It’s taken all of three weeks, but even after this episode – probably the weakest the show has done yet – I’m starting to really fall for Community and fall hard. It’s been a long while since I’ve fallen for a new comedy in its first handful of episodes (well, OK, it’s been since Party Down last spring), but here we are in the fall of 2009, and I’ve fallen for this and Modern Family, like it’s the 1980s and sitcoms rule the airwaves or something. Will wonders never cease? What I liked about this episode of Community was that it continued its pattern of sending the characters into odd pairings with each other, pairing up Troy and Pierce and Britta and Abed, and that those pairings made sense, while the characters stayed true to themselves. Comedies are built both around the characters in them and the relationships between those characters, and Community is already testing out a large number of permutations of its cast and finding most of them successful.
As always, let’s start with what I didn’t like. I thought the episode’s messages were a little – OK, a lot – heavy-handed. John Michael Higgins’ accounting professor who imagines he’s in Dead Poets Society was a really great character, especially as he challenged Jeff to seize the day, but his speech in act two (meant to be a turning point for Jeff, I think) hit the nail on the head a little hard, and even though both Higgins and the script tried to play it off ironically, it was too obviously the show’s actual philosophy to make that wholly work. I love that Community is, by and large, a comedy about a cynic surrounded by people who aren’t cynics and aren’t afraid to tell him that his point-of-view is largely self-defeating, but having him be all, “Or you will fail at LIFE!!!!” was a little too underlined for even me.
That said, the show knows how to have a heart and keep it funny, as evidenced by that final sequence, where Abed showed everyone his film about his mom and dad (“Well, it’s not exactly Citizen Kane,” said Jeff). The film was queasily hilarious, mostly for the bargain basement production values and the shots of Abed’s head bouncing around a series of, uh, needles or the crude footage of his parents’ faces pasted over Jeff and Britta’s heads. And even as the sequence was strange and offputting and weirdly funny, it took a left turn into actual poignancy when the film brought Abed’s dad (played by the principal from Glee) to tears, leading him to tell his son that it wasn’t his fault his mother left. Considering most of the episode hinged on Abed’s dad being mad that he was taking a film class instead of preparing to take over the family falafel business, it was a surprisingly moving end.
The Jeff subplot didn’t work quite as well in that regard. It made for some wonderful sight gags – like Jeff wearing the rainbow suspenders (and when he yelled “Shazbot,” this show won me over for life) – but the overall arc of the storyline, which mostly seemed designed to give us another chance for the show to beat Jeff over the head for the wrongness of his lifestyle. This sort of storyline mostly works when the character who’s being taught a lesson’s life seems sort of charming on the surface, and it’s only gradually revealed how empty that life really is. Having a professor – no matter how wacky and off-the-wall and how much a parody of previous college-set movies – tell him this outright just felt like too heavy of a hand on the sentimentality button. On the other hand, it led to a lot of great moments between Jeff and Britta (whose chemistry is surprisingly smoldering even at this early stage) and a wonderful final kiss where Britta got one over on Jeff again.