Too Many People Looking Back

Clip shows are a mainstay of sitcoms.  A chance to look back at high points and, even better, a chance to get full pay for less work.  They're also a chance for new viewers to learn a bit about the show while older viewers can wallow in nostalgia (or change the channel).

Just by chance, two of NBC's Thursday sitcom lineup did their take on a clip show last week, 30 Rock and Community.  Both shows are too hip to do it conventionally, but one worked while the other didn't.

30 Rock was broadcasting its 100th episode--actually, at an hour, its 100th and 101st--which is a prime time to do a clip show (and a chance for producers to celebrate because they now have enough in the can to run five days a week in syndication).  The arc lately has been Kabletown's bought NBC and TGS, the show within the show, will be canceled unless Tracy Jordan, its missing star, returns. This week was about getting him back, and while he had his adventures, every character on the show had a chance to think back about how they got to this place (hence the clips), aided by a gas leak in the building creating hallucinations.

I thought it was a weaker than usual episode, with the clips not adding much. (I did like the bit where newer cast member Cheyenne Jackson, who's never had much to do, had the flashbacks of former cast member Lonny Ross.) I especially didn't like the gas, a grating plot that wouldn't go away.  There were enough complications without it. In fact, the show is already about crazy people doing crazy things with plenty of cutaways--making these thin characters even crazier is a bad idea.

The threat of the show being canceled, and all the characters hating each other, was mostly schmuck bait (stuff that we're supposed to worry about but would never happen or the sitcom is over), so it was hard to care about the plot.  There were decent jokes here and there, so perhaps it would have worked better as a half hour, with no gas.

Community, on the other hand, had one of its better episodes, and maybe its most unusual.  It was very meta, which I usually don't like--it's too cheap and easy--but if you're gonna do it, you might as well go all the way.  (Community has always been meta--especially with Abed, the character who compares everything to pop culture--but they've managed to balance it within the ensemble.) Indeed, the episode started with the group making a diorama, which is all they ever seem to do for some classes, and it's a representation of them making a diorama.

To call it a clip show is actually a misnomer.  It had the form of a clip show, with the cast reminiscing (due to the schmuck bait of the study group breaking up), but all the flashbacks were completely new.  In fact, while clip shows are usually a chance to lower the budgets, this must have been the most expensive episode they ever shot.  We saw cutaways to former episodes that never happened, featuring classic sitcom tropes--a trip to a Wild West town, a night in a haunted mansion, getting stuck in a booby hatch and others.  There was even a flashback to their claymation episode, except it was new claymation. (The Clerks TV show once did a fake flashback episode, but that was animated, and it cost the same no matter where they went.)

These flashbacks were used to comment on the show, of course.  There was a montage, for example, of Jeff's "big speeches" cut together as one.  Many of the flashbacks were about things that fans of the show have noted--it was the producers telling the audience they were aware of what's going on.  For example, a slow montage of "meaningful moments" from Jeff and Annie's relationship, or quick cuts showing the selfishness of Jeff and Britta, or a series of women's costumes the dean wore.  Some bits had less to do with the characters and were just there as stand-alone gags, such as their wicked parody of Glee.

It's a good thing that most of these bits worked, because there was almost no story.  On the other hand, most clip shows help to introduce the sitcom to newbies, but the less you know about this show, the more confusing it would have been.

PS Paul Reiser's show, on after Community, did so badly in the ratings it was canceled after two episodes.  I watched both outings and it wasn't much, but it was no worse than a bunch of other comedies out there.