Corner had been called Anonymous Pen Pals. Also guilty: The Five-Year Engagement, The Break-Up, Date Night, or No Strings Attached, just in case you didn’t see it when it was called Friends With Benefits. Here’s the formula: take any totally meaningless and overhyped contemporary phenomenon, wait till it’s been beaten to death, and then summarize it in the most generic way possible. I like my comedy focus-grouped, don’t you?


So for all you film executives out there, get your hands on these hot properties. And if you’re planning on seeing a film comedy in the next ten years, here’s some of the titles you can look forward to. After any of these, do you really need to see the movie?


Love Commute


Cubicle Mates


She’s My Boss


Frat Party


Man Cave


Blacked Out


Best Friend’s Ex


Un-Divorced


On the Rebound


The Hook-Up


Break-up Text


Tivoing Alone


Missed Connections


Met on the Internet


YouTube Sensation


Tweethearts


Friend Me


It’s Just Lunch


Speed Date


First Date


Last Date


Worst Date Ever


Dating the President’s Daughter

A Larger, Warmer Whole

Confession: I was not a big fan of the final three episodes of Community.  Pretty disappointing, especially considering, given the firing of Dan Harmon, they could be the last episodes of Community worth watching at all.  Unfortunately, I just didn’t find them that funny.  Well, to be more precise, I liked the first one, sort of liked the second, and disliked the third. So exactly the opposite of VanDerWerff (that makes me very happy).  But, really, our respective opinions of the episodes’ quality is irrelevant.  VanDerWerff’s judgments don’t bother me so much; it’s his thought process that really gets my goat.  (And I mean that literally.  I’ve been running a goat farm up here near Sheybogan, and Todd stole one of my prized  LaMancha goats.) 

Upon completing “Introduction To Finality,” the third of tonight’s three all new Community episodes, my first thought was, “Man, that would have been a satisfying series finale.” 

Christ, Todd.  You really want this show to be cancelled, don’t you?

There were things that didn’t quite work, and the Winger speech was overly gooey in the beginning. 

So we don’t like gooey now?  And yet—spoiler alert—you’re soon going to be demanding that the characters come together to form a “larger, warmer whole.”  Sounds pretty gooey to me.  

But by the end, when the theme song started up and the characters took us into the season’s final movement—a gently sweet montage that showed us where they all were as their adventures at Greendale came to a close for another season—I was genuinely touched by the journey the show had gone on. 

Shows don’t go on journeys.  People go on journeys.  Shows do not have legs.  Or brains.  Were they to go on a journey, they would definitely get lost.  

It’s nice that you felt touched—Community can be a sweet and touching show.  But are “gooey,” “gently sweet,” and “genuinely moved” really the things you want to lead with in a write-up of a comedy?  Remember, a COMEDY.

There was a rough road on the way here—even tonight—and some of the show’s stranger story complications didn’t make a lot of sense. But by the end, the season had reoriented itself as one about choice, about the times that we choose to stay somewhere that maybe doesn’t make us ecstatically happy because of the people who surround us and the places and people we’ll forever carry around with us in our 

hearts.

 

I must admit that my first reaction to this was throwing up my hands and snorting (the douchey guy sitting next to me on the train must have been baffled).  Congratulations, Todd: your “criticism” is so bad it defies words.  But valiantly I soldier on.

OK—for today, I’m going to accept all this.  I’m going to enter the VanDerWerffian mind, where humor doesn’t matter, but journeys and character growth do.  In a sitcom, mind you.  But ok, fine, let’s give it a try.  What new insights will this yield?

Let’s read this again.

But by the end, the season had reoriented itself as one about choice,

A season about choice.  Was season one about love?  Season two about truth?  Season four will be about justice?  Five—if we’re so lucky, and Dan Harmon makes a triumphant return—about the American Way?  And if there’s a movie—well, I imagine that will be about all humanity.  And Todd will be there to tell us what it all means. 

 . . . about the times that we choose to stay somewhere that maybe doesn’t make us ecstatically happy because of the people who surround us and the places and people we’ll forever carry around with us in our hearts.

Wow, you hit the nail on the head, Todd.  What insight!  A new Susan Sontag, you.  What deep thoughts you think.  Let’s give you the Pauline Kael Chair of Media Analysis.  One question, though: what the fuck are you talking about?

Oh, wait, I get it.  You see, I often have a similar difficulty to the one Todd describes here.  I’m often thinking, why am I not ecstatically happy right now?  Shouldn’t I be ECSTATICALLY happy at all times?  Shouldn’t I be on a Caribbean beach while engaged in coitus after having just won the lottery and found the cure for cancer?  That’s the standard by which I judge my happiness level.  And, of course, I could just choose to have that life.  A choice, that’s all.  But I say, fuck it, fuck curing cancer, fuck that Caribbean beach.  I could get on a plane to San Juan, but I’m staying here on my goat farm in Sheybogan because of all the people (and goats) I know there, as well as all my warm memories of summers slogging through goat excrement that I carry around in my heart. 

