TV #28 of 2021:

Community, season 5

This is a year for the sitcom that’s clearly in transition, with the return of showrunner/creator Dan Harmon after a season off, the departure of two original cast members, and a few necessary tweaks to the general premise. The solution to the question of how one still tells a story about community college beyond graduation is to bring one character back as a teacher (a strong writing choice), make the rest re-enroll as students (a weaker one), and reconfigure the erstwhile study group into the Save Greendale Committee (somewhere in between, and definitely metatextual given the constant threat of cancellation hanging over this series).

We already have a wider focus than the classroom with Jonathan Banks joining as a disgruntled professor and John Oliver reprising his similar old role from the first two years, and although neither of them ultimately reappears for the show’s final stretch on Yahoo! Screen, for now they change up the usual meeting rhythms nicely. I almost wish the committee could have been composed entirely of faculty and alumni, since there’s not a lot of payoff to the flimsy idea of immediately restarting one’s post-secondary education, but as a bridge from the title’s roots to what it would need to become going forward, this all just about works. While it falters a little in the long view due to the network swap remixing things yet again, in a universe where this was followed by a few more shakes at NBC, I think Community’s later success would largely have season 5 to thank.

Unfortunately, that service to a potential future hinders the immediate narrative, and overall, this run is simply trying to do too much in too tight a space. It’s a notable improvement over the previous installment — which never quite earned the meanspirited “gas leak” comments that Harmon writes in here, but did struggle to consistently channel his vision into productive new outlets — yet is not as brilliant as the early stuff either. I’d hesitate to label any of the 13 episodes herein as all-time classics, and even the typically lovely high-concept experimentation in format and genre-hopping seems to repeat a lot of the program’s proven tricks, rather than attempt anything truly distinctive. It remains a fun comedy with a lot of built-in viewer fondness at this point, but it’s hardly as searingly exciting to watch as it once was.

★★★☆☆

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TV #26 of 2021:

Community, season 4

I’d probably agree with the popular consensus that this is the weakest stretch of Community, but it’s honestly not that big a step down from the chaotic year before. Fans were reasonably upset that showrunner / creator Dan Harmon had been fired — not knowing then how abusive he was on set — and it’s true that this season doesn’t have many of those flashes of brilliance that often elevate his work. Nevertheless, I don’t know if the network needed to bring him back as they did afterwards rather than give the replacement team longer to perfect their own spin on the material. (And his later retcon that there was a gas leak on campus during these events is plain petty and cruel, although it’s almost a fair return for Abed’s deeply unearned line about making paintball cool again here.)

This run has its share of issues, but there’s also potential to stake out new ground, and in rewatching with some distance, I think a residual fondness for the study group helps paper over most of the flaws. The biggest ideas are the inherited Troy/Britta relationship and the Chang amnesia plot, and while neither ultimately amounts to much, it’s not like any romance or that problematic antagonist has ever been this program’s strongest element. The fact they flop is more noticeable with less of anything else going on, but that hardly destroys the show’s legacy. It’s still a solid three-star title, reliably delivering laughs and quirky scenarios without necessarily evidencing any grander ambitions or deeper insights. Heck, this should have been a poignant farewell moment for Pierce, whose actor Chevy Chase finally carried out his threat to quit, yet he’s missing half the time and his arc barely gets an afterthought of development at the very end of the finale.

So it’s not awful, but it really lacks follow-through, particularly in the sitcom’s trademark high-concept experiments. Under Harmon, the joke was never just that a community college was suddenly home to organized crime or a zombie outbreak or an animated holiday special or whatever; it was in how thoroughly the writers got inside those other genres and lovingly repurposed their familiar tropes. Season 4 by contrast veers closer to referential humor, as though it’s enough to simply turn the cast into Sesame Street style puppets for twenty minutes and not even try to filter that separate storytelling tradition via the distinctive Greendale weirdness.

With the length cut from 22 episodes to 13, this year flies by too quickly to make a firm impression for good or for ill, but the lingering sense is largely one of wasted possibilities and necessary ingredients present yet not quite clicking. I’m glad the series recovers and doesn’t ever get any worse, but this could have been significantly improved through a few rounds of rewrites and a clearer driving vision.

★★★☆☆

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