A not-so-brief discussion of the Season 4 premiere of the NBC comedy Community, by Wired editors Laura Hudson and Peter Rubin.
Laura: So the two big questions, as we all return to Greendale Community College for the first time since the departure of *Community *creator and show-runner Dan Harmon (along with two of the show’s executive producers) are:
- Is Community still the show that we remember? and
- If not, is it something different -- but still worth watching -- or just an empty husk of the experimental comedy we once loved?
Peter: Not loading our questions or anything, at least.
Laura: Well, I figured the answer to the first question would be an obvious yes or no, but even after watching the first two episodes repeatedly, I’m still not sure I have the answer.
Peter: Would you have noticed that the execution differed from last season, had you not known Harmon was gone?
Laura: Yes. Obviously I wouldn't have come to it with the same fundamental sense of suspicion if I hadn’t known about Harmon’s departure, in the same way that you don't go around assuming that people you know have been replaced by alien duplicates?
Peter: The same way you don't go around, maybe.
Laura: But in both cases, if I'd found out about the switch after the fact, I think I'd be able to look back and point out how things had felt off even if I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time.
Peter: The entire episode was a secret handshake, and by its very ersatz...ness it was bound to chafe. The writer's room is still full of people who were around last season. They're writing what they know how to write — and that may have Harmon's imprimatur forever. I mean, his philosophy and willingness will be part of the show's DNA, but I don't know how well-served they'd be trying to replicate it all season. I fear the prospect of Uncanny Harmon.
Laura: I think the Uncanny Valley is a great analogy, because that's exactly why the show bothered me at times. It's not that it didn't imitate Harmon extremely well; it's that it came so close with such eerie resemblance that the subtle ways it fell short became even more apparent and unsettling to me.
Peter: I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that this was more of a hat-tip – a love letter to Harmon before they pack up and move the show "forward.” One thing that is tangentially related, and may provide some closure on this matter: the premiere is actually titled "History 101."
Laura: And it kicks off with what is essentially a re-imagining of Community as a banal, mainstream sitcom, complete with a horrifying canned laugh track, in a sub-narrative which I will henceforth refer to as “Shitty Community.” It's telling to me that this joke gets dragged out for so long that I actually started to feel uncomfortable, because to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, if you spend long enough pretending you are a shitty sitcom, after a while, are you really pretending?
Peter: There were certainly things about the episode that felt off to me, but I didn't share your uneasiness with the multi-level narrative. After a season with 16-bit videogame episodes and six-way fractured storylines, I come to a new season expecting some conceptual gymnastics. But this certainly seemed like a way for them to say "Harmon's gone? Really? WE DIDN'T NOTICE. HERE, HAVE A STRUCTURAL PLOY." Community: the show that never meta show they didn't like.
Laura: It's not the concept I have a problem with – they couldn’t have picked a more Harmonian idea if they tried -- but rather the execution. What theoretically makes the joke funny is the idea that it's self-aware; the show knows that it's being shitty, and we know that it knows, and that means we can laugh together. But when it starts attenuating the joke to the point where it gets uncomfortable and grating, I start to question the show's judgment and whether we’re really on the same page. It’s like it stops being funny, but the show doesn’t realize it.
Peter: The thing about the Shitty Community segments that I enjoy, above and beyond my snotty love of meta-fiction, is that they use all the same joke tropes that are in the Regular *Community *episode as well: the Dean making "dean" puns; the hipster glasses. And it sure feels to me like they're venting about NBC's efforts to make them more palatable and accessible.
Laura: If nothing else, they really highlight how easy it would be for the show to be far, far worse than it is.
Peter: I agree that it can be a bit lingering, but since that feeling doesn't extend to Regular Community, I'm willing to take it as a bit more meta icing.
Laura: Well, let’s talk about what it means meta-fictionally, because I think it’s relevant. The episode begins with the gang telling Abed that this is their last first day of school ever, which creates this sense that -- something is over without it being over yet? Fitting, perhaps.
Peter: That’s "prolepsis,” a word that I promised myself I would use someday, but have never found a situation that demanded it. Until now, somehow, talking about Community.