Moving on . . .

The episode revolves around Jeff’s need to study for his biology final, something that he puts off to help Shirley in her trial against Pierce for controlling interest in the sandwich shop the two are finally allowed to open. He keeps repeating the phrase “cellular mitosis,” and I think that idea is crucial to understanding the whole season—and maybe the whole series so far.

I keep repeating the phrase, “Todd VanDerWerff’s an idiot”—I think it’s crucial to understanding his write-ups.

Cellular mitosis is the process by which cells split off from each other and replicate, so that all of your skin cells are recognizably skin cells and all of your bone cells are bone cells and so on.

Shit—you’re about to open a can of insight on our asses.  Thanks, Bill Nye.

Mitosis involves a complicated process of splitting off, of one cell becoming two individual units. Throughout this season, we’ve watched as the members of the group have pursued their own interests and run off into their own little stories, and we’ve watched as more and more of the students of Greendale became characters in their own rights. But as the individual “cells” of the study group—or of Greendale—split off from the larger organism, they still carry the things they learned from being with each other.

Excuse me, I just had to go wipe a little bit of vomit off the train seat. Getting a bit gooey in here. This is just a model of your insidious influence on your readers, isn’t it, Todd?  As they go off into their lives they can “carry” the bullshit things they’ve learned from you about journeys and growth and spread it over the internet until all comedies are just people hugging and congratulating each other on how much they’ve learned. 

The longer they’re together, the more they’ll influence each other. But when the time comes for them to finally split off from each other for real, they’ll be ready to spread the things they’ve learned from each other even further.

The Greendale virus!  We’ve got a stage three contagion going on here!  Run for your lives!

Wholes split into pieces, but they’re still wholes, because we carry those things forward in our hearts.

I just…oh my god. The things we carry forward in our hearts, you mean plaque right?  Arteriosclerosis?  Since you’re getting all science-y and all. 

And that’s a lovely message to leave us with

Yes. Embroider that shit.

in a season that’s been sometimes messy but always ambitious, always pushing the limits of what the show could do, and always trying to find new ways to tell stories about these people.  . . . But when I look back on this season of TV in the years to come,

When it’s off air, because of asshats like you.

I don’t think I’ll remember all of the struggles that got us to “Introduction To Finality” or even the moments in that episode that I didn’t like. I’ll remember the group walking down the hallway, the theme song starting to play under them. I’ll remember Shirley letting Jeff throw the case for his own good. I’ll remember Abed admitting Britta’s the best therapist he could have. I’ll remember Troy realizing that his potential and his friends don’t have to stand in each other’s way.

Wow, are you watching the same show I’m watching?  You know what these moments you mention have in common?  They’re not fucking funny!  You know what I’ll remember?  Jokes, gags, parodies. German Foozball players saying, “I wish there were a word to describe the pleasure I feel at your misfortune.”  You know, comedy. 

And I’ll remember Leonard reviewing Let’s Potato Chips (as well as his tall, muscular, African-American roommate).

See, that’s funny.

Most of all, though, I’ll remember the idea that we all have a choice, that we can all put off our own destinies or embrace them.

Holy shit, this just achieved a whole new level of depth.

We don’t have to put off growing up to be with our friends, just as we don’t have to give up being with our friends to grow up.

Oh, snap—you saw what he just did there, didn’t you?  Switched around the sentence order!  Man, he’s a rhetorical God—it’s like Marx, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire.” Like he says there, history repeats itself twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”  That’s pretty much a description of my cycle of reactions to reading this write-up. 

There’s much more to life than just the same stuff we’ve always known,

What, Todd, don’t tell me that!  You mean I can continue to learn?  To know new things!  No, no!  You’ve just overturned my whole worldview!  I thought once we reached the age of twenty it was just “the same stuff we’ve always known.”  But now VanDerWerff, the new Socrates, has shown me the light!  And what a master of writing—“the same stuff.”  Hats off, Todd, hats off.

and when we finally reach the point where we’re ready to head off into our own unknowns,

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.  In addition, there are ‘own unknowns’—these are bullshit, Todd.  Stop mentioning them.”

                                                                                                -Donald Rumsfeld

we’ll carry bits and pieces of each other with us all the while.

I don’t know about you, but I do not approve of cannibalism and dismemberment. I’m kind of a Protestant when it comes to relics. I do not carry around my first grade teacher’s thumb, no matter how much of an influence she may have been on me.  Or perhaps you mean it like how Tracy Jordan meant it on a recent episode of 30 Rock: “I have someone inside me too.  It’s a bath toy of a scuba diver.”

Now that’s a joke, kids!

The title of Community has always been a description, yes, of the place where these people met and the kind of world they built for themselves. But it’s also always been a promise, a hope that someday, we’ll all find people who make us feel at home and become parts of a larger, warmer whole.

Van Der Werff’s last lesson to his followers: we can all get into “a larger, warmer whole.”  A larger, warmer whole.  Todd, Todd, this is supposed to be a family friendly website.  You really shouldn’t bring up your proclivities, no matter how incoherent you become when confronted with “gooeyness.”  Though a journey in search of a “larger, warmer whole” would make for interesting viewing.

