Every season of Community recently seems like it has some unfortunate circumstances that it has to overcome to prove itself. The third season had to somehow match the amazing and genre-defining second season (which it mostly managed to do, despite inevitably dropping slightly from that seasons' earth-shattering heights). The fourth season had to prove that, without the careful hand of creator Dan Harmon, the show was still Community (which it wasn't, really). And the fifth season had perhaps the hardest task yet. With Harmon back at the helm, Season 5 had to save the show. After the rightly-maligned fourth season, Community was no longer TV's best, most thoughtful, and most unpredictable sitcom like it was during the original Harmon years. Could Season 5 change that? Could it restore the show to being one of the most exciting things in the world of comedy, like it had been before?
Basically, it did as well as it could. While Harmon's return added a jolt of energy to the aging Community, it was still very much a show in its fifth season. A show in its fifth season can't be as surprising and exciting as a show in its first or second season, simply because by this point, we know the show's game. We know what to expect. This is true especially of sitcoms, which can only go so far to change their own status quo out of fear of messing with the formula that makes the show what it is. Even a show as unique as Community relies on some form of formula to keep the engine running, and this was strangely most true in the shows' concept episodes, which felt a bit more rudimentary than they did in the shows' early days. While concept episodes once allowed the show to experiment with new storytelling methods to gain new insight on its characters, the fifth seasons' concept episodes felt like episodes the show was doing because everyone expects them to. There was some gold within them - "Basic Intergluteal Numismatics" was a messy but fascinating endeavor, and "Geothermal Escapism" was a fitting combination of insanity and emotion to send off one the shows' most integral characters, but there were also episodes like "Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (which felt like a reheated version of Season 2's Dungeons & Dragons episode, one of the shows' very best) and "G.I. Jeff" (which managed to be a funny send-up that said some interesting things about Jeff but sort of abandoned them by the end of the episode).
Still, it's hard not to call Season 5 an incredibly comeback when it produced episodes like "Cooperative Polygraphy" and "Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality". These two episodes found the characters at the most grounded they've been since arguably the second season, and it managed to dig into the core sadness and longing that drives Community at its best. Both episodes used tactics that worked in the past - getting all of the characters around the study table for the former (used most memorably in the hysterical and weirdly moving "Cooperative Calligraphy"), and taking the characters out of Greendale to analyze who they really are for the latter (used in my personal favorite episode "Mixology Certification" as well as in the gently heartbreaking "Critical Film Studies"). It was in these episodes that Community showcased best how far it had come from the doldrums of the "gas leak year" - while that season only seemed concerned with the characters on a surface level, this season returned to trying to figure out who these people are beneath the surface. I argued in my last Community piece that this side of the show is what makes the show able to pull off its conceptual side, and that was never more true this season. Had this season been an endless march of "G.I. Jeff"s, things would've felt pretty hollow. But episodes like "Polygraphy" and "Bondage" were able to bring a level of insight that both kept the season afloat and gave the concept episodes a much stronger leg to stand on.
So if this season of Community occasionally felt a little tired, it was only because this is a sitcom in its fifth season, and that's natural. For the most part, this was still a show that used some amazing, deeper-rooted character work to pull off some of the more interesting structural experiments you'll ever find in a television comedy. At this point last season, I was desperately hoping Community would get a fifth season not necessarily because I was looking forward to watching it (since I figured it'd be another Harmon-less year) but because I couldn't stand the thought of one of my favorite shows of all-time ending on a season (and an episode) that mostly made me sad and angry. This year, I'm desperately hoping for a sixth season because I genuinely want more of this show that I love again. (And because, you know, #sixseasonsandamovie and all). That alone speaks for how far Community has come back this year, doesn't it?
Now bring on that sixth season. And the movie.
Final Grade: B+
(or, four MeowMeowBeenz)
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