Laura: And then Abed has a total freakout about the terrifying possibility of change, so he creates an alternate world in his mind that looks very much like his world... even though it isn't, exactly. Which is possibly like the freakout I'm having about the show looking so much like the old one, even though it isn't, exactly.
Peter: Or the freakout the writers are having about the show without their fearless leader, or anxiety about this weird nether-realm season being the last.
Laura: Aren’t we all Abed, a little?
Peter: Not only us, but Harmon is largely spoken of as being Abed-ish (even though there's an actual Abed, supposedly). There's basically no end to the number of ways you can interpret this episode, which itself is one of those reasons the show has the following it does.
Laura: So Abed creates Shitty Community in his mind because he is frightened by the idea of progress, and wants to retreat to a world that doesn't challenge him. He is the Mainstream Television Viewer? I almost feel like it's a scare tactic: Here's what Community could have been, what we still could be, if we just gave up -- if we weren't trying so goddamn hard.
Peter: I don’t think the writers are that insecure, but Abed's always been a way for the show to confront the demands of the outside world: networks, viewers, etc.
Laura: Well, right. It's a reflection of – and response to -- the pressure on the show to become more conventional.
Peter: Sure, and that's something that's been happening for the better part of three seasons now, although I think Dan Harmon tended to do it much more angrily. There were some real fuck-you moments in Season 3, when he was at the end of his rope. Or so I imagined. But the real question here is: Does it work now? Also, is that the property that makes Community "Community?"
Laura: Anger? Willful defiance?
Peter: Defiance, yes, to a degree. Without that defensiveness and formal pyrotechnics, are they just another sitcom?
Laura: That’s an interesting question. Is the show defined by its sense of frustration and contrarianism? If Community could have been the show that it wanted without constantly dangling at the edge of cancellation and getting bullshit from the network, what would it have been like?
Peter: Is that rhetorical or a real question?
Laura: Real one. In cultural terms, I think most people who deviate from the mainstream do so not because they want to be “difficult,” but because they legitimately just want to express themselves a different way. However, when you're subjected to constant pressure from people who try to police you back into being conventional, it can become as much about fighting that battle as it was about who you innately are or wanted to be.
Peter: But when that overtakes your creative identity, it subsumes your natural gifts and just makes your work about The Fight. Which, face it, is never as much fun. To wit: Kanye West.
Laura: So who are you “really”: the person you would have been absent the bullshit, or the person you became because of it? There’s no real way to take that apart in the end. But you hope that you don't get defined by your anger.
Peter: Is it fair to say that toward the end, Harmon did?
Laura: Well, if all you do is fight at every turn, it's hard not to feel like you're fighting at every turn, you know? So yeah, probably he did, but also that’s pretty legit? And the fact that he dealt with it meta-fictionally in the most meta-fictional comedy ever seems perfectly cromulent to me.
Peter: There are two ways to deal with that sense of siege: One is you lash out, and the other is to develop a foxhole mentality that We're All In It Together. And that to me is the difference between last season and now: Harmon lashed out. A lot.
Laura: The premiere is really all about the gang starting their final year at Greendale – quite likely, the show’s last year as well -- and now that I think about it, that’s what Annie's “senioritis” likely represents: acting out. The sense that hey, it's the final season, so why not fucking go for it? Here’s an Inception-style premiere with a three-level nested narrative! Here’s an intensely homoerotic scene between Jeff and the Dean! Here's an unpleasant, unblinking look into the mirror universe where NBC got its way and homogenized the show! Eat it, haters! Or as Amy Poehler once said, “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”
Peter: It was a continuation of last season's aggression, at least to me. There was this willful refusal to adhere to anything new viewer-friendly. And that's why it is a show beloved by assholes.
Laura: Assholes like us. While I still think the show overreached in the premiere -- by my count there are two dueling primary narratives, multiple B and C plots, and not one but two twist endings -- I like Shitty Community (and Regular Community) a great deal more in this reading, because it transforms the irritation of those sequences from something obtuse into something deliberate -- something that wasn't intended to be painless. There are times when media should create dissonance and provoke discomfort. Time will tell, but maybe this was one of them.
Community airs on Thursdays* at 8/7c on NBC.*