And tut, tut Todd.  You’re married.  You should be at home with your wife, not out searching for larger warmer wholes.

Oh, “whole.”  You rogue you, silent “w.” My bad.  But what exactly would a larger, warmer whole look like?  I imagine a huge, circular round of cheese, approaching the consistency of Velveeta.  Mmmm. Gooey enough for you? And now, where Dan Harmon’s brain used to be, it gets to sit on top of a suit as the driving force behind Community. What a final image to leave us with, Todd. 

The End of Comedy

It might be a while till I get to the three-part VanDerWerff opus on the season finale, so here's something in the mean time. This one’s old, but it’s worth wasting your time on.  An AV Club debate about the quality of Community.  On one side, Steven Hyden.  On the other, our old friend Todd VanDerWerff.  A veritable Lincoln and Douglas.   You’re up, Steve.

“Remedial Chaos Theory” is a unique, undeniably well-conceived 22-or-so minutes of television. But to what end?

The End of Comedy: A Novel, by Steven Hyden.  “The End of Comedy”: also a terrible article, as noted above, by Neil Genzlinger.  It’s all related, man!

I’m really glad that I’ve been exposed to the Hyden school of criticism.  It’s really opened my mind, forced me to think in new ways.  I’m almost ready to try my hand at it.  Let’s see how this goes:  Citizen Kane is a unique, groundbreaking 119 minutes of film.  But to what end?  Does it cure cancer? No.  Did it help me get dates in college? No—girls seemed less than impressed by my knowledge of classic film.  Will it bring about a new era of world peace and prosperity, when Christians, Jews, and Muslims will work together for the common good?   

Probably not.  Well fuck it, then.

Good God, won’t Dan Harmon think of the future?  Why isn’t he out there trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with his episodes of Community? 

So we could see, once again, that Jeff Winger is a jerk whose toxic presence is poisoning his supposed friends? Or that Harmon and his writing staff, once again, have proved themselves to be very clever?

God, Harmon.  Won’t you just stop proving yourself so clever with your funny jokes and “unique, undeniably well-conceived” episodes of television.   Your show is so hilarious it just makes all the rest of us feel bad. 

This gets to the heart of what bugs about this show:

[Sic]

Is Community about its characters, or its brilliant (yet empty) self-reflexive mastery of whatever storytelling form it touches? If it’s the latter, and I suspect it is, am I really getting anything meaningful out of watching Community? Or is it just patting me on the back for recognizing the stealthily employed references and skewered conventions?

Again, EVERY show I see on TV is about the “brilliant . . . self-reflexive mastery of whatever storytelling form it touches.”  I am SO sick of that.  But characters?  That I never get.  I mean, when was the last time you watched a show that had characters?  What TV channel was it—TNT?—whose slogan was “Character wanted”?  That’s what we’re missing in America today.  Forget the underfunding of our schools, this is the real problem: too few shows with characters on network television. 

But in the realm of Community, this is part of the safe, predictable, and hermetically sealed world that the show has created. Clearly this is what people love about the show—that it has created its own universe—but for me, Community is an airless terrain where nothing is allowed to grow, deepen, or evolve. Even really good episodes have the emotional payoff of a Funny Or Die sketch.

Yeah, it is disturbing how Community has created its own universe.  That’s something no other comedies ever do.  There actually is a Pawnee, Indiana.  If I wanted, I could get a New York apartment as big as the one on Friends for just as little money.  And I’m sure if I ever get stranded on an island with someone named Gilligan, I’ll be able to build myself a car, entertain visitors from the mainland, but somehow not manage to build a raft to escape. 

And I don’t know about you, but I am sobbing at each and every Funny or Die sketch.  It’s like Beaches in here. 

Oh, phheff.  VanDerWerff is done.  Now we can see what Steven Hyden has to say.  Wait, what?  You’re telling me that that wasn’t VanDerWerff?  But it sounds just like him!  Didn’t he recently just ask, “It’s funny, but for what?”  Didn’t he not like the Law and Order episode because it cared more about form than characters?  Doesn’t he want characters to “grow, deepen, or evolve”? Doesn’t he just love those “emotional payoffs,” more even than, you know, comedy?  You sure this isn’t you, Todd?  Is this really a debate, or a Vanderwerffian psychodrama?

Let’s see what the real Todd has to say in defending the show.

And maybe that’s true for some portion of the fandom, but the portion I’m aware of (the sizable portion that hangs out here) posts lengthy essays every week about how the characters are growing and evolving, dissects the interplay between them, and adds to the sizable amount of information we already know about each of the seven study-group members with the new little bits dropped in each episode.

Now I get the VanDerWerffian ideal: it’s not just a “formula” for comedy.  It’s fan fiction!  A show is just an excuse for us to write about the lives these people—oh, I mean characters—live outside of the “hermetic” world of the show.   You know what, forget about the show.  I’m sure Todd would be happier just making up stories about his “friends,” without having to deal with anything as thorny as laughter. 

