Community: Season 4

I buy a lot of TV seasons I've already seen, and end up watching them a second time. (As you all know, DVD purchasing is one of my biggest vices.) In my experience it has often been the case that mediocre seasons of television comedies improve the second time around. For some reason - probably a combination of reduced expectations and binge-ability - I tend to come out of a lot of these re-watches with a more forgiving attitude.

That just wasn't the case with the fourth season of Community. I don't need to re-hash all the behind-the-scenes melodrama, but suffice it to say for those not in the know that there was a huge turnover within the Community crew after the third season, particularly in the creative realm, and the drop in quality and overall tonal softening couldn't have been more obvious. For some reason though, in some sort of anti-cynical attempt at naivety, I spent most of Season 4 reiterating - mostly to myself - that I didn't really think the show had gotten that bad. There were a few duds and missteps, but overall, the new showrunners were just struggling to balance the twin tasks of maintaining the show's legacy while also making it their own.

But I spent the last two nights watching these thirteen episodes again and, well, no. These just aren't good. Specifically, they get better toward the end of the season in general, but even then there's no consistency. What's stranger is that critics and fans never seemed able to agree on which episodes were decent and which were awful; although the season as a whole was widely despised, I can't say the same thing about any one particular episode.

There's reason for optimism, though. Not only was a fifth season greenlit against all - no, seriously, all - odds, but creator Dan Harmon has been rehired to run the show. Most of his best writers have found work elsewhere, Chevy Chase is finally gone for good, and now even Donald Glover is edging his way out and will appear in only five of the upcoming thirteen episodes, but there's still some cause for hope here. At this point I don't want to see a sixth season. Truthfully, I never even wanted to see a fifth. But it'd be nice to see Dan Harmon and company salvage enough pieces here to go out with a bang. I'd like to be able one day to think back on Community and say, "I'm glad the fourth season was just a brief dip in quality in what was otherwise an excellent show." We'll see.