With Dan Harmon back at the helm of Community, it doesn’t take long for the show to start feeling like itself – both “Repilot” and “Introduction to Teaching” bring back the darker, sharper edge of the show lost in the fourth season, a collection of episodes that largely felt like a series of fan fiction stories with bigger budgets. And although all of “Repilot” and most of “Introduction of Teaching” feels consumed with the task of unraveling last season’s mess, there are plenty of signs Community is back on the right track this season – a season that seemed so improbable only nine or ten months ago.
Like the original Community pilot, “Repilot” opens with Jeff Winger reaching a new low point in his adult life: a failed excursion as a defense lawyer has a broke, desperate Jeff pulling at strings – desperate to the point we get a view of the man Jeff was fiour years ago: a man who would manipulate anyone to his ends (like creating a fake study group to sleep with a girl, as he did in the show’s “first” pilot). It’s the same group of people he’s trying to coerce, too: everyone else has been through a shitty year away from school, be it Annie selling drugs to little Annie’s, or Shirley’s lack of money, family, husband, or career. Every single one of the Greendale Seven has failed once again in the real world – an existential punishment forced upon Harmon by the show’s fourth season, which pulled characters way out of orbit with the people we once knew them as (something the show addresses in it’s most meta scene ever, with Jeff breaking down just where each character went wrong in the last batch of episodes).
For awhile, it seems like “Repilot” is going out of its way to show us what a fantastic place Greendale is – which it is, despite the information Jeff discovers (and says) about it in the episode’s first half. Be it the school or the show’s characters, Harmon’s rigid four-quarter plot structure remains strong: in the beginning, all begin as flawed, ugly, and most likely evil – but the last half of the episode shows us the other side of the people and the school they attend, reminding us that there’s no right answer to whether Greendale is a good or bad place (something reiterated with Abed and his journey through Nicholas Cage’s film career in “Introduction to Teaching”), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any truth to be found. Greendale might produce some shitty graduates, but it is a place where messed up people can be comfortable working through their messed up problems, a comfortable purgatory where discovery of self comes before actual education (again proving the oxymoron that is life: the good and the bad eventually balance themselves out).
Getting the characters of Community back at Greendale was a pretty easy task for Harmon, Chris McKenna (who co-wrote “Repilot” with Harmon) and crew to accomplish: any comedy can re-tool itself on the fly when needed, for better or worse (see: Scrubs season nine, which I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot about this season). Where Community does a terrific job is finding meaning in this re-purposing of characters and situations, with things like Troy’s loss of personality since becoming part of Troy & Abed, or Abed realizing he’ll never be the filmmaker he wants to be if he can’t work with people (he quits Jeff’s lawyer commercial because of “creative differences” over the business phone number showing on-screen). And it does so by being out-loud funny for the first time (it feels like) in ages: even the latter episodes of season three were too wacky and dark to be hilarious (or in reality, being emotionally engaging).
It’s hard to judge a show by it’s first two episodes – and in particular, ones like “Repilot” and “Introduction to Teaching” that have to reset the show’s status quo. What’s important is not where these characters are going in this world, but how they’re getting there, and that’s what the first hour of Community gets right, setting the stage for a number of interesting story lines to follow through the truncated fifth season. Beyond the genius pop culture parodies and hilarious genre homages, Community was a show about flawed people going back to college to try and better themselves, something they couldn’t do without a family – and for the first time in a long time, it feels like the show’s starting to remember that.
“Repilot” – A-
“Introduction to Teaching” – B
Other thoughts/observations:
– I spoke mostly about “Repilot” up there: “Introduction to Teaching” is a fine episode that neatly slides Jeff back into the rotation on Greendale’s campus, despite some climatic moments that feel rushed through. Not a particularly funny episode, but still eons more entertaining than some of last season’s head-shakers.
– The Ghost of Christmas Pierce!
– Troy’s plan: to wait for Abed to make a billion dollars on the next social network, then sue him so they’re both rich.
– “messed-up cartoons” is an accurate way to describe most of season four – and an explicit reference to the Scooby-Doo! homage?
– Abed, to Jeff: “But what you do is above lying… you show us the right truth.”
– Abed, to table: “Resume table mode.”
– Looking forward to lots more Buzz Hickey, even if I couldn’t care less about his cartoon duck.
– Troy: “Et tu, Brute…. am I using that right?”
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