Community quickly became my favorite show on television relatively early in its first season (the Halloween episode was the clincher,) and I have been a devoted fan of the show through its first three seasons. The show managed to have a kind of "have its cake and eat it too" quality, with solid, grounded characters who were nevertheless able to go off and do some of the most absurd and ridiculous things on television (admittedly, the two non-study group members of the main cast, Ken Jeong's Ben Chang and Jim Rash's Craig Pelton were never all that grounded - though the Dean gets one episode in season three that shows some of the underlying cause to his bizarreness.)
The show has been a place to engage in a kind of child-like, inventive play, but because the show is written by adults, it also explores the underlying psychological imperatives that inform that play.
Sadly, behind the scenes at the show, there has been a great deal of drama, particularly between stunt-cast regular Chevy Chase and the show's creator and show runner Dan Harmon. After a public feud between Chase and Harmon, at the end of season three it was announced that Harmon had been fired. The result, then, is this strange beast known as Community Season Four. At the time of this writing, Dan Harmon has been hired back to run the show's fifth season, after Chase quit the show some time during season four (the producers wisely got coverage of him for the finale before he quit.)
I'm not particularly interested in the drama behind the scenes, particularly as it casts a shadow on the rest of the cast, which is one of the best television comedy ensembles I've ever seen.
I'll admit, though, that I avoided season four. The show was so much Dan Harmon's baby that I worried that the tone would be off, and the humor might become broader, and the balance between the outlandish and the grounded would be off.
Reports among my peers suggested that this was the case, that the show had lost its magic, and that it was terrible.
Well, I just watched the fourth season, and I actually have to disagree. Terrible? No. All of the worries I mentioned two paragraphs up? Well, they did come to pass, but not to their full extents. Yes, the show lost a bit of its character polish, and I felt like we really missed out on a lot of Greendale campus life stories that give the world of the show much of its depth (I adore how the show brings back one-line characters time and again.)
But I think that the core of the show - using over-the-top ridiculousness to deal with real character issues - remained the same.
If I were Dan Harmon, I'd be mortified at what I was looking at, and it does almost feel unfaithful to like the show without its mad inventor at the wheel, but I am also a huge fan of the show itself, not to mention Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ken Jeong, and Jim Rash (and truth be told, I actually thought Chevy Chase's Pierce Hawthorne was good for the show when they weren't writing him as much of a jerk as the actor who played him.)
On the other hand, it took a while to get me to watch through it, even if I did so in basically one long binge. The fact that Dan Harmon is coming back (I don't want to imagine how awkward that must be for the folks at Sony) in a way makes this easier to watch than, say, West Wing after season four. The danger now is to set our expectations too high.
Yes, they shoehorned in some paintball, and yes, the character of Greendale was not as present as much as we might hope, but I think that people need to chill out. It was still Community.
Looking forward to Season Five! (Hey, so… did season four just last a semester? Jeff graduated early, but if it was a full year, then everyone would have anyway, so… Yeah. Must have been. Ok.)
