NBC’s Community returned from a midseason hiatus last night, which, as the show itself points out, pretty much means cancellation. Twitter was more overjoyed than Stevie Wonder, and the world was prevented from ending.
I’m sorry. I can’t substantiate that sentence. I stayed off Twitter and just watched the damn show, because as much as I really love Community, I really hate the internet love for Community.
It’s a hilarious, self-aware, hyper-meta show that makes jokes about itself, its genealogy, pop culture, and current events. It succeeds in being topical while being universal and not too heavy. If it does get too heavy, some character quickly swoops in to diffuse the situation and make everyone laugh or at least smile again. You care about all the characters. That said, it is flawed. It’s too weird for some people, too self-referential, and some would argue that its heavy reliance on (affectionate) genre parody is laziness, not originality. I’m not going to try to make a case for one side of the other—people who dislike it have an honest point. Nor am I really going to defend it.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Last night’s episode was about feminism, but not in too broad a sense. Shirley is remarrying her ex-husband Andre, but she and Pierce also want to go into business together (she has knowledge and goals, Pierce has money). The main subplot is Troy and Abed trying to “purge all the weirdness from our systems”—Community’s standard meta joke. The show is super weird, has really low ratings, and is on the verge of being cancelled. So Troy and Abed try to be “normal” in order to be more liked.
Last night’s episode illustrated exactly how finely Community straddles the line. Every scene started with me sighing, then at the last second, making me laugh or feel sympathy. Pierce is clunky and awkward, a Roger Sterling-esque princeling without the subtlety. But as soon as I was wishing the group really had banished him, we learn that his father’s company has fired him. His namesake company doesn’t want anything to do with him, and they only waited so long to axe him because they needed his father to die. Moments after wishing he didn’t exist, I was feeling sorry for him.
Britta and Jeff’s drunken, semi-sexual tension-y fight at the wedding rehearsal was another instance of this. They’re up at the altar, shouting marital clichés at each other. Shirley and Andre come in to talk them down, end up having a mini-fight, and then getting married. It’s a nice moment. Abed and Troy throw in some solid comedy, particularly Abed's tone-deaf complimenting of the shrimp cocktail that just pisses Andre off more. I don’t know if it’s because Danny Pudi looks like alien Don Draper, but it’s almost impossible not to laugh at everything he does.
After the weak resolution, the show morphs into a dance number and the monkey shows up. Then Troy and Abed start acting weird again. Community is back! Six seasons and a movie! I’m confident they can shake off the rust in the next episode, but the question remains: is Community aware that it has flaws? Is the post-modern hyper-meta nature of the show an easy way of editing these flaws, i.e., winking and nodding instead of addressing lazy writing? Probably both.
Which brings me to my larger point: Community can’t continue much longer. They lampooned BBC TV for ending all of its shows early, but American shows have a bad habit of staying too long. Sorry, internet, but it has to be cancelled soon. First of all, community college typically only lasts two years. They’re on year three. You can cheat your way through four seasons because what Community calls “real college” goes four years. The moment season five starts, Community jumps the shark.
A friend and I were talking once about how The Office was so hilarious because it was a comedy focused on some grim realities of the business world. After Michael Scott opened his own paper company in a basement, nothing about the show made sense anymore. That just couldn’t happen, anywhere, and therefore, it wasn’t funny. A few minutes later, I lamented the fate of Arrested Development. My friend agreed that while AD’s cancellation was unjust, but then he said, “If it was still on, we’d be saying the same things about it as we are about The Office.” So it seems to be either 1) overstay your welcome or 2) unjustly get cancelled early. Hopefully Community can use their limitless knowledge of television to realize the path they’re on and not do either.
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