(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Apparently controversial opinion about Community:

I am not bothered by the fact that the beginning of this season has not been great. That's because everybody tries to forget that most of the Dan Harmon era was terrible, too. It was actually rare that Community did a great episode, but when they did manage it, they were GREAT episodes. Remedial Chaos Theory was a triumph. The Paintball episodes were all brilliant. The video game episode was wonderful. The Pulp Fiction parody rocked my socks.

What I love about Community is that more than any other show I've ever watched, it epitomized my glorious failure model. They did a stop-motion episode, and it had good moments, but mostly it attempted to manufacture synthetic emotion and failed. They pushed their meta-fictional character Abed past his limits in a nearly unwatchable episode where he filmed a documentary about the making of a commercial. They did a motherfucking zombie episode, and it was terrible, but what present day sitcom does a motherfucking zombie episode? Every week you knew the show would take risks and try out storytelling approaches nobody had ever dared before to try. And most of the time it would fail to live up to its potential, and you'd have wasted twenty minutes of your life on a mediocre entertainment, but you kept coming back on the chance that next week would be a classic.

So I don't really understand the complaints that these episodes lack 'the spark of Dan Harmon'. The spark of Harmon was that occasionally a risk would pay off and you'd have something memorable and unique. It wasn't, as in Sorkin, a consistent quality of language and thoughtfulness. It wasn't, as in Whedon, a consistent ability to make meaningful leaps of imagination. It wasn't, as in Simon, a consistently powerful honesty about the world around us. It was a willingness to fight the network and try out crazy ideas to see if they were good crazy or bad crazy.

This season has, so far, mostly been bad crazy. I liked the Clue episode more than the rest of the people I've talked to, but it still wasn't very good. The Inspector Spacetime convention episode would've been better without Annie's flight of fancy. But... it is what it is. The show is still refusing to stay in the box it came out of. Hopefully something from the remaining handful of episodes will work better, but I'm not convinced by what I've seen that the departure of Harmon has harmed Community's ability to risk badness for the sake of greatness.

And ultimately, as is usually the case for the avant-garde, the legacy of Community will be in the shows that follow which moderate its revolutionary impulses and try for deeper, more conventional storytelling. But I do believe that such shows will follow.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hm. I liked the Annie bits in the last episode more than I liked anything else in it, I think. The convention plot was weak, IMO.

One of the things that I enjoyed about the better Harmon episodes (having not seen the worse ones) was that strange feeling that, to a great degree, they were about the characters themselves playing a game with undue seriousness, but still remaining true both to their own character, and to some degree, the in-game character except for one-off moments that remind us that the game-within-the-show isn't real, but it still felt like it might be. And somehow, through that, there was character development -- we got to see different facets of characters, even if and when they were tinged by the weirdness around them. Law and Order episode comes to mind. And, I think, it took a lot of understanding of both the characters and the genre itself, to make that happen.

In the new episodes, it felt like the characters remained static themselves in a wacky setting. Maybe that's how it was in the weaker Harmon episodes, and I am giving the show the benefit of the doubt. But that's the difference, and that's what I miss.

[seekingferret]

Law and Order episode was a great one, and you're right, the best Harmon episodes were the ones where the gimmick didn't interfere with, and even enhanced, telling a meaningful story about the characters. But I think 'we got to see different facets of the characters' is a rose-tinted way of saying that the characters have been written extremely broadly and at times inconsistently. Pierce in particular went through a lot of incarnations, and it never felt to me like he was deliberately being evolved so much as he was modified to serve the story. When they needed a bully or an antagonist within the group, he got meaner. When they needed someone in the group to be isolated, they made him into a more pitiable figure. When they didn't have need of either of those modes, he was just a delivery tool for weak punchlines.

I think being true to the characters is only true in a roughly fanfictional sense, where these characters had certain core elements that had to stay true no matter which AU they were placed in, for it to feel canon-compliant. I don't think there was actually much consistency in the character motion over the course of seasons because the jumping in styles made it impossible for that to be meaningful. Did the character discoveries of the paintball episode really translate over to the Law and Order episode? Only in a very loose way.

[(Anonymous)]

That may be true. I find that this is where I am strongly biased, having only seen the good episodes. There is a feeling of a lot of canon out there, but it doesn't mean that canon is actually as consistent as the good episodes make it seem. In the end, the best I can say then is -- I feel like there was *more* to Pierce than just 'lonely' or just 'evil' or just 'lonely and evil', just as there was more to Abed than 'geeky' and 'obsessive'. But that's because I saw the good episodes, maybe.
(uh, having failed to sign the last one, this is ekate)

[seekingferret]

In my opinion, Community is one of the shows with the widest gaps between good and bad episodes. It probably is overall more enjoyable in a curated fashion where someone chooses to only show you the good episodes, but we all know my taste is broken and I enjoy the seat of your pants feeling of not knowing whether it's going to be fun or not.

[morbane]

Somewhat off topic, but - in response to your last comment, may I recommend Detention (2011)? It starts with a high school comedy/horror premise, and then goes on finding new rails to careen off of. That kind of almost too-clever-for-its-own good scheme where it keeps throwing things at you and expecting you to roll with them for an eventual payoff. (Of course, I don't know a lot about your tastes, but it seemed worth mentioning.)

[seekingferret]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll have to check it out.

My tastes? In general, my friends suggest that my taste can be classified as 'bad taste'.