“That’s like me blaming owls for how much I suck at analogies.”
“Community,” which is entering its fifth season on NBC, has never been a show that you could talk folks into watching. People love it or it leaves them cold. It takes place at a community college called Greendale (“Ranked America’s No. 2 Community College by greendalecommunitycollege.com”), among a diverse study group of students (now six, but soon to be five, since Donald Glover is leaving the show), but that’s always been more of a set than an actual setting. It’s a sitcom about sitcoms, a character study of characters. “Community” is at once icy and sentimental, anarchic and highly controlled, like a sneeze that never lets loose, but it feels great anyway. It’s so self-referential that it makes “Arrested Development” look like “The Andy Griffith Show.” Yet just because it’s not an easy sell doesn’t mean that it’s not worth buying. Once you’re in the tank, “Community” is as satisfying as anything on television.
Mainly, the show is a very pure expression of the mind of Dan Harmon, the notorious headache who created this contraption. More than a year ago, Harmon got fired from his job as showrunner, for either legitimate or illegitimate reasons (most likely, both), depending on whom you talk to, and when. For one disastrous season, he was replaced by two possibly nicer and easier to work with but certainly less-good-at-creating-“Community” showrunners. Then, miraculously, the man was rehired. It was an unsettling moment for television, from which one might draw various conclusions about network economics, creative eccentricity, and / or the nature of collaboration, but, for the moment, let’s stick with the facts: the first three Harmon-is-back episodes of “Community” are solid.
The recent graduates of the study group have returned to Greendale. Jeff Winger (played by Joel McHale) is semi-reluctantly working as a teacher. The uncool Pierce Hawthorne—played by Chevy Chase, who was fired—has been replaced, symbolically, by first the ultra-cool Jonathan Banks, of “Breaking Bad,” and then by the ultra-cool Walton Goggins, of “Justified.” There is a belligerent undercurrent to the proceedings, with lines like “In real life, the robot wins” and “I wake up every night screaming,” as well as dialogue that includes “I want to kill myself.” “Use that.” For passionate Communitarians like myself, there is also copious self-criticism, including this reference to last season’s gas-leak episode: “Don’t blame it all on the gas leak year. This was a four-year process. We went in one year as real people and came out the other end as mixed-up cartoons.”
The highlight of last night’s pair of episodes was a truly transcendent Nicolas Cage imitation / psychic breakdown, performed by Danny Pudi, as Abed Nadir. A pop-culture maniac, Abed had joined a class called “Nicolas Cage: Good or Bad.” (“I’ve always wanted to know,” he murmured, poring over the Greendale catalogue.) Naturally, given Abed’s obsessiveness, this subject leads him to the brink of mania. He can’t handle the confusion of recognizing that something original might not be easily labelled good or bad. There is a hilarious rant on how to judge quality in acting: “Robert Downey, Jr.: good! Jim Belushi: bad! Van Damme: the good kind of bad. Johnny Depp: the bad kind of good.” There was a debate about Cage among Abed’s classmates. “I don’t know,” shrugged Shirley. “If I was in seventy films over thirty years, and I spent each one talking at random volumes, I might accidentally win an Oscar.” There was a frightening imitation of Cage, involving meowing. And there was a line that clearly applied to Harmon himself, with a trademark mixture of insight, self-pity, and grandiosity: “That’s why critics could call him a genius or an idiot and be right no matter what.”
Call me a fangirl, but I ate it up. It helped that the scripts were filled with solid, silly zingers:
“You trust-funded, body-sprayed, Eli Roth-DVD owner!”
“They invented fibromyalgia. And the cure for fibromyalgia.”
“When I asked you to explain the Sixth amendment, you pled the Fifth.”
“Can I be a surprise witness? Wait, don’t tell me.”
“Community” is more than just a collection of well-made jokes, but it doesn’t work unless it’s that, too. When it is firing on all cylinders, it feels like the perfect blend of the surprising and the familiar: something old, something new, something borrowed, and definitely something blue. This is a comedy with the most depressing theme song ever, which includes lines like “We could be roped up, tied up, dead in a year.” In Harmon, it has a creator whose brand is “Worry about me.” I began this season peeking through my fingers, afraid that I’d see a crash of epic proportions, a zombie show built of leftover zombie parts. Instead, watching just felt good. Nice to see you, “Community.” We’ve missed you.