Tis The Season

The latest Community, "Cooperative Escapism In Familial Relations,” may have been the best of the season so far, but still wasn't much.  It had Jeff finally meet his father with therapist Britta helping out, while the rest of the gang attended Shirley's Thanksgiving dinner and then tried to avoid it (with a Shawshank parody that never quite took off).

At the recent Paley Fest (which I didn't attend), the plots of new episodes were revealed: an origin story (wasn't that the pilot?), a story where the study group are puppets and a body-switching episode.

These seem to go along with the rest of the season's on-the-nose exploration of Community tropes--they've already had a plot set in Abed's mind, an Inspector Spacetime convention and the return of the Germans to Greendale.

The trouble is not the plots.  The trouble is they've got the outer trappings of the Community we know and love, but not the inspiration.  Community has always played with the form, but that wouldn't have meant anything if it weren't for the jokes and the character moments.  Also, in general, this season they're overdoing the emotion, almost wallowing in it, rather than letting it rise to the surface from a deeper core.

Okay, I promise I'm going to stop complaining about the fourth season of Community. We've gotten three great seasons and if the last doesn't go as well as hoped, we should just look at the glass as three-quarters full. I'll watch till the end, but when I recommend the box set (or whatever format is favored) I'll have to warn friends to expect a big drop in quality in the final season.