Under Construction

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Community is something of an anomaly among sitcoms.  It’s incredibly smart (of course, we should ask this of all shows…), but more notably, it has no boundaries.  For most sitcoms, the plots switch between the characters’ apartment and workplace - if they ever do something different like go to a beach house, it’s a notable change that almost feels cheap, as if the writers needed something new to work with.  Through some mixture of meta humor, not cheating their source, and keeping the show’s core strong, Community is able to break from this.  The show can put on a great episode without leaving the group’s study room, or for the length of an episode, the show can morph into an entirely different genre or setting without hiccup.

Community’s first season seemed to be a discovery of this ability.  Occasionally we would see full episodes in parody or in homage, perhaps the standout being the episode Modern Warfare, in which the entire school is torn apart in a paintball match used to parody various action films.  The second season sunk into this further - there seemed to be more experimental episodes than traditional ones, zombies, stop motion, mockumentary, a My Dinner With Andre/Pulp Fiction mash up.  Of course, all of these issues were resolved within their respective episode with only minor carry over.  What makes Community’s third season so special is that it seems to be the point at which the show discovers that it can create these absurd situations within their own normal world that everyone is experiencing.  Additionally, though it only became truly notable at the season’s end, the show adeptly carried small plot points through and brought them to truly unnatural and wonderful conclusions.

This season of Community was weird.  Almost every episode explored the show’s ability to do something different and wonderfully indulged its characters.  In particular, episodes like Remedial Chaos Theory prove Community’s brilliance.  Abed discusses the possibility of multiple timelines, and in twenty two minutes, we see seven utterly different versions of the same few minutes.  Like in previous seasons there were plenty of oddities: anime, video games, a Ken Burns’ documentary, Law & Order, Abed as Batman.  The show can become whatever it wants because it’s core characters are strong enough to hold it all together.  What’s more important though is the bizarre threads that continued throughout the season.  Abed and Troy build the Dreamatorium.  Troy turns out to be a savant at repairing air conditioning units.  The Dean, who in previous seasons occasionally popped into the study room in an odd outfit to kick off the plot, now did so indulgently - before it was a quick laugh and an easy way to start the plot off, but now the joke is that the Dean simply wears the outfits and bothers the study group because he likes to.  

Certainly, the simply episodes where the study group gathered around the table and dealt with more normal circumstances are to be missed.  They had to be clever in a different way than they do when parodying Glee.  But the content we see with moments like Evil Abed are to be cherished.  It’s easy to accept them as the norm within Community, but among the broader sitcom landscape, such an occurrence is impossible.  This season’s penultimate episode is particularly a standout.  For the final episodes, somehow the plot within the show has brought us to a point where the Dean has been kidnapped and replaced with a doppelgänger, Chang is dressed as Napoleon and has turned the school into a police state thanks to his army of pre-teens, and Troy is revealed to be the messiah of air conditioning repairmen.  It’s a bit insane, but its all within the shows sensibilities, and throughout it all the characters’ personalities remain strong.  It’s impressive that the show has brought us to this point - when we started, these people were just getting together to study and hit on one another.

As exciting as it is that Community has been renewed for another thirteen episodes (it’s hard to believe it was even allowed three seasons - something this good should have been canceled long ago), it seems we’ll have to be wary going into them.  The show runner is being replaced, and it’s easy to imagine that without him Community’s distinct voice could turn into a wash of cheap genre pastiches.  But these have been a great three seasons, and unlike other sitcoms, we are not waiting for romantic plot lines or otherwise to be tied up.  Who cares if Jeff ever returns to being a lawyer?  Late in this season, John Hodgman cameoed as a fake psychiatrist employed by Chang.  Hodgman poses to the group that community college degrees usually only take two years, but this is their third.  Jeff responds in frustration: “Everyone’s always saying that - the average community college student attends school five to seven years!”

Because I’m never that good with words, here I am reblogging an honest-to-goodness post that mirrors my same sentiments. The entry encapsulates what wonder I found in the show, what I want to say to other people to get them to watch Community, and how I feel about the recent turn of events surrounding our Greendale Human Beings (including the awesome season finale.)