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COMMUNITY Season Four: A Shaky Start

It used to be hard to tell if Community was a particularly turbulent show, or if its voracious fans plus a rather public cast and crew combined to give the sense that it had a great deal of behind-the-scenes drama. That question resolved itself last summer, when the shocking firing of showrunner Dan Harmon, as well as other long-time creative forces, made it clear that, yes, Community was a mess.

While many fans and critics, adopting an auteur theory of television, were convinced that this was the end of Community, it actually made me slightly more curious about the fourth season. I enjoy seeing and analyzing a show in creative flux, and Community's always manifested a chaotic creative process. But I also noticed a notable step down from the brilliant second season, thanks largely to the third season's self-indulgence—Community had become a show about itself. A kick in the pants seemed warranted, although the steel-toed boots used for this particular kick may have been excessive. Still, many of the writers and all of the stellar cast remained, giving me some hope.

The Season Four premiere of Community, “History 101,”opened with an inspired concept: the show reimagined as a multi-camera sitcom, complete with laugh track. There were enough layers here to be worthy of the show in its prime. As a single-camera, formally daring sitcom, Community is theoretically in the vanguard of television comedy, fighting against the multi-cam, a format (probably unfairly) decried as stodgy, old-fashioned, or even outright bad. (A fake Twitter profile set up in the name of the new showrunners, David Guarascio and Moses Port, invited fans to be part of the “live studio audience”–a joke within a joke, perhaps?)

This season's premiere was also very much like the third season premiere, opening with a big happy musical number in the style of Glee (a show Community had mocked mercilessly), before the characters immediately dropped back down to earth. Finally, “History 101” made sense from a character perspective: of course Abed Nadir, resident pop culture obsessive, would find solace in an old-fashioned sitcom form labeled AbedTV. In short, the deliberately confrontational/mocking style, the formal experimentation, and the connection with the characters made it seem like it was exactly what Community should be.

The problem was that it didn't work.

AbedTV was just one part of the story among many—four and half, to be precise. That's a lot of storylines for a serialized hour-long drama, let alone a 20-minute sitcom. “Overstuffed” would be an understatement.

None of those storylines really worked, either. Pierce's throwaway joke was essentially nonexistent, which was fine, but Annie and Shirley seemed to be off in a storyline that went nowhere. The biggest problem was Britta. Even at Community's worst, like Season Three's wince-inducing “Advanced Gay,” Gillian Jacobs' defiant certainty in the face of being wrong about everything could salvage an episode. Yet in “History 101” Britta wasn't defiant, because she'd become attached to Troy in a relationship. She could mess up his tradition, but it turned into a gentle-hearted romp. A soft Britta is no Britta at all, and she's long been the best part of the show.

What was perhaps most frustrating about this turn of events is that Community has always explicitly rejected turning into a show about its characters' romantic relationships. Its first season was premised on hooking Jeff and Britta up, but episodes like “Modern Warfare” and “Contemporary American Poultry” indicated that it wanted to play around with stories apart from the romantic comedy. After a disastrous first season finale that was nothing but romantic entanglements, the second season occasionally used the actors' chemistry for comedy, but turned against romance as the show's driving force. In its mock clip show, “Paradigms of Human Memory,” Community attacked character romance directly, as Jeff dismissed his supposed will they/won't they with Annie by saying “it's called chemistry, I have it with everyone.” In that same episode, his secret affair with Britta was revealed—the show's initial premise was subverted to the point where it coming to fruition is a throwaway line.

This is not to say that the Troy and Britta romance came out of the blue. It was obviously slowly developing over the course of the third season, just as Jeff and Annie's will they/won't they hardly disappeared after it was mocked. Rather, it's that the show always deliberately steered clear of entangling its characters in such a way. Seeing its best character compromised by sweetness, it was easy to see why romance was treated with such skepticism.

The one storyline that came anywhere near working was the Dean's Hunger Games bit, largely thanks to Jim Rash. His emergence—or perhaps the acknowledgment of his emergence—as one of the show's most important characters was one of the best parts of Community's third season, and that continued in “History 101.” The scene where he and Jeff dance the tango should have been good enough to find a place in Community lore, and maybe it will eventually. But that storyline was squished by all the others, preventing it from being more than an amusing diversion.

