Remember When Community Was Young? It Shone Like The Sun.

I started to post a response about last night’s “Alternative History Of The German Invasion” episode in an article at Badassdigest.com, but, like a lot of my responses there, it started to get a little long.  So I figured I’d do it here.  But you should still check out the article there (by clicking HERE), even though it’s an opposing view of the one you’re about to read.  Or, really, ESPECIALLY since it’s an opposing view.  Variety, man…

Anyhow…

I loved Community.  It was the underdog show that lasted longer than anyone expected it to, and, with the exception of (more than a few) random chances taken that definitely fell short of the mark, it strutted through three seasons, head high, and totally owned both its beauty and its flaws.

That was then.  This, as they say, is now.

So, Community Season 4.  I was OK with the first ep, kind of OK with the second & third (although… I’m actually having trouble recalling the second one…) , but this last one bored me to tears. When it wasn’t annoying me.  And the problem with being bored (and annoyed) on something like this is it allows you time to focus on the stuff, in real time, that may have been at the back of your brain, nagging you, that you’ve been able to mostly ignore.

Yeah.  This episode may be the first nail in the Community coffin for me.

This one’s listed as the second ep of the season, which, since it’s the fourth one to air, means they did a little shuffling with the order.  This is something that annoys the hell out of me (and, yeah, I know Community has done this before.  It annoyed me then, too).  Continuity isn’t only about plotlines, it’s about theme.  And artistic growth.  How are you supposed to follow the through-line of a character when you’re suddenly, unceremoniously thrust backward in time?  Now, granted, we’re not talking about a specifically linear storyline like Lost or The Walking Dead or Breaking Bad, but, again, theme.  Character growth.  And, actually, all that said, I didn’t know it had aired out of order until just this morning (in retrospect, it’s obvious)… which maybe raises more questions about the quality of the season.  Probably still too soon to tell.  I hope.  But, I digress.  Anyway…

I almost feel like it was swapped out to be the fourth aired so that this awkward (read: Dan Harmon-less) fourth year could have a few “strong” (I use the word lightly) episodes right off the bat before things got bland. But that’s just conspiracy theorizing, really. Basically, as we move towards the middle third of this swan song season, I’m feeling more and more like the show is now a “paint-by-numbers”one.  Which was sort of working at first, but is now degrading into stuff like “Obligatory Dean Pelton Cross Dressing Shtick” and “Changes To Vocabulary Jokes.”  That stuff was funny when it was special, not when it’s thrust front-and-center at every unearned opportunity.  Dean Pelton has been a favorite character of mine from the get-go, and Jim Rash totally owns it, the fact that his “thing” has become so obligatory is making me actually start to dislike it.  Never thought I’d see the day.  And that’s really the general feel I’m getting so far with Community this year- they’re making the horse dead just so they can beat it.

An even larger problem I had, specifically with this episode, is the return of the Germans.  Because it wasn’t really the return of the Germans.  It was the return  of those two glorified extras with German accents and some new guy playing the “brother” of Nick Kroll’s lead German from the foosball episode.  Really, if you can’t get Nick Kroll to reprise his role (a head-scratcher, for sure- dude’s not THAT in demand at this point), then why bring the Germans back at all?  I don’t ask just because I’m a Kroll fan, I ask because what’s the point?  Does the show need a callback to something that came before so badly that they’re willing to just plug some dude in to sleepwalk through his role with a German accent?  It was funny last year because Nick Kroll is funny.  It’s not funny here because “ya, ve’re CHURRmun” will only get you so far in comedy when there’s nothing to back it up.  Like, 3-seconds far.  I’m sure that Chris Diamantopolous dude is a good guy, and all (I hear his “Moe” was pretty good in that Three Stooges movie), but by the mid-point of the episode I wanted earplugs every time he was on screen.  Very, very annoying.

Anyway, the cast all seem to still be bringing their A-Game (well… except maybe Danny Pudi. I’m feeling a real sense of “let’s just get through it” from him), but what they’re given to do is just so… blah.  That’s when they’re even actually given something to do (remember when Shirley was a character on this show?).  It’s like they’re morphing from dynamic characters to generic caricatures right before our eyes.  All of them.  And don’t even get me started on the show’s emotional core.  It always had “heart,” but, like the aforementioned “unearned funny stuff,” it has degraded into, “look, viewers, this show still has HEART™.”  When we lost Dan Harmon to asinine executive decisions we lost nuance.  We lost edge.  We lost originality.

But maybe this is the point.  These guys are supposed to be graduating this year, right?  Maybe the point is that people grow up and lose some of these parts of themselves.  I mean, there’s no way in hell this is actually a planned theme, but maybe it’s an unintentional lesson- “things aren’t always going to be great, future graduates,” or something.

I went to a Community College, and, like these guys, I stayed too long.  And things certainly got a lot less colorful and a lot more generic for me… but I wasn’t living in a sitcom, so my life was only in danger of boring me, not 3.08 million viewers.