CliqueClackPut Community out of its misery
This morning, I woke up to the news that ‘Community’ is being renewed for a fifth season; news which in the past would have filled me with levels of glee usually associated with excitable children. But now, having endured the show’s miserable fourth season, the prospect of more ‘Community’ is one of sheer dread.
To misquote Abed on season four: “I remember when this show was about community college and didn’t suck.” Sure, it improved as it went along, but it never managed to shake that Community-tribute-act vibe. It was like the writers were performing a “Best Of,” but hadn’t actually heard the original songs. Or learnt to play their instruments. All the half-assed call-backs to paintball and the darkest timeline seemed to scream: “The fans will remember this! You know, from when it was good.”
Even the characters felt like bad lookalikes this seasons. Look at Abed, surely one of the most interesting comedy characters of recent years. This season saw him reduced to making increasingly lazy references and forced homages. Meanwhile, Jeff’s speeches have become so utterly mawkish and wet that he might as well just walk around wearing a t-shirt saying “I LOVE MY FRIENDS” and save us a lot of wasted time. As for Chang, he’s just one of the worst characters ever.
Worst of all, this season just wasn’t funny. This is meant to be a comedy, so where were the jokes? They seem to have been replaced with more and more contrived high-concepts. Let’s do a puppet episode, let’s do a superhero origins episode, let’s do a fate episode — and yes, two of those were the same one; it was literally conceptually confused. The feeling that this was a show trying to be Community permeated every unfunny second of season four.
But that’s because it was trying to be Community. Call me a stuck record, but with no Dan Harmon, you have no Community. Trying to write Community without him is a thankless task. It’s not the writers’ fault, they were doing their best in an impossible situation. It’s NBC’s fault, for firing the man who created Community and exercised such auteurist control over every aspect of the show. Community without Dan Harmon is like Seinfeld without Seinfeld, or How I Met Your Mother without the casual sexism.
Now, there are reports that Dan Harmon may return for season five, which seems highly unlikely given the hugely unfair way in which he was sacked — the Commutiny, as I call it. But I sincerely hope he does return, because that would be the only way to save this limping ghoul of a show. Otherwise, I beg that NBC have a change of heart and axe this show that I once so desperately longed to continue. #6seasonsandamovie? More like #4seasonsandanapology.
If you run over an animal with your car and it only just survives, screaming in agony, it is only right that you put it out of its misery. That’s what NBC has done to Community; they have all but killed it, leaving it floundering in pain. They therefore have something of a moral duty to finish it off, out of mercy. And I hope that someone somewhere in the world of television learns a valuable lesson about messing around with an artist’s creative vision. But they won’t.
5 Comments on “Put Community out of its misery”
Give people a forum and they seem to suddenly think their goddamn opinions are ‘facts’.
Couldn’t agree more with this article. You don’t just leave a turd languishing in the toilet. you flush it
You are a genius. Reading this made me realise that Community has been going downhill since season 3.
To continue the poo metaphor, it’s like I’ve just taken a massive dump, and now all I need is to wipe myself clean of this crap!
It’s one of those rare times when I read a strongly opinionated article and also agree with it word by word.
The best case scenario is that Dan Harmon returns – and I like to believe it’s not terribly unlikely, even if it’s unprecedented. The second best case scenario would be for this poor show to end, just so that it doesn’t desecrate the amazing first three seasons. But this isn’t going to happen, because apparently enough people liked it even without Harmon. That’s the curse of the show.
Ultimately, we have to accept that there have always been two kinds of people watching Community. People of the first kind watched it because we felt that the jokes were cleverer than what you usually see in a sitcom. We watched it because we liked the complicated plot threads that were waived in every episode in ever more unexpected ways. And, most importantly perhaps, we were drawn to the fact that beneath the gags and the pop culture references and all the silliness, there was a darkness underlining almost everything that took place in the lives of the Greendale Seven. Naturally, all these things vanished when Dan Harmon left. People of the second kind watched the same series for entirely different reasons. For them, Community was about references and “special” episodes. They watched just to see what that weirdo Abed will do next. They wanted to see whether Jeff and Annie end up together. They watched because they wanted to see another tale of the power of friendship and another speech by the handsome de facto leader of the group about how they’ve grown. This is where the fourth season focused – and necessarily so, because a creator’s touch is usually irreplaceable, especially in such a complex medium.
In the end, if the renewal is anything to go by, it seems that the already small audience of Community was split even more and we, the people who watched Community for what Dan Harmon brought into the equation, are a very small minority.
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