Community’s characters go back to college
When last we saw Community nearly a year ago, Greendale Community College had narrowly missed being sold to Subway, the sandwich people. Typically, it was a metaphor for the show itself, which had struggled to survive throughout the years. “Save Greendale” was the fifth season’s theme.
Also, the show was then on NBC, a television network. It returns to the world this week via Yahoo Screen on the Internet.
But unlike Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu Plus, it doesn’t require a subscription. Apart from the venue and some changes in the cast, it is the Community you may know and maybe love.
That the series lasted as long as it did on broadcast TV seems a miracle. It was the last to première of a Thursday night group of self-aware ensemble comedies that also included The Office, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation that were, for a time, all that NBC had going for it in the way of prestige. “A show set in a community college,” to steal a description of the show from the show itself, Community continues to achieve a tricky balance of cynicism, sentiment and surreality. Series commander Dan Harmon, who seems from afar to present an unusual mix of dishevelment and perfectionism, and who spent the fourth season fired from his own creation, maintains a firm hand on the wheel.
As before, it stars Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Dani Pudi, Alison Brie, Ken Jeong and Jim Rash as a collection of geeks and weirdos allowed the run of the school. Gone are Yvette Nicole Brown, who played Shirley, along with last year’s recurring players John Oliver and Jonathan Banks.
New regulars offset the loss. Keith David (lately of Enlisted) brings back the older character that Chevy Chase once represented and, ethnically speaking, redresses the loss of Brown and the earlier loss of Donald Glover. As Jeong’s Ben Chang asks early in the season première, “Have any of you white people noticed what’s happened to this group? Do Abed and I need to be concerned?”
Paget Brewster plays Frankie, a financial consultant assigned by Rash’s Dean to work with the other characters’ study group/committee room, to their near-unanimous disap- proval. At first, she seems to come from a more conventional, well-organized reality — her even-tempered effect is something new for Community — but we will later see that this is not exactly the case.
“My umbrella concern is that you as a character represent the end of what I used to call ‘our show,’ ” Abed (Pudi) tells her.
“This is the first I’ve heard that I’m a character on a show,” says Frankie, who is, of course, a character on a show.
Community is not the first show to make a point of its own artifice. But the show lives in consciousness of its own construction in an existential but also dramatically meaningful way.