It would have been easy, after that episode, to say that without Harmon, Community had lost its soul/moorings/quality, and that it was now “Community” or "Zombie Community" or "not canon" or the like. The thought certainly crossed my mind. But as I was watching “History 101,” I had a gut feeling of discomfort that reminded me of something else I'd recently watched. An hour or two later, I realized that it was the same feeling I got when I watched the season three episode “Regional Holiday Music,” or rather, “that Glee episode of Community.”

Both episodes gave me the feeling that what I was watching was simply wrong. That feeling of wrongness derive from the show's being mean. I know Community has a sort of cultivated “too cool for school” reputation, but when I've watched it and loved it, it's been because it joyously immerses itself in the history of pop culture. From action movies to Dungeons & Dragons to “everyone goes to a bar!” sitcom plots, Community wanted to be everything. But in “Regional Holiday Music,” it spent an entire half-hour attacking its more popular cohort, Glee. In “History 101,” Community focused on making fun of multi-cam sitcoms (a set that perhaps coincidentally includes another rival, The Big Bang Theory). A mean-spirited Community is an unpleasant Community.

If there was any hope for the fourth season of Community, it was going to manifest in its second episode, not its premiere. Season premieres of any show are often hit-or-mess, especially sitcoms. On the other hand, the second episode, “Paranormal Parentage,” had a very promising premise. First, it was a Halloween episode, which always works well for a show that loves having its characters play roles—the first-season Halloween episode, “Introduction To Statistics,” was its first great episode.

Second, “Paranormal Parentage” was penned by Megan Ganz, a writer who quickly came to prominence with four superb episodes (the bottle episode, the two documentary episodes, and the Law & Order episode) in the second and third seasons. In each of these, Ganz showed the darkest, weirdest parts of the characters while making them more, not less, sympathetic, while also twisting the form in stunning and hilarious fashion (a combination that reminds me of The X–Files' great Darin Morgan). Her continuing presence in the writers' room was a ray of hope for fans—although her recent defection to Modern Family means that next season, worries will start anew.

“Paranormal Parentage” was a massive improvement over “History 101.” While not quite in the top tier of Community episodes, it was continuously funny and structurally clever.

The costumes may have been the best part of “Paranormal Parentage,” possibly the best of any of Community's Halloween episodes. You can earn a lot of good will by putting Shirley in a Princess Leia outfit and Annie in a Ringu costume. Every time they appeared on-screen, I got a slight thrill of novelty. But more importantly, Britta in her canned ham costume went a huge way toward salvaging her character after the disastrous premiere. Gillian Jacobs' gifts for physical comedy were on full display: every time she had to move in costume, she made it funny; every time she spoke in costume, she managed to accent the ridiculousness. Her therapist dance, done to get Jeff to open up, was the highlight of the episode.

Yet for all the laughs I got in “Paranormal Parentage,” the episode didn't quite succeed, in part because it seemed detached from its history. When I called Community's third season self-indulgent, that was, in part, because it delved too deeply into its characters' internal turmoil. While Season Three struggled with that through its run, it did successfully tie the characters' arcs together by the end, making it appear as though they'd grown up—almost all of them had a major breakthrough in the finale.

Meanwhile, in “Paranormal Parentage,” most of the characters reverted back to their initial type. Jeff was particularly frustrating, turning into the selfish, contrarian asshole that he was at his worst early on in the show's run. Annie and Troy were right behind him in this respect, their youth and naivete a throwback both to early Community episodes as well as the Season Four premiere. This may be the legacy of the turmoil at the end of Season Three—the seeming inevitability of the show's cancellation may have forced the writers to bring the show's character arcs to a close. Alternately, the removal of Dan Harmon may have removed the show's instincts to have the characters change and then maintain those changes.

Regardless, the crucial distinction between Season Three and Season Four of Community is that now the characters are treated as types, whose various histories are less important than what can be mined from them. In the season premiere, Jeff's actions were those of someone desperate to demonstrate that working for himself could also work toward his group's benefit. But he was back to selfish here. Troy's “becoming a man” process, demonstrated in some of the show's best episodes, was ignored so that he could be treated like a child in order to make (poor) jokes about his relationship with Britta—a relationship's being treated as a marker on a storyboard rather than a necessary character development.

In short, Community seems to be mining its history for plot developments, but it's failing at understanding its character developments, even when it's of a much higher quality. This is probably a necessary stage for most comedies, to be honest. But coming after the ambitious, largely character-based Harmon era, this could lead to a major, likely negative change for the show. Still, this is only the second episode of the season. If Community stabilizes at the level of “Paranormal Parentage,” it can still be a good, occasionally great, show. Or this could be the last gasp of the old guard, struggling to do their best with a show that's spun out of control.

