Last year, after NBC cancelled the oft-praised, oft-jeopardized Community after five seasons, Yahoo stepped in and saved it, because that’s what the Internet does now. But what did it save, exactly?
Like many sitcoms deep into their run, the show had seen attrition: Donald Glover had left, and Yvette Nicole Brown would soon join him (as well as recurring figures like John Oliver, now of HBO). Its premise had shifted with age, as the study group graduated, though the fifth season kept them together with the mission of rescuing Greendale Community College. The college was saved and the show was saved, but that left each with a question: what now?
The first two new episodes (premiering on Yahoo Screen March 17; here’s how to watch) still seem to be figuring it out. Community still feels very much like the same show in tone, sense of humor and production quality. The structure is more or less like the NBC version (though the second episode runs an extra-long 26-plus minutes). But what started out as an odd, emotionally charged series about motley misfits getting their lives back together is in the process of becoming… something to be determined.
The premiere, in typical Community style, is mainly about being the season premiere of a sitcom. The departure of Brown’s Shirley is explained, then dissected meta-style. “Like Troy?” demands Chang (Ken Jeong). “Do any of you white people notice what’s happening to this group?” Stepping in is Francesca “Frankie” Dart (Paget Brewster), an all-business new administrator assigned to ride herd on the committee, and soon Abed (Danny Pudi) is parsing her addition as a stand-in for the audience and critics: “I’m worried you’re not distinct enough from Annie, both in terms of physicality and purpose.”
Whatever doubts you’ve had about the changes, Community has already pre-doubted them. But the first thing that matters is if the latest reboot still has the comedy goods, and it does. A decade ago, Brewster was an MVP on the similarly eccentric Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and she’s custom-fit for Community‘s fast pace and commitment to absurdity. The second new episode is especially funny, combining two favorite Community modes–period pop-culture parody and outrageous visual gambits–as Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) becomes obsessed with a dated virtual-reality system created by an inventor (Keith David) in the 1990s.
What’s missing–and to be fair, what requires more than two episodes to judge–is a sense of mission regarding the characters. The original gang has evolved from where they were at the beginning; Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) has gone from misanthropic disgraced lawyer to slightly jerky teacher, for instance.
Beyond the show’s astonishing inventiveness and world-building, Community‘s emotional power–what made it not just funny but gorgeous and great–came from Dan Harmon’s melancholic, lovely story about a boxful of broken toys trying to fix one another. No one ever becomes perfect, of course, but by the end of five seasons, they largely succeeded. They saved themselves, and they saved Greendale (again, imperfectly). Without a similar project, the two new episodes are very funny–the best bits, of course, I’m clamming up about so you can be surprised by them–but we’ll have to see if the show can be as emotionally involving again.
Maybe it doesn’t need to be. Maybe it’s enough for Community, free of the ratings pressures of NBC, to live its second life free to be weird and playful and experimental. Maybe the sixth season (if not the movie) will move this project forward, having each character negotiate new challenges of post-college adulthood. Maybe the former study group can be fixed but still funny.
But you have to wonder, as Jeff puts it in an argument with Frankie in the season premiere, “How much can you improve Greendale before it stops being Greendale?” As always, leave it to Community to be its own best critic.
LIFE Watches TV: Classic Photos of People and Their Television Sets
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) executives watch a brand new invention called television, their New York offices before introducing the product to the public, 1939.Carl Mydans—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesWriter Russell Finch enjoys a smoke, a bath and a TV show in 1948George Skadding—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesMen gather to watch TV through a store window in Pennsylvania in 1948.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA boy watches TV in an appliance store window in 1948.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesSisters at St. Vincent's Hospital in Erie, Penn., watch a program on a new local TV station, 1949.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesWatching a Western on TV in 1950.Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA group of swimmers at an indoor pool watch the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Jacob Malik, filibustering in the UN Security Council in 1950.George Skadding—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesGrade school kids in Minneapolis watch a video "classroom lesson" on TV while the city's public schools are on strike in 1951.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA rapt audience in a Chicago bar watches the 1952 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. (The Yankees won.)Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesSix-year-old girls use a "Winky Dink" drawing kit on their home TV screen as they watch the kids' program, 1953. The show, which aired for four years in the 1950s, has been cited as "the first interactive TV show," especially in light of its "magic drawing screen" — a piece of plastic that stuck to the TV screen, and on which kids (and, no doubt, some adults) would trace the action on the screen.Walter Sanders—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA performing chimpanzee named Zippy watches TV in 1955.Michael Rougier—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesAn adopted Korean war orphan, Kang Koo Ri, watches television in his new home in Los Angeles in 1956.Allan Grant—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesMilwaukee fans watch the 1957 World Series, when their Braves beat the Yankees in seven, behind three complete-game victories by the gutsy Lew Burdette.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA railroad worker's family watches TV in a trailer at a camp for Southern Pacific employees in Utah in 1957.Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesAn awe-struck baseball fan is seized with utter delight as he watches the Braves win their first and only World Series while based in Milwaukee in 1957.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA traveling businessman watches TV in a hotel room in 1958.Nat Farbman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesTenant farmer Thomas B. Knox and his family watch Ed Sullivan and ventriloquist Rickie Layne on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958.Ed Clark—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesPicketing workers watch TV in a tent outside the gates of a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, during a strike in 1959.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesVice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, watch the 1960 GOP convention in Chicago from their hotel suite.Hank Walker—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesThe Kim Sisters — a Korean-born singing trio who had some success in the U.S. in the 1960s — watch television in Chicago in 1960.Robert W. Kelley—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesEventual VP candidate Lyndon Johnson watches TV during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.Thomas D. McAvoy—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA "Three-Eyed TV Monster" created by Ulises Sanabria which permits simultaneous two- and three-screen viewing, 1961.Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesAstronaut Scott Carpenter's wife, Rene, and son, Marc, watch his 1962 orbital flight on TV. Carpenter's was NASA's second manned orbital flight, after John Glenn's, and lasted nearly five hours.Ralph Morse—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesDie-hard New York Giants fans watch the 1962 NFL championship game against the Packers outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the NYC-area TV blackout, December 1962. Green Bay won, 16-7.John Loengard—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesA crowd watches John F. Kennedy address the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962.Ralph Crane—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesFrank Sinatra watches his son, Frank Jr., 21, emcee a TV show, 1964.
John Dominis—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesDifferent CATV (Community Antenna Television) stations available to subscribers in Elmira, New York, in 1966.Arthur Schatz —The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesActress Diahann Carroll and journalist David Frost watch themselves on separate talk shows. Carroll and Frost were engaged for a while, but never married.Bill Ray—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