The central problem with Community for a lot of people is always going to be that it’s a lot of work for the show to be both intellectually and emotionally satisfying. You have to travel a lot further to find these characters at all loveable (or, better, empathetic) than you do with a show like Parks And Rec.

Loveable characters.  Those I’d want to have a beer with, to bro out with.  Characters I can call to help me move. That’s what I’m craving out of television.  Not funny characters. 

You know what character I like on a sitcom: George Costanza.  He is a miserable sack of shit.  Do I love him?  No.  Do I identify with him?  Yes.  Is it because I too am a miserable sack of shit?  Perhaps.  Or maybe it’s because we don’t have to like a character to be able to identify with aspects of him/her.  You don’t have to love a character to find him/her interesting.  You don’t even have to empathize.  Have you never read or watched anything?

I also like the comparison to Parks and Rec. I don’t want to say anything bad about Parks and Rec, which is smart and well-written, and obviously Ken Tremendous is a big influence on this blog.  But let’s just say that it fits the ideal of AV Club criticism perfectly.  Compared to Community, it is more interested in loveable characters and their growth and a little less interested in laughs.  That’s fine.  Not all shows need to be the same.  But don’t judge Community by the same criteria as you would Parks and Rec.

Let’s see what Steven Hyden has to say about this comparison.  

I’m not just talking about its low ratings; Parks And Recreation doesn’t have lots of viewers, but that seems flukier than it is for Community, which is clearly geared to a very particular sensibility.

Ah, the illogic gymnastics.  Community is too niche and too funny, so it doesn’t have the broad-based appeal of Parks and Rec.  Only problem: THEY GET THE SAME FUCKING RATINGS.  Oh, but apparently that’s just a “fluke.”  Perhaps.  But if so, IT”S A THREE-YEAR FLUKE.  The other day I forgot to pay my rent for three years, but IT’S JUST A FLUKE! The landlord was so understanding. Also, I haven’t showered in three years, but I wouldn’t call myself dirty, exactly, it was just that things got in the way, and then my water was out, and I started to find the smell kinda comforting, and anyway, it was JUST A FLUKE.  How ‘bout this, Steve?  How about maybe there’s not some normative standard of what an appealing comedy is?  How about both shows are just different?

But wait, I’m still confused.  Where’s the debate?  Todd likes it, Steve doesn’t, but they agree perfectly on using the same bullshit criteria of whether people are loveable or grow or blah blah blah when is Community on so that I can get back to laughing?  Todd, if you’re using this criteria to judge Community you’re just going to realize that you don’t like it and then you’re going to lose this debate you’re having with yourself. 

You’re also engaging in a little takedown of your own—see, we have a lot in common!  You say you don’t like this critique of Community, by Larry Fitzmaurice, which basically makes the same argument as “Steven Hyden” in a slightly more incoherent and over-the-top way.  Well, let’s take a look at what’s so irritating to Todd. 

Fitzmaurice basically outlines all the ways in which the characters on Community are terrible people—no arguments here!  Then:

In real life, the desire to have friends doesn't excuse decaying, bigoted excuses for human beings. Yes, this is television. It's unreasonable to expect a portrayal of real life from a show that considers zombie outbreaks and runaway monkeys a part of its balanced breakfast.

And yet you continue. 

Still, for a show as episodically self-contained as Community, watching these characters step on the same rake over and again has devolved into pure frustration. In "Comparative Ecology" the beloved study group were branded the "Mean Clique." But, more accurately, it exposed their toxic, mob-mentality inertia.

They’re bad people.  Funny funny bad people.

Community's writers are unconcerned with their characters attaining some sort of personal growth . . .Also, remember that Community is not the first critically adored sitcom with arguably unlikable characters at its center—Seinfeld, Titus, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Arrested Development come to mind.

Yes, terrible shows all.  Clearly unlikeable characters don’t correlate with great comedy. 

But it's safe to say that Community's most mouth-foaming, sweater-fondling disciples aren't looking for much character growth beyond, "Hey, did that 'Pop! Pop!' guy show up?"

Hey, bud.  You’re right!  I don’t fucking care about “character growth.”  Guilty as charged.  And I do like to fondle my own sweater sometimes—it’s cold out here in Dubuque!  As for that mouth-foaming, the doctor says that the rabies shots should help, at least in a few weeks.

