The upshot is that this is one of the (many, many) ways in which art cannot imitate life, using the loosest theoretical definition of “art” possible and applying it to “this blog”. This is a clearinghouse for my thoughts, but it’s also a place where I try not to repeat myself too often. A minor happenstance in my semi-charmed life or a trivial bit of pop culture ephemera prompts me to expound on it for a little while, and then it’s out of my system and on to the next thing. That formula does not apply to weightier events of any great significance, which all have the tendency to dominate the forefront of my mind for days or weeks at a time or more, without ever changing much. I circle around and around in their emotional-gravitational orbit just because that’s the nature of these things, not because I need that much time to process through a litany of thoughts but because I simply can’t stop. I don’t claim to be alone in this, either, which is all the more reason why I don’t find the phenomenon particularly interesting nor expect anyone else to. My mother is life-threateningly ill, and this makes me anxious and sad and angry and regretful and any number of things despite her getting good care for it and good hope for recovery being very much appropriate. That was true on Sunday when I got the news, and yesterday, and today, and will be tomorrow and the day after that. And I will run out of words for different ways of putting that before it stops being the case, whether or not I mention it day after day after day round these parts.
So, I might as well talk about Community, I guess?
The long-delayed fourth season of my Favorite Show Ever got underway at the beginning of this month and the world has now had the opportunity to check out three separate installments of the show as it now exists without its founding showrunner. My personal reaction has been mostly positive. Between Harmon’s departure and the runaround the season premier was given, I lowered my expectations accordingly. Now that I’ve finally been able to tune in on Thursdays on the regular, I’ve been happy to find that the current version of Community bears more than a passing resemblance to what came before. It is different, no mistake, but again, I was expecting that, and it hasn’t deviated wildly beyond what I braced myself for. Unfortunately, it’s not merely “different, but still just as great” but rather “different, and still good, but not quite as great.” None of the three episodes we’ve seen so far have hit the highs of the all-time classic episodes of the past.
The critical reaction to the show’s return has been mixed, as well, and a little more negative (probably because I’m more positively biased, right into apologist, than your average professional tv reviewer) but one particular writer offered an insight I’ve taken to heart: Community is really starting over again from a behind-the-scenes perspective, even as it continues previous storylines with the same actors playing the same characters. The very first three episodes of Community’s first season weren’t that mind-blowing either, but it built its rhythms as it went along and blossomed into brilliance. There’s no guarantee the fourth season will do that, but it’s too early now to discount the possibility. It’s rough right now, but it might not always be. (Then again, NBC could burn off the last ten episodes it has on hand and then forbid the speaking of the show’s name ever again, and we’ll never know what might have been. Unless someone writes a book about it.)
So I’m not despairing about Community, and I still consider myself a fan. I haven’t commented on the show since February 7th because I haven’t had much to say, and honestly even though I’m a big ol’ drum-bangin’ booster for the show and would love to raise awareness and influence ratings, if someone who had never watched Community before checked out the last three episodes on my say-so, I’d feel like I had done everyone a disservice. But in addition to all of those qualified quasi-non-statements, I did have a little nit to pick with the most recent episode, “Conventions of Space and Time.”
The episode had some good callback jokes, and it had Matt Lucas, and it had Danny Pudi doing a dead-on Joel McHale impression which pretty much slayed me, and it positively wallowed in the sci-fi show-within-the-show Inspector Spacetime by sending all of the characters to InSpectiCon, which means it should have been an unabashed geek-out. But on that last count it really failed to click for me, and paled in comparison to what I still think was one of the finest half-hours of the entire series, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”.
The thing about the “AD&D” episode was that it was clearly written by people who understand the roleplaying game, and who love it, but also recognize everything about the game (and the subculture of gamers) that is thoroughly ridiculous. And the script brought it all home in the details. Everything was blended into the story in such a way that, to someone who knew little or nothing about Dungeons & Dragons, the incomprehensible game jargon gave things a genuine texture without becoming distracting, while at the same time those bits of minutiae were extra joke-sprinkles for anyone with a foot in that alternate world (like me). A the same time, the script never stooped to suggesting that D&D was a stupid game or that people who played it a lot were irredeemable losers. Fat Neil comes off pretty freaking well in that episode (as does Volunteer Dungeon Master Abed) as he goes from victimized misfit to admirable hero in the kind of subversion that Community is best at pulling off.
I don’t doubt that the people who wrote “Conventions of Space and Time” understand Doctor Who (the basis for the Inspector Spacetime pastiche) and have been to some fan conventions in their day. I am not exactly a big Whovian but I’ve been to plenty of cons myself, and the InSpectiCon just felt totally broad and generic to me. There was very little in that episode that had to happen at a fan convention and could happen nowhere else in the way that certain elements of “AD&D” could only have happened within that specific gaming context. And while “Conventions of Space and Time” never stooped so low as to do any mugging and nudging along the lines of “Check out these freaks who would go to a fan convention for a sci-fi show!” there wasn’t anything particularly subversive about it, either. (Giving Thoraxis a fan club member who is a hot, intelligent adult woman doesn’t even really count. Although Thoraxis is a fantastic dumb villain name on many levels.) It was just a backdrop, and not a particularly memorable one.
Maybe the problem was too many layers of remove. Community hits its highest highs when it riffs on tv history and pop culture in general with a zealot’s specificity, whether it’s for the turn-based combat rules of Dungeons & Dragons or Abed quoting anything and everything from Star Wars to My Dinner With Andre. Inspector Spacetime is an homage to a real pop culture juggernaut, but (fan wikis notwithstanding) there’s no real Inspector Spacetime show to pull specific nuggets of reference from. When Troy and Abed make passing, gibberish reference to the show it works, but attempting to capture a whole convention center filled with that gibberish felt a little hollow.
But again, I hate to kick a show when it’s down, and I’m still much more vested in seeing Community succeed (against staggering odds) than in bailing on it prematurely. I can only hope that at some point late in Community Season 6 there will be a totally gonzo time travel episode that involves Troy and Abed going back to the InSpectiCon from three years prior, at which point I will be thoroughly grateful that I watched the earlier episode and can appreciate all the references.
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