Man, am I wrong, or have none of you seen the sixth and final season of Community? I mean, I get it - that Yahoo streaming service sucked something awful, and the show was down to four of its original seven main cast members anyway, and frankly you didn't miss any late-breaking entrants into the Community episode hall of fame or anything. But still - it's Community! Didn't we all love Community?
That this thing made it to six seasons is a well-documented miracle, but the age was certainly showing. Down to four main characters - Jeff, Abed, Britta, and Annie - the show leaned as heavily as it ever has on Chang, the Dean, and - wait, no, really, that's all we've got left here. Even John Oliver is long gone, off on his sweet little HBO gig. Joining the cast are Paget Brewster (to fill the "adult female" role left behind by Yvette Nicole Brown's departure) and Keith David ("are you black Pierce or old Troy?") and while they were plenty serviceable, the characters never seemed to really, I dunno, matter. That said, neither did any of the main characters, now in their sixth year at a community college and no longer taking classes together (save for in an episode or two). There were thirteen episodes in the season, and given that Community wanted to get in another paintball episode and another documentary episode, and spend a couple episodes introducing the new characters, and wrap things up nicely with a poignant finale, that only left like eight to ten episodes to play around with.
But as much as it felt like Community went out with a whimper - and it was nothing but bang bang bang in its first three seasons - there's a certain grace and dignity when a show "dies of old age" or whatever. The finale wasn't perfect, and one scene in the third act felt downright lumpy and out of place, but it was such a good Community conclusion; the characters, sitting around the study table (and later a bar) as summer begins, each envision what "Season 7" would look like. And after lots of goofy pitches, the saddest one of all belongs to Jeff, who suddenly realizes that the eight-person study table might one day soon include the likes of Garrett, Vicky, Leonard, and Todd. It's as if Dan Harmon was coming to grips right alongside Jeff - "sure, we can keep on going, but at a certain point, what are we even doing here?" Jeff then defiantly reimagines his own pitch, and suddenly it's a future where the whole crew is hanging out in the teacher's lounge - Annie's teaching criminology, Abed's got a pop culture class going on, Britta's the school shrink - and when he's done pitching this one, he just kind of gets a lot of sad, blank looks. Annie and Abed are young and have their whole lives ahead of them - why would they want to hang out at Greendale forever? (Again, I picture Harmon coming to grips with Alison Brie and Danny Pudi leaving the show sooner rather than later in order to test their star power elsewhere.)
Before the finale came out, and long before Yahoo Screen folded, Harmon and others had publicly stated that they were happy to keep Community going as long as someone would allow it to do so. But the finale suggests that he never really meant that - the hashtag was always "six seasons and a movie," after all, and, yeah, it was just time.
But damn do I still want that movie. (Come back, Donald Glover!)
One last thing - the tags at the end of the episodes in Season 6 got really damn dark. Most of them had nothing to do with characters we'd even seen on the show before - they were almost like little two-minute films only barely inspired by the preceding episode. Anyway, here are some of my favorites:
No comments:
Post a Comment