But back to Todd.  Ok, Todd, you don’t like this argument.  It drives you crazy.  But basically, this hack has more substance and consistency than you, even if he is a known idiot.  Although he doesn’t state this, basically he doesn’t like the show because he doesn’t like shows with unlikeable characters.  Fine—I can respect that opinion.  It means he probably also doesn’t like funny shows, but ok, maybe funny’s not for him.  Just remind me to avoid him at a cocktail party.   But Todd?  You, my friend, are disingenuous.  Cause aren’t you really saying the same thing as this guy you pretend to hate when you criticize the show?  You pretend that Community’s writers are concerned “with their characters attaining some sort of personal growth,” when really, as this douche recognizes, they’re fundamentally not (or at least shouldn’t be, since that’s when the show is at its best).  Your “criticism” starts from exactly the same premise as his—that what we need from a sitcom is “personal growth.”  But if so, then Community is not the show for you.  In fact, comedies are not really for you.  You know, I’ve come to realize why you liked last week’s clip show episode so much.  It started out as your ideal for a comedy—a group therapy session!  All the characters can come together and they can learn something!  Only, something funny happened in the midst of that group therapy session—aside from the intrusion of something called comedy, which I know you’re against.  The writers sent out a big fuck you to Herr VanDerWerff and all those others who want these characters to mature.  Cause guess what?  They didn’t grow or change.  They wanted to be crazy; they wanted to stay as fucked up as they always were.  Because, again, that’s what makes for comedy. 

Hard Hitting Cultural Analysis

You thought this was all about VanDerWerff?  Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to star television critic Neil Genzlinger, for that most illustrious of papers, the New York Times.

Sorry to bring this up on a weekend devoted to celebrating mothers, but you know all the things that have been wrong with young people for the past half-century? Mom’s fault.

I’ve reached this conclusion after an exhaustive study of an inadvertent historical record that has been left to us: the decades’ worth of sitcom mothers who have been caught on tape, as it were, giving dubious advice to children present and past.

I realize that the tone of this seems rather tongue-in-cheek.  What comic point will Mr. Genzlinger be making?  What far-reaching cultural analysis will that lead to in this 1200 word (!) edition of the “Critics Notebook”? 

At the start of this research, which consisted of watching whatever shows happened to be on TVLand-like channels in recent weeks or are in my DVD collection, I expected that modern-day mothers would be revealed to be shockingly lax, and they were. What I didn’t expect was to learn that their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers, were similarly irresponsible. And just as scientists have traced human lineage back to a mitochondrial Eve, the decline of motherhood can be traced to a single sitcom moment and a single sitcom matriarch. A momochondrial Margaret.

That’s a really terrible pun. 

But let’s begin in the present. We all know instinctively that, though there are probably exceptions, in general kids today are immoral, nihilistic dunderheads.

Since this is written in such a breezy tone, if I object it’s only because I’m not in on the joke.  But what if there’s no joke to be in on?  I just blew your mind, didn’t I?

If American children are being outdone by young scholars in other countries, you need look no further than Mom to know why. Specifically, you need look no further than a recent episode of the ABC sitcom “Last Man Standing.”

Last Man Standing—a paragon of progressive gender values, by the way. 

Vanessa Baxter (Nancy Travis), the mother in the family, is playing Scrabble with two of her daughters when one of them tries to play T-H-A-N-G. “That’s not a word,” Vanessa says. The child who made the play stands by her “thang,” and the other child invites Vanessa to go look it up.

“Where’s the dictionary?” Vanessa asks.

“Upstairs,” she is told. To which this lax mom responds, “Fine; it’s a word.”

Man, I’ve really got to start watching Last Man Standing.  That’s gold!

Mothers, it seems, can’t even be bothered to climb a flight of stairs in the interest of instilling good grammar in their offspring. No wonder American children are being outperformed academically all over the globe.

Again, this is obviously tongue-in-cheek.  But what the hell’s the point?  It’s not funny, so presumably it has a point, right?  Something about gender roles?  Anything?  Neil?  Neil?  Hello?  Anyone there?

(I’m mercifully cutting out another couple of examples—believe me, you’re happier for it).

…Look at “Beaver and Chuey,” a 1958 episode of “Leave It to Beaver.” Eddie Haskell has played a trick on the Beaver, and the Beav’s older brother is rushing out the door to exact revenge.

“Wally,” says June, “where are you going?”

He replies, “I’m going to go over and slug Eddie.”

To which this seminal, peerless mother says: “Wally! That’s no way to talk. This is Sunday.”

I shouldn’t have to point out that you probably shouldn’t call a mother “seminal.”  Look it up (I’ll wait.) Semin—got it? Just saying.

Wally grasps the moral relativism of the coming age instantly. He considers his mother’s input, then tells her, “Oh, yeah; I’ll wait till tomorrow and slug him in the cafeteria.”

By the way, that Eddie Haskell really had it coming.  What a smartass!

For young people in the ensuing decades, there would be no right or wrong, only arbitrary, fickle rules, which would soon be easily discarded, leading to unkempt hair, draft dodging, pot smoking and the drift and disorder that have been with us ever since.

So this is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of ascribing large-scale social changes to cultural productions?  Is it?  Because this is a really fucking stupid point. Boy, I wish the Times would just go back to their sweet spot of writing feature articles introducing us to cultural phenomena that everyone has been aware of for years. 

But we can’t really blame June Cleaver for all this. Turns out she was merely expanding on the example of momochondrial Margaret:

I’m really glad you found a way to work that pun in twice.

