You Can't Disappoint a Picture!: Community Gets Back To Its Roots (Literally)

There is one word to describe last night’s Community—brilliant.  Complete with LeVar Burton, last night’s Community had SO many random aspects to it, but amazingly enough, it worked!

Let me start by saying, I have been very critical of Community this season.  I felt like Season 1 of Community was excellent.  Every episode was laugh out loud funny, and I think I came into Season 2 with the bar held a bit too high. 

I wasn’t impressed with the beginning of Season 2 when Community was constantly doing parodies.  Yes, the parody episodes in Season 1 were done well (i.e. Modern Warfare).  But it seems like the successes of these past episodes made the Community writers think “Gee, parodies go over great with the audience.  Wouldn’t it be AWESOME to do a parody in EVERY episode?”  The writers failed to realize that too much of a good thing never bodes well. Seeing parody after parody this season, I longed for my simple, character focused show to come back.  Luckily the TV gods seemed to listen to me.  In past weeks, Community has been picking up steam, and last night it was better than ever.

Although one can argue that Community did do a parody last night, I don’t really agree.  Yes Community was clearly making fun of documentary style sitcoms with the way it was shot, but that wasn’t the focus of the episode. The episode was character driven (maybe Glee should take notes) and surprise, surprise it worked! 

Despite Community doing well lately, last week’s episode (“Early 21st Century Romanticism”) disappointed me again.  It seemed to forget how ensemble shows tend to work.  When you have an ensemble cast as amazing as the one you have in Community, EACH of the main characters deserves screen time.  In “Early 21st Century Romanticism” many main characters were neglected (Shirley was barely even in it).  One of the main reasons last night’s episode (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking) was so good was because it gave each of the characters a chance to shine….including Pierce.

Pierce has been annoying me to no end this season.  I love Chevy Chase, but I hate how evil Pierce has become.  Pierce was always senile and racist, don’t get me wrong, but never evil. When character traits or plots come out of nowhere, it really bugs me.  And up until last night, I felt like Pierce’s descent into madness came out of nowhere.  Finally last night’s episode allowed him to voice his opinions both to the group at large and to the camera a la talking heads (I guess Abed was right—documentary-style sitcoms really do allow complex problems to be easily understood).  Once he explained why he was seeking vengeance on the group everything started to make more sense to me.  I started seeing him as a tool to bring the group together in an extremely hysterical way—which I think is genius on the writers’ part.

The whole episode last night, was set in the hospital (something very un-Community-esque).  After a drug overdose Pierce is forced to stay there, and as a result his friends stay to look after him.  Considering Pierce has not been happy with his study buddies lately, he convinces them that he really is dying and starts to bequeath (LOVE that word) gifts to them. As the episode went on he called each member of the group one by one into his hospital room. When each of them entered the room, he gave them a “gift” (aka an item meant to personally screw with them).  Every gift was perfect.  I loved how Pierce was able to dissect the quirks/personal problems of every single character and give them gifts that were subtle yet tormenting. 

From the audience’s perspective, Pierce’s actions allowed fans to get a more in depth view of the characters.  We always see Jeff as a jerk who appears to be apathetic to everything.  Pierce knew the only way he could break Jeff Winger down was to go after the one thing that would make any person break down—daddy issues.  Pierce told Jeff that he got Jeff’s dad to come which did not go over too well with Jeff.  Although Jeff denied it, he began to freak out, and getting to see that was hysterical.  I especially loved when Jeff saw Abed filming him, told Abed that he was NOT upset and continued to tell Abed not to cut to scenes of Jeff freaking out upon final edit of the documentary (which Abed obviously did).  Not only did all of this show us a different side to Jeff, it made fun of documentary sitcoms at the same time.  The mixture of meta and actual story for that moment was absolutely fabulous. 

Now all the characters in the episode were funny.  Like I already said it was nice to see Jeff emotional for once.  It was also fun to see Brita being tormented over her “selflessness,” Annie freaking out over nothing, Shirley realizing she uses guilt as a weapon.

And while it was nice to see all of these character quirks come to the forefront, the storyline that was by far the funniest was Troy’s.  We learn in this episode that Troy has an obsession with LeVar Burton (Roots, Star Trek, Reading Rainbow dude).  When Pierce brought LeVar Burton to meet Troy, even I didn’t see what would be so bad about it.  But seeing Troy FREAKING OUT saying how he NEVER wanted to personally meet LeVar Burton because you “can’t disappoint a picture,” killed me. I literally had to pause the show I was laughing so hard.  And if me laughing that hard at something isn’t proof of what a true comedy should be doing, I don’t k now what is.  And as if Troy’s initial freak out wasn’t good enough, we also got to see him singing the Reading Rainbow song, staring open eyed at LeVar Burton and nearing have an entire meltdown in front of poor Kunta. Donald Glover is just too amazing for words.

As you can tell, this episode was great on so many levels.  It allowed Community to explore a new format, it allowed Community to be meta (which we all know that show LOVES to do), it allowed the audience to learn more about the characters, and it allowed Community to grow plot wise.  In fact this episode was jam packed with so much awesomeness, that I am going to have to include a list of stuff I loved that I didn’t already mention.  So to conclude I guess I need to judge this episode as a WIN LOSS or TIE.  But come on guys…do I even need to say it?  I am The TV Referee so I guess I will despite the extreme obviousness….this episode was a gigantic, over the top, awesomely amazing WIN.

Other things I loved that I didn’t already mention:

• Troy and Abed’s FIREFLY reference
• Annie truly being Pierce’s favorite
• Jeff and Brita bickering (which led to a wonderful Oingo Boingo reference)
• Hearing LEVAR BURTON sing Reading Rainbow HIMSELF
• Seeing Shirley film her own talking head

There might be more things I haven’t even really digested yet…I’ll have to re-watch.  There was too much funny to take in at once

Please leave comments with YOUR favorite parts and opinions of this episode.  Like always, I can’t wait to hear what you guys thought!