Six Seasons And A Movie
I'm in love with everything in this picture. Yes, that includes three quarters of Donald Glover's face.
If you don’t watch the TV show Community,
you’re doing yourself a grave disservice – both because it’s a spectacular,
ballsy, hilarious show with a great cast and a fair amount of Alison Brie
cleavage, but also because this update is going to be about
Community, so if you haven’t watched the show there’s a good
chance you’ll have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
The gist of the show, for those of you who don’t watch it,
is this: A disbarred, asshole lawyer has to take classes at a dysfunctional
community college. He winds up in a zany, racially diverse study group, and
they proceed to have shenanigans of the highest order, including, but not
limited to, sailing a boat on a trailer through a parking lot, throwing a dead
body out a window, a paintball war, a massive blanket fort, Dungeons
and Dragons, claymation, another paintball war, multiple divergent
timelines, and making out with Alison Brie (once, or maybe more than that if we
count the divergent timelines).
It’s a great show. In five or ten years, we’ll be talking
about it the way we talk about Arrested Development now.
A lot of Community’s brilliance can be
traced to the perfect union of a spectacular cast, spectacular-er writers, and
creator/showrunner Dan Harmon, whose previous credits include co-creating
The Sarah Silverman Program and a pilot for a show called
Heat Vision And Jack, in which Jack Black plays a renegade
superhero astronaut who gains super intelligence whenever he’s in direct
sunlight and has a sidekick named Jack who is a talking motorcycle, voiced by
Owen Wilson. (For whatever reason, the pilot did not get picked up for a full
season.)
If you didn’t get the hint from the thing about the talking
motorcycle show, let me tell you upfront: Dan Harmon is a weird dude, and his
weird helming is what, I think, has made Community so great.
He never plays it safe and swings for the fences with just about every episode,
doing stuff you’d never see on another TV show. One Community
episode was an extended parody of My Dinner With Andre - a
highly philosophical art film that exactly seven people in the world have seen.
Dan Harmon, like the honey badger, doesn’t give a fuck – he just makes the TV
show he wants to make, which is why Community is so often
groundbreakingly hilarious.
That said, the My Dinner With Andre
episode of Community was arguably one of the worst episodes
of the series. And, sadly, there have been some real contenders in that
department. Community, for as much as I love it, is
admittedly inconsistent – some episodes should win Nobel Prizes, some are
pretty funny, and a few have sucked harder than [trashy celebrity] at [location
– e.g. CMA’s/handicapped stall at Olive Garden].
I, personally, am fine with that. I’d much rather watch a
show that sucks sometimes because they swung for the fences and missed than a
show that plays it safe and is too tepid to appeal to anyone – commonly known
as Don’t Trust The Bitch In Apartment 23 Syndrome.
However, the people writing the checks tend to favor
consistency over innovation, and on Friday it was announced that Dan Harmon had
been removed as Community’s showrunner, an act that has
drawn considerable derision from Community’s cast and the
whole Internet.
Now, I’m as pissed as any Community fan
that the driving force behind the show has had his baby forcibly removed from
him, like the Cylon/human hybrid child in season 2 of Battlestar
Galactica, but at the same time I can kind of understand the
reasoning behind taking it away, just like I did in season 2 of
Battlestar Galactica when they took the Cylon/human hybrid
child away.
Dan Harmon is a genius, yes, and I’d love to meet him, but
by all accounts, including his own, he’s a pretty difficult guy to work with.
His relentless perfectionism leads to a lot of long nights and frayed nerves that
often explode into fights during the production cycle. He drinks constantly and routinely threatens to commit suicide. In his defense, if I was in charge of a
TV show of my own creation I’d probably be drinking and threatening to kill
myself too.
More recently, he’s been rather publicly butting heads with Chevy Chase, who is apparently one of the worst people in the world. Chevy
seems to be the one cast member who isn’t BFFs with all the others, and has
been openly critical of Dan Harmon’s scripting, which resulted in Harmon
delivering a fairly hostile speech at the cast Christmas party, the gist of
which was apparently, “SCREW YOU, CHEVY!”
So I can understand why Sony pulled Dan Harmon. He’s a
renegade cop who doesn’t play by the rules – Jesus I use that analogy a lot! –
helming a risky show with sub-par ratings. In Sony’s eyes, something had to
change for this venture to become less troublesome for them.
Regardless of whether Dan Harmon comes back, I think we, as
Community fans, should focus on the good:
1) The New Showrunners Are Pretty Good
Harmon got replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port, who
previously worked on critical darlings Happy Endings and
Just Shoot Me. Keep in mind, Happy
Endings is the show that some critics were saying was better than
Modern Family. These guys don’t seem to be idiots, which is
why we should be thankful that…
2) At Least It Didn’t Get Cancelled
Community’s shitty ratings have put it in
considerable danger of being cancelled from pretty much day one, and it’s a
testament to NBC that they’ve kept it around for as long as they did, hiatus
and truncated fourth season episode order notwithstanding.
Now, I’m sure a great many fans would rather see the show
cancelled then have it continue, Scrubs style, as an unfunny
embarrassment that cheapens its former greatness. I, however, still have some
hope.
As established, the new showrunners aren’t idiots. They’re
good at their jobs, so presumably they know what Community
is and why people like it. Community’s writing staff remains
fully intact, and I have reason to believe they’ll be allowed to be just as
weird as they were being before.
Community will undoubtedly be different
under new management, but I don’t take that to automatically mean that it’ll be
bad. Community has always been different from everything
else on TV, and it’s been great – usually. Now Community is
going to be different from previous seasons of Community. On
a show this meta, that’s bound to be a comedy goldmine.
Truman Capps would immediately quit watching the
show if Alison Brie were no longer on it.