Margaret Anderson (Jane Wyatt), a foundational television matriarch first seen four years earlier, when “Father Knows Best” had its premiere.

I believe I have found the moment when mothers began sliding down the long, slippery slope. It’s subtle; barely noticeable, really. It comes in Season 1, in an episode titled “Live My Own Life.”

 “I’m not so sure he’s handling it right,” she tells her older daughter, Betty. “Oh, it’s not that I don’t think your father has wonderful ideas. It’s just that, well, they don’t work.”

This was the moment that civilization began to fall apart. A mother has told her child that Father, the universal authority figure who for centuries has kept society from devolving into chaos, is an incompetent boob, and she has done so on a show named “Father Knows Best.” There can be no stability, no constancy after this. Margaret has effectively neutered the only thing standing between us and social and political anarchy, the Omniscient Patriarch. All of the bad TV mothering that followed was inevitable.

Is this comedy?  It’s not funny.  Is this cultural critique?  It doesn’t say anything.  Is this satire?  I wish, because it kind of sounds like a parody of a David Brooks column, but if so it sure as hell doesn’t lead anywhere. 

Perhaps you’re thinking that this is a lot to hang on a few random bits of dialogue from fictional TV series, and that a half-dozen examples of good mothering could be found in the very same shows.

Whaddya know.

Maybe. But here’s the thing: I too am a product of one of these postmodern mothers.

A postmodern mother. Does she have like, a guitar for an arm, and a Grecian column for her left leg? No, that sounds like a modern mother.  Maybe she just “performs” the idea of “modern motherhood” while actually being a sixteen-year-old German Shepard? Or does she run her own countercultural mail system?  She’d better, because if she just wore bell bottoms and went out of the house without a bra, I’m going to punch you in the face. 

Where in the world would I have acquired the discipline and academic rigor to construct a well-researched, fully realized argument? Not from watching television, that’s for sure.

Here’s the moment when you’re going to bring it all together.  Here’s the moment when this sorry excuse for humor is going to justify its privileged place on the front page of the Weekend section.  You’re going to tie these ideas in with critiques of the new HBO show Girls, show the ridiculous burden that television representations of women are forced to carry?  No?  That’s it?  Really, you’re done? Wait let me see the next line.  

Not from watching television, that’s for sure.

Oh my god that is really how you just ended this piece. Neil, you write for the Times.  (Admittedly, writing television criticism for the Times does not require much in the brains department: see Stanley, Alessandra).  But I might expect a writer for the Times to have at least a half-sense of the meaning of the word “postmodern.”  Perhaps that’s asking too much.  Perhaps I would expect a writer for the Gray Lady, when he was sitting down to write a 1200 word column, to have a point in mind.  Just acknowledging at the end of the piece that you have no ideas and no methodology does not make your piece any less of a waste of time.  Why don’t you just say, my editor gave me an assignment to write about Mother’s Day, and I kind of whiffed.  It happens—but then you don’t go ahead and publish it.  Oh, wait.  I forgot: you’re Neil Genzlinger.  You published an article about The End of Comedy that I’m still reeling from.  This isn’t an exception.  This is the rule. 

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. 

Todd VanDerWerff Contains Multitudes

Does he contradict himself?  Yes.  Yes he does. 

I like a lot of the individual elements in tonight’s episode of Community, but I’m not sure it works all that well as a whole. 

Fine, it seemed like a strong episode, but certainly not as good as the Law and Order one last week that you found so unsatisfying.  But prepare yourself for a review in which Community can be judged by the standards of Lost, and mayhem is not the most fundamental essence of comedy.

I’m still not a fan of the “Chang takes over the campus” storyline, and too much time is spent on that and its form of broad comedy. 

“Broad comedy”: as opposed to, say, doing a full-on parody of Law and Order.  That whole premise: kind of broad as well.  This isn’t a light and witty Noel Coward drawing room comedy.

Broad humor can work in this show, but I’m never going to be someone who thinks the best solution for comedy is a crazy riot setpiece that goes on and on and features kids breaking out the pepper spray. 

Oh yes, me neither. I’m never going to be the kind of person who thinks aimless craziness is going to be a good idea, because comedy needs “solutions.” Comedy needs to be about order. It needs to be about decorum, about falling in line. We wouldn’t want—what’s the word? Oh yeah, mayhem. We wouldn’t want mayhem in comedies! Not like, “a crazy riot setpiece” over a blown up meth lab and unrestrained rage against authorities! We wouldn’t want bland and forgettable characters whose only job is to produce mayhem like Falstaff or the fucking Marx brothers. 

Yes, yes, we need to keep our humor from getting too “broad,” gotta make sure all its elements stay in their proper place so it can all multiply into a mathematical “solution.”

In theory, I like the idea that this episode tests the group’s reactions to Greendale first dicking them over, then tossing them out. Greendale is the heart of the show, a place that both forgives and rejects, and the stuff with the characters getting tossed out is an intriguing direction for the show to go.

