NBC
There are sitcoms you enjoy because you have such a good time watching them, and then there are the sitcoms you enjoy because the people involved clearly have such a good time making them. Community, which returns tonight on NBC, is an example of the latter. (The former too, but especially the latter.) The show, about a motley study group of adult learners at a community college somewhere in the West, is, as its title says, about very different people coming together to form a group. But its joys are also in the margins, goofs and details—the now-mandatory Troy-and-Abed outros over the closing credits, the stealthily inserted pop culture parodies, the ancillary characters like the eccentrically hirsute Starburns.
Tonight’s episode is a blast, for many reasons I don’t have the heart to spoil for you, but above all for how it so clearly conveys the sense that Dan Harmon and his crew simply could not wait, after four months, to deliver these laughs to you.
Here’s what I can tell you: As Jeff (Joel McHale) and the gang return to Greendale Community College, they no longer have the same Spanish class, but they have a year’s worth of shared history. That includes, from the end of season one, Britta’s (Gillian Jacobs) declaration of love for Jeff and Jeff’s impulsive kiss with Annie (Alison Brie). This gets addressed fairly quickly in the episode, as does the new status of former Spanish teacher / nemesis Señor Chang (Ken Jeong), as does the need for the study group to remain together. Because this is 2010 and you need Betty White on your TV show, Betty White appears, as a fearsome new anthropology teacher.
[For more of the show’s plans for the season, and simply a general sense of the delight the creative team and cast take in it, see Jace Lacob’s feature at The Daily Beast.]
The debut also doubles down on something I could do with less of, the show’s constant self-awareness and referencing of other TV shows, delivered especially through the character of Abed (Danny Pudi). After a puzzling conversation in the premiere, Jeff asks him, “Abed, why are you mining my life for classic sitcom scenarios?” Answers Abed, “I’m hoping we can move away from the soapy, relationshippy stuff and into bigger, fast-paced, self-contained escapades.”
The exchange is funny, but it also takes me out of the show, and the regular awareness that I’m watching a pop-culture work that knows its a pop-culture work about other pop-culture works limits the show’s upside for me. (By which I simply mean that I think Community is excellent, but can’t quite put it in the league of NBC’s missed-until-midseason Parks and Recreation, Starz’s recently departed Party Down, or FX’s new Louie.)
But I accept that this is what the show is, and what saves moments like this is that it’s more than simple cold self-consciousness. Abed—whom Pudi plays with beautifully calibrated eccentricity—is conscious of the sitcom tropes around him because he’s hyper-conscious of himself, and he’s as self-conscious as he is because this is the mechanism he’s developed to deal with life and understand other people. (He’s something like an alien who’s come to understand Earthlings by watching satellite transmissions that bounced into deep space.)
In other words, Abed’s a character, not just a narrative device. Community, true to its premise, started with a group of characters who we were inclined to see as types (the crusty old man, the ingenue, the nerd) and fleshed them out without losing the show’s surrealistic sense of play. The ensemble is so good that while it got the most attention a year ago for casting veteran Chevy Chase—who is no slouch as the brusque, clueless Pierce—his character by now is just one among the ensemble.
What makes Community not just funny but engaging is that it doesn’t lose its essential sweetness amid the rapid-fire gags and Easter eggs. The gags and eggs are there, though—there’s an inspired, meta-referential online tie-in to tonight’s episode that I am dying to tell you about but won’t—and they make watching each episode like dumping out an overstuffed Christmas stocking.
Community will need every treat it can offer, because the already ratings-challenged show is scheduled against CBS’s just-moved The Big Bang Theory, which has its own vein of geek humor and a dangerously similar audience demographic. (The show’s Thursday competition, and other off-screen developments, have also not escaped the attention of Harmon and the writers—and that’s all I’m going to say.)
The choice between them is easy for me, but if you love both and want to keep them around, DVR Big Bang and make Community your priority. It needs you, and we need it.