Community Review!

Alright! After finishing The Office and then finishing Parks and Recreation, I took a break from comedies and watched Avatar: The Last Airbender (Which I loved). After finishing that, I was ready to get back to comedies, and a television show called Community had just been added to Netflix and had a lot of online buzz. So that was good enough for me. I just finished watching a couple of weeks ago, and my thoughts have just recently cooled and molded into a thousand-and-a-half word review. 

Community was part of NBC's golden age of television: They had The Office, Parks and Rec, and 30 Rock all airing for about five years simultaneously. It's some of the best television programs all happening in the same time span. But dealing with Community - Community is special. It's one of the most different and unique shows I have ever seen. Well, at least the first three seasons. The last three... well... let's talk about the first three.

The first season was incredible. It starts out with a pretty good stick and characters with clear arcs - Jeff Winger, a sarcastic lawyer who accidentally forms a study group to try to get with Britta Perry, an atheist anarchist who gradually gets less and less funny as the series goes on. But again, sticking on the first three seasons. Community was fairly standard for the first half of the first season. It was very "well and agreeable television I don't mind watching." And then the show changed.

S1 E21 "Contemporary American Poultry" was when the show changed.

It's very difficult to explain how Community works. Basically, imagine any type of trope - Zombie movies, action movies, crime movies, documentaries, bottle episodes, 8-bit, space movies, stop motion, clip shows, and musicals, and then imagine those things taking place in a community college. While watching, every day I was excited to see what Community had to offer. It was like a buffet of tropes hosted by witty dialogue and a great cast.

Every single episode of the first three seasons was amazing. Every character had an arc and every setup was answered. This also included the peak of Ben Chang's character, who was blatantly misused after season three. But again, we'll get to that later. I really enjoyed Chang in these episodes. He was the hilariously mean teacher who didn't care during season one, trying to do better during season two, and when season three happened, he went insane, infiltrated campus police, and took over the school. Like I said, such giant leaps were taken that they eventually became the norm. 

This was the peak of Chang

My favorite episodes of these three seasons were probably "Contemporary American Poultry," "Modern Warfare,""Aerodynamics of Gender," "Paradigms of Human Memory," "Advanced Chaos Theory," "Advanced Gay," "Regional Holiday Music," "Digital Estate Planning," and the season three finale. Each of these episodes was hilarious. Quite possibly my favorite of the tropes was "Paradigms of Human Memory." I absolutely hate clip show episodes, but this one only referenced episodes that we never saw. It was such a great way to poke fun at those episodes.

That was the peak of the show. It was basically the plotlines of later Simpsons seasons with the writing of early Simpsons seasons.

After that? Well... less so.

Season four marked a major change in the show. They fired the creator, Dan Harmon, for being a procrastinator and perfectionist, causing some friction with the studio. Frequent directors the Russo Brothers left the show to direct Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and a lot of behind the scene drama happened that culminated in major change season five.

This resulted in season four being "Community but not clever." Just noise, more a parody of early Community episodes than the clever tropes of tropes. It was a huge step down from the first couple of seasons. It also introduced a pretty bad plotline with Chang, who undergoes "Changnesia," a fictional disease that he's faking to restart his life. He never recovers, and neither does the show. One of the better gags from later seasons was referring to this season as the gas leak year.

The problem with season four was the high-concept episodes. In the first three seasons, strange gimmicks dealt directly into the plot. Abed saw everything in stop motion, and that was the main focus of the episode. The episode formatted as a Civil War documentary was actually about a Civil War in the study group. But in season four, they are puppets because... that's something early Community might've done, but they don't know why. There's a Hunger Games parody because... why not? It's aimless. The gimmicks aren't structurally integrated into the episode, but rather there because they are. 

This puppet episode is often viewed as the worst episode of the series. Rightfully so.

After season four, we get season five. Shocker. Season five realized that season four was bad, so they brought back Dan Harmon. But by then, Chevy Chase (Who portrays Pierce), left the show. Apparently, he was actually very in line with the Pierce character - a racist irritable baby boomer. And, halfway through season five, Donald Glover left the show to focus on his music career. The show never recovered after Donald Glover left.

The first half of season five (With Glover) basically amounted to b-list episodes from seasons one through three. Following Glover's departure, we get Jonathan Banks as Buzz Hickey, a fun replacement but not nearly as fun. The second half of the season's not half bad, having a weirdly fun episode with "App Development and Condiments."

This was a delightfully strange episode.

I didn't like season six all that much. After season five, we have yet another cast member leave in the form of Yvette Nicole Brown, who portrayed Shirley Bennet. The show was also canceled but picked up by Yahoo!'s streaming service for another season.. and then the season ended and the streaming service died. 

A lot of season six is devoted to the characters, but the characters are all pretty boring by now. Like Abed says, they walked in as people and came out as caricatures. Britta is painfully unfunny after season four. She always worked best when interacting with the group, and attempts to make her a funny stand-alone character drew crickets. 

Twitter personified. 

Abed Nadir, portrayed brilliantly by Danny Pudi, is also sidelined for most of the last season. After Troy (Glover) leaves the show, they have no clue what to do with Abed. Instead of being cleverly meta, he just blatantly says references. It's not a large difference, but it's felt in the episodes. He's mostly in the background for most of them.

 

The show also stops doing special episodes. They become more standard episodes instead of the stylistic trope episodes, spending more time introducing and developing new characters such as Frankie and Elroy. The best part of this season was definitely the development of the friendship between Jeff Winger and the Dean.

The zingers at the end of the episodes also become painfully unfunny and very long, and not even related to the episode. It was very sad. That's not to say that the episodes were bad - I quite enjoyed "Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal Care"( I just thought any scene where the Dean was in his VR office program was absolutely hilarious). 

"AND JESUS WEPT."

The series six finale also had the show's only use of explicit language with two f-bombs, which felt wildly out of place. In terms of the whole show though, we should probably talk about the cast. Donald Glover is definitely the MVP here. His body humor and line readings are just off the chart, which makes me sad that most of his work now seems relatively serious. 

Donald Glover has... changed

Danny Pudi as Abed Nadir is insane. I took how good the actor is for granted until I saw an interview of just him. His speech patterns and physicality are completely different. Respect earned, he's fascinating to watch.

Overall, I thought that Community was great. But only the first three seasons. After that, it's agreeable episodes of  an okay tv show. But, let's just try to remember the good stuff. The innovation of television, the lovable flawed group, and Troy and Abed in the morning. It's all iconic and I highly recommend it.

Overall, I give Community a 9/10 "Community as a whole is not the best television series by any means. Community as viewed by the first three seasons, however, might be the best content to ever air on television."


Also, we need a Netflix movie for this as soon as we can. With Donald Glover.

#andaLEGOset
This might actually happen, it's being reviewed by the LEGO group right now.