Again, the Vanderwerff school of comedy: broad humor (still waiting on your definition for that, Todd), crazy setpieces, these are bad (despite these being exactly what characterize Community as a whole).  Good: “testing reactions,” “intriguing directions.”  Community: not a comedy, but a science experiment. 

Also. Greendale is not the “heart” of anything. It doesn’t “forgive” or “reject.” Are you trying to get a Varsity letter there or something? Trying to be a booster? Greendale is just a setting, a situation. A situation for comedy. Let’s see how can I make that shorter for clarity.  Uationedy. Hmm.  Seems a bit hard to pronounce.  Comsit. No, sounds like something from 1984.  What else?  Sitcom! Got it, by jove!

But if we’re being honest, the last act of this episode just proceeds too rapidly, especially when compared with the Starburns memorial that makes up the entirety of the second act, or the sequence cutting between the study room and the Dean’s office that makes up the first.  . . . It’s very, very fast, and I’m not sure a single one of the emotional payoffs lands because the show is so anxious to get on to whatever’s next. Presumably it’s setup for something, but what?

So now you’re so quick to criticize the “emotional payoffs” that you seemed to be craving last week?  What gives, Todd?  Not up to your level of pathos?—tears weren’t welling up?

But let’s step back for a second.  Let’s imagine that we hadn’t read any of your previous recaps, that we didn’t know the Vanderwerff worldview (and how much happier we would then be!).  What are you actually arguing for here?  Seems like you’re saying that the emotional aspects of this show don’t necessarily work.  Ok—let’s see where this goes.

It is, in a way, the equivalent of a serialized drama’s “moving the pieces around on the board” episode. Episodes like this place a lot of weight on whatever comes next, because if the conclusion to all of that piece-moving is suitably moving or devastating, it will make everything that came before seem better in retrospect. (The example I always like to use is Lost’s “Follow The Leader,” which is a messy episode of television, but it leads into the absolute insanity of the fifth season finale, so all is forgiven.  . . ..) I haven’t been entirely sure about Community’s experiments in serialization this season, but I’ve been playing wait-and-see. This is the first episode that makes me think such elements were probably did more harm than they were worth, but, of course, if the final four episodes are any good, they’ll make all of these concerns moot.

“Element,” “Experiments, “Solution”: I would really like to hear your scientific method of comedy reviews, Todd.  God knows it would be more logical than whatever the hell’s going on here. 

And again, Todd, you go with Lost as a comparison point.  As we all know, Lost IS A FUCKING DRAMA.  About. . . who the hell knows.  Also, you like the “insanity” of the last episode of Lost but you don’t like the “crazy riot setpiece” of Community.

Serialization in comedies is a hard thing to pin down. Since television comedies need plot so little, serialization—which is very, very dependent on plot—has been the sort of thing they haven’t tried much of. For the most part, TV comedy serialization is done via very loose character and story arcs—Sam and Diane start dating; Dunder Mifflin is having financial troubles; Jerry and George are doing a TV pilot. There’s nothing there as ambitious as anything you might see on a serialized drama. Even the most serialized of them—that Seinfeld plot—is something that was more an overriding concern for the season than it was an ongoing arc. It dropped in every few episodes, and when it wasn’t present, nobody seemed to care very much about it.

True.  Comedies tend to be stand-alone episodes.  Wait—my cognitive dissonance detectors are beginning to buzz!

I find it fascinating that both Community and Parks & Recreation have launched intricate, season-long storylines this season, and that those storylines have created situations where the shows struggle under their weight, even as they allow for all manner of forgiveness from fans. For instance: Last week’s episode featured several scenes where Troy seemed irritated with Abed taking the lead in the Law & Order scenario they were playing out. Finally, the show was dealing with the repercussions of the pillow fort episodes! Or was it? Did anybody intend for us to read things that way, or were we just reading into it because we could? Serialization is kind of a crutch in that way, because it allows TV writers to hand-wave away stuff we might otherwise wonder about.

So you now don’t particularly like the emotional aspects of this show, and don’t like its experiments with serialization.  Wow, we agree, sort of, which I never thought was possible after last week (but then, I never thought that the VanDerWerff method would be so inconsistent—er, incoherent). I too am not a big fan of serialization in comedy, but two points:

one, everything you say above is bullshit.  Actually that’s my only point. My math skills begin to fade when I have to wade through your tortured logic. 

Why is it bullshit?—you go on and on about how Community is moving in a serialized direction, but is that even true?  A couple of to be continued style episodes, a few sustained conflicts between characters (which, as you say, are then just dropped), and that’s about it.  What I’m saying Todd, is that the entire premise of your argument (did I just call it an argument?—that’s going much too far) is specious.

And let’s not get started on that last sentence about serialization as a crutch, which aside from the unfortunate crutch-hand-wave mixed metaphor, is just blatantly false.  Serialization doesn’t wave stuff away, it connects episodes together.  Stand alone episodes, by contrast, do exactly what you claim serialization does.  On Seinfeld for the most part each episode exists in a hermetic world of its own; if something happens in one episode, there are no consequences for it in the next.  I’m not saying that only using stand alone episodes is necessarily the ideal situation—Arrested Development is able to sustain interconnected storylines across episodes without sacrificing comedy—I’m just saying that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I don’t want to sound too down on the episode.