Rowan Kaiser is a freelance pop culture critic currently living in the Bay Area. He is a staff writer at The A.V. Club, covering television and literature. He also writes about video games for several different publications, including Joystiq and Paste Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @rowankaiser for unimportant musings on media and extremely important kitten photographs.

“Critical Film Studies”: The Hazards of Reference

“Critical Film Studies,” the 19th episode of the 2nd season of Community, was probably pretty confusing to most fans of the series when it aired in the Spring of 2011. Heavily promoted by NBC as the show’s full-scale Pulp Fiction parody, the episode turned out instead to be a lengthy and rather muted (by the show’s standards) homage to Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre, with only a few Tarantino sight gags tucked neatly away in the periphery. People were understandably disappointed: Community appeared to have traded a spoof of one of the most enduringly popular and widely acclaimed films of the last several decades in a for a more affectionate and high-minded take on a film few in the show’s key demo knew anything at all about. It was, in a sense, an intellectual bait and switch: they promised something familiar but delivered a reference that would prove more substantive, both intellectually and emotionally.

Though My Dinner With Andre was the toast of the upper-crust New York literati when it was released in 1981, it is now widely regarded by people who haven’t seen it as a movie they’d rather not, ever, lest they become the sort of snobbish intellectuals who regard a film about two guys talking as “interesting” rather than “unendurable”, which they assume it must be. Its reputation has trickled down through pop culture for almost three decades now, and its high-concept setup, of course, has been prime parody real estate for years. One of the advantages of the format is that your audience doesn’t need to be familiar with the film as a whole for the reference click: the novelty lies in recognizing the basic structure–two men meet for dinner and, over the course of an extended discussion or argument, learn more about each other and about themselves–and an un-clever title riff along the lines of “My x With y”. Everything else is context-specific and just sort of writes itself.

A My Dinner With Andre parody is not in and of itself particularly special. Part of the problem is that the format has become a bit of a cliché, but a bigger issue is that lifting the premise of My Dinner With Andre wholesale somehow devalues its content and execution, or at least contributes to the pervading misconception that the film is boring and stuffy and worth remembering only for its setup. My Dinner With Andre is by no means a perfect film, but I’m still immensely fond of it, and it means a lot to me personally for reasons that “Critical Film Studies,” in its own modest way, articulates surprisingly well. It might sound trite (or too typical of a former film student), but I honestly believe that watching My Dinner With Andre for the first time several years ago was something of a life-changing experience, and that it made me, to some extent, a better person.

Before Andre, I felt depleted and vaguely adrift, remote from my friends and from myself. I was living in a run-down student bungalow with four disparate twentysomethings, struggling to care enough about the fifth year of my undergraduate degree to prevent the need for a sixth, and I was one Bukowski book away from drinking myself into utterly cliched oblivion. It was all admittedly pretty juvenile. One night, one of my roommates lent me a copy of My Dinner With Andre, a movie he thought I might enjoy, and, in a bid to avoid schoolwork for a few hours more, I decided to give it a shot. It was a revelation. I mean that: it was though a new world of emotional and intellectual depth had been revealed to me, a world of real conversations and connections and living. My life seemed childish and empty by comparison. Why wasn’t I dining with old friends, sharing a worldview and learning to see things from another person’s perspective? Why was I so reliant on simplistic humor, and on the pop culture that had saturated my life? I suddenly didn’t want to drink too much and quote “Pulp Fiction” and act like a jerk–that wasn’t living, it was acting, and it wasn’t the life of the person I wanted to be.

The next night I brought My Dinner With Andre over to the apartment of some close friends to watch it a second time with them, and then I watched it a third time a week later with another friend. I felt I had to share this feeling with other people. Naturally, I gave into the impulse to call friends from whom I believed I’d drifted apart, and I began dining and talking constantly. It was a strange experience: I was rejecting pop culture in favor of what I perceived to be unmediated experience, but it was a work from pop culture that had inspired me to do it. I didn’t want to rely on movie tropes and references, and yet by imitating Andre I was living an elaborate reference out. I knew this personal sea change had been good for me, but I couldn’t help but worry that my route to being what I felt was a better person was just as steeped in pop culture and cliche as the life I was trying to leave behind.

