Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Stories about storytellers revisited

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to keep blogging about Community on Tuesdays, specifically consistently commenting on the previous episode which aired five days earlier, but I have to say I do kind of like the way that it’s been working out, where I can watch the show and process it and digest the commentary from other online sources like the AV Club or Slate and then (hopefully) say something that hasn’t already been said. That’s especially true after watching last week’s episode, “Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations” aka the “Jeff meets his father” episode.

It was the Thanksgiving-in-March episode, just like we got the Halloween-in-February episode a few weeks ago. And after a little bit of early-season shuffling, it’s the re-synching of the broadcast order with the production order, episode five of the season. I bring that up because I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in the reactions to this episode. Most people (including me) agreed that it was a satisfying resolution to Jeff’s daddy issues, with the right amount of emotional sincerity counterbalanced by all the different shades of humor the show plays around with. Plus, as the kind of geek who keeps track of production-vs-broadcast order and things like that, I knew back over the summer that James Brolin was cast as Jeff’s dad, so that reveal was drained of some of its impact for me BUT I had not heard that Adam DeVine had been cast as Jeff’s half-brother and seeing one of the Workaholics goofballs show up on Community was nothing short of delightful.

But all of that’s neither here nor there. It seems that most critics and hardcore fans spent the first three or four episodes of this season of Community lamenting the fact that the show was never going to be exactly what it was before and also trying to figure out whether or not it could even come close. All of this hand-wringing and tooth-gnashing was of course brought on by the departure of Dan Harmon, the show’s creator and original showrunner, but as I said, it seemed to run its course by the end of week four or so of this delayed (and possibly truncated) season. And then along comes the fifth episode, which seems to be very directly commenting on that turbulence, right at the moment when everyone else has decided they’re done talking and thinking about it. Which is kind of weird.

Alternatively, it could very well be that my reading of “Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations” is, to use a technical criticism term, completely whackadoodle, and that’s why no one else is commenting on what I’m seeing on the screen. But as I’m always eager to point out, this is my blog, so I might as well give voice to my own crazy theories. So the idea is that Jeff is basically a stand-in for the tv show itself, and William Winger is Dan Harmon, who abandoned his own show. Immediately this is a problematic interpretation if you believe that Harmon was forced out of Community by the studio and network honchos, and I’m aware that the facts do support that belief, but at the same time Harmon was notoriously difficult to work with, his public feuding with Chevy Chase certainly didn’t help, and to a certain extent you could accuse Harmon of having squandered every opportunity he had to suck it up and figure out a way to play the game as it needed to be played. Instead he took pride in being difficult, and left his bosses little choice. Maybe you respect his artistic integrity and self-respect. I’m less of a fan of people who absolutely refuse to compromise, but that’s me. At the end of the day (or at the end of Season Three), Dan Harmon gave life to Community and walked away from it, and Community is in the process of figuring out how to deal with that.

And it’s been something of a painful transition. And if Community were anthropomorphized, it might feel a lot of self-doubt and self-loathing and other symptoms of being “broken”. And if Dan Harmon ever shrugged his shoulders and said that him leaving the show was the best thing that ever happened to it, Community might be justified replying “With all due respect, by which I mean ‘none’, go to hell.” (Furthermore if Dan Harmon ever creates another show, it will suffer from its own issues of compromised self-worth as it is inevitably compared to its predecessor. Seriously, you guys, I cannot say enough about DeVine’s Willy Jr. in this episode.)

So Jeff/Community acknowledges that it’s not as solid and stable as it might have been if dad/Harmon had stuck around, but he/it is moving on as best he/it can. That, my friends, is a damn fine statement of purpose. It just took a month or so to get around to making it, by which point most of the audience had gone back to seeing the episodes as chronicles of the misadventures of a bunch of characters we’ve come to care about, or at least think of as boon hang-out companions, instead of seeing the episodes as samples of Community-the-tv-show to be mechanically analyzed. I can’t turn that off, though, so I’m in both camps. It will be interesting (to me) to see if Community goes back to these themes as the season progresses, or if the new showrunners just had to get one final kiss-off in and plan to never speak of it again.

(By the by, the B-plot? I love a good Shawshank reference or twelve, but the strangest part was Pierce’s escape attempt turning into deliberate clowning. “It’s my Showtime at the Apollo!” was a great line, but it all happened offscreen – deliberate pricking of Chase’s ego, or working around the fact that they wrote the scene to be on-screen and Chase refused to do it? Or budget constraints which meant they couldn’t build an entire Shirley’s living room set, or afford the liability insurance for having a sixty-nine year old man do pratfalls? I kind of want to believe the latter, if only because it makes it that much funnier when Abed ends the episode thinking in voiceover about Christmas and riffing “I hope we do Die Hard!”, probably the highest-budget Christmas movie ever.)

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