Again, the only thing that you sound is incoherent.

There’s plenty of good stuff in the non-Chang scenes, though the group’s sheer anger over having to attend summer school on a technicality felt a little forced. The first act was some strong stuff, with Britta’s attempts to help the group cope mostly going very awry (in amusing fashion) and the Dean’s realization that he was going to have to break more bad news to “Jeff and the group” being one of my  favorite gags of the episode. I also liked Garrett singing “Ave Maria” and the content of the final scene in Troy and Abed’s apartment, even if the story placement of it was a little wacky. And it’s hard to go wrong with a Starburns death montage using entirely greenscreen footage.

Good stuff.  Funny stuff.

But even here, I find myself wondering just what we’re trying to get at.

Again, “getting at” something is really not the point of a comedy.

Britta’s been shown to be at least semi-competent in several earlier episodes, so why is she suddenly the worst grief counselor ever? What’s up with Jeff’s emotional overwroughtness this season? You can say that both of these things are isolated gags that are there to drive comedy, and I’d mostly agree with that.

Great—true, you don’t want the gags to contradict the characters that have been created on the show (as even Seinfeld is occasionally guilty of), but, as this quite sophisticated “you” that you set up as a straw man argues most persuasively, for the most part gags are just “there to drive comedy.”  Because the genre of Community is, again, a comedy. 

It’s funny to watch Britta screw things up, and it’s funny to see the normally cynical Jeff realize how much he cares about something—even if he cares about it in the sense of not wanting to have to do it.

Uh oh, he just called Community funny.  Must be preparing to shit all over it.

But you can’t introduce these one-scene/one-episode ideas, but also suggest the whole season is building toward something. That makes it seem more suspect when Britta was bumbling but basically competent in previous episodes, but is now getting everyone to envision puppies on fire. It’s funny, but for what?

The classic encapsulation of the VanDerWerff aesthetic.  “It’s funny, but for what?”  For world peace, presumably.  For a better tomorrow.  The Vanderwerff way: utilitarian humor.  Soon we’ll all be asking, what’s the cash-value of that joke? 

But at the same time, I found myself wanting more space, wanting everything to feel less cluttered. I opened this piece up by talking about death, and I think it’s telling that in an episode in which a somewhat major recurring character dies, his death is almost incidental. That’s a really funny idea if handled properly, but it gets buried under a bunch of plot mechanics. There’s a reason that TV comedies so rarely do heavily plotted stuff, and that’s because every second you spend laying out the plot is a second you spend not telling jokes. Comedy arises from spontaneity, and having a rock-solid plan is the enemy of that. I wanted more time to breathe. I wanted more time to not mourn Starburns.

So let’s get this straight.  Your criticisms of this episode: too much plot, too much serialization, too many unearned emotional moments. I seem to remember someone who liked serialized elements in comedy series, or at least what they provided for.  I seem to remember somehow who was all about emotional payoffs, and what they taught us about the characters.  Oh, right.  His first name started with T, and his last name rhymed with Ramberverff.

It’s actually kind of sad, Todd.  Underneath it all, you know what works and what doesn’t in Community.  You know, as you say, that “every second you spend laying out the plot is a second you spend not telling jokes.”  This despite the fact that you were criticizing last week’s episode for being too funny and this week’s for being funny for nebulous ends.  (I can’t believe that that’s actually what you’re arguing, but hey, it’s there, you wrote it).   You know that the big moments of emotions, all of Jeff’s speeches, can be warm and cheering at times, they can even serve a purpose, but that basically they’re a little pat, a whole lot repetitive, and at heart just a distraction from the comedy.  You know this, but you seem unwilling to acknowledge it. 

Well I’m here to tell you, Todd, that it’s not your fault.  Or only partly your fault.  It’s the fault of the discourse you propagate, which distracts the writers and creates damaging audience expectations. Like Frankenstein’s Monster, it’s returned to revenge itself upon its creator.   You can’t demand from a comedy that its highest goal be to teach us something new about the characters each week, and then criticize it for being too serialized.  It’s only possible to do that “character work” as you so precisely put it in last week’s writeup, in a serial format.  What’s the best example of a stand alone show? Amusingly, it’s Law and Order.  There is no character development, ever.  Lennie Briscoe may have talked about his ex-wife a grand total of twice.  As far as we know Sam Waterston’s character was a eunuch.  So if you want character development, whatever that means in the context of a comedy, you have to like serialization.  Don’t call the show out for the very aspects that your brand of criticism has helped to create.  This is why I’m criticizing you, Todd.  You’re style of reviewing is poisonous, because it demands from comedies the very qualities which, against your will, you’ve diagnosed above as being dangerous to comedy.  Remember last week when you talked about the burdens of the sitcom?  That burden, when it comes to Community, is you.