"Critical Film Studies," it turns out, is about exactly this sort of double-bind, about the implications of attempting to reject the influence of pop culture and about the effect of My Dinner With Andre specifically. The episode begins precisely as it needs to: Abed, in the Andre Gregory role, has invited Jeff, his better-looking Wallace Shawn, to meet him for dinner at an uncharacteristically lavish restaurant, which Jeff describes as in an Andre-style voiceover as something he’s not been looking forward to. Abed arrives in a chunky grey sweater, channeling Gregory’s jovial grin, but because Community imitates the forms and conventions of pop culture touchstones as often as its characters explicitly refer to them, it isn’t quite clear if the show is sending up My Dinner With Andre or if Abed is setting it up to look that way deliberately. This ambiguity serves a narrative purpose as well as a thematic one: when a waiter inadvertently brings up My Dinner With Andre and Abed quickly silences him, Jeff begins to realize that he’s been acting out a movie reference without even being aware of it, and a lack of familiarity with the plot and dialogue of My Dinner With Andre is what allows Jeff, as well as the audience, to be fooled by the gag. The writers know the reference will be as much a surprise to most of the show’s viewers as it is to Jeff, and they’re more than okay with that fact–if the episode is in part about a desire to return a state of pop culture innocence, ignorant of references and ready for real conversation, it makes sense that most people watching wouldn’t catch the principal one.

The audience’s assumed lack of awareness is important because it corresponds directly with what Abed’s claims to be afflicted by, which is that his obsession with pop culture has been preventing him from truly living his life and connecting with other people. The point of the dinner, he tells Jeff, is for the two of them to have a meaningful conversation without resorting to shallow pop culture references, which is, of course, what watching My Dinner With Andre has inspired so many of us to go out and do. The problem with following through yourself is that attempting to bond with a friend without pop culture references under the influence of Andre is itself a reference to pop culture, even if it’s a piece of pop culture that’s considered stuffy and obscure. Can a movie inspire you to reject the pervasive influence of other movies? Can a fictional connection drive you to seek out a real one?

Over the course of the dinner, Abed explains a revelation he had while appearing as an extra on the set of ABC’s Cougar Town. As the director calls “action,” Abed realizes that it would be impossible for any character in the fictional world of Cougar Town, even an extra with no lines, to be familiar with Cougar Town the series, because obviously the fiction doesn’t exist in the world of that fiction itself. In order to satisfy his need for authenticity, Abed imagines a fictional persona for himself to pretend to be during his walk-on appearance, but he becomes severely distressed when it occurs to him that this character might have been living a richer and deeper life than his own. It’s the central conceit of almost all fiction: the characters live, actively and with purpose, rather than watching, passively and with disinterest. Like the character in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King who has an awakening when he hears “you are watching As The World Turns” on TV, Abed is made suddenly and intensely aware of his own relationship to the pop culture he’s been consuming, and being on the passive side is too much to handle. It’s a problem we can all relate to, with one key difference: Abed himself is a character on TV, and we’re watching him discuss his Cougar Town crisis on a show called Community. Fans should be used to the meta impulse on Community, but “Critical Film Studies” takes it a step further–here it’s self-critical.

I sometimes worry about consuming too much pop culture, as I imagine many of us do. Nobody wants to feel shallow, and there’s a constant feeling of obligation to read or watch things that are more serious, or that have more depth. We worry about being the passive spectator, and about coming to be defined by that passivity. For me, “Critical Film Studies” deals with exactly that kind of anxiety, and with how the need to live and connect sometimes seems impossible to take on. There’s no such thing as a totally unmediated dinner, and there can never be a culture-free conversation; even talking openly and honestly with a close friend over dinner becomes a reference to something. Abed tries to reject his dependence on tropes and quotes, hoping instead to have depth, but doing so ultimately proves shallow. Jeff gets indignant when he finds out that’s his been tricked into opening up, but he ultimately learns something. The point isn’t that connection is impossible or that pop culture is toxic, but that we can still have the former while totally subsumed by the latter: sometimes connections cut through all the movie references and surprise us. What “Critical Film Studies” made me realize is that it’s okay to feel weighed down by pop culture, and that’s it natural to struggle fruitlessly against it. It made me realize that the change afforded me by watching My Dinner With Andre could be both shallow and deep, that being inspired by it could be both an elaborate reference and the route to true connections. “It has something to do with living,” Andre says to Wally–and that’s a reference I don’t mind knowingly making.

Calum Marsh is a frequent contributor to Slant Magazine.