Community seasons 5 and 6 – not recommended

SPOILERS

I liked Community seasons 1-3 a lot.  See previous posting How to watch Community.

Season 5

Dan Harmon returned as showrunner to Community in season 5 and was able to, sort of, put it back together, but Pierce is gone and then Troy.  This latter will become critical in season 6.  As a reboot the show is ok, but it just isn’t quite Community.  The show has gone beyond its natural arc.

Not recommended.

Season 6

Season 6 is interesting in a television analysis way, but not in an entertainment way.  Do not watch it.

A show has a certain structural integrity, certain key components that hold it together.  For a show that is explicitly about a group of people, the members of that group are key.  Community could have withstood the loss of one minor group member, as it did with the loss of Pierce.  But in season 6, Pierce, Shirley and Troy are gone and the show simply doesn’t work.  It turns out that Troy is a load-bearing member of the group.  His subtle, fun dynamic with Abed is in many ways the core of the joy of the show.  While Jeff is in theory the main character, Troy-Abed bring a key dynamic that balances the show.

Dan Harmon represents this quite literally in 6×01.  In a profile of Harmon in Wired, we learn

The circles are everywhere, if you know to look for them. They’re on the whiteboards around Dan Harmon’s office, on sheets tacked to his walls, on a notepad on the floor of his car. Each one is hand-drawn and divided into quadrants with scribbled notes and numbers sprouting along the edges. They look like little targets. …

the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps

The circles, in season 6, are frisbees.  When the roof collapses in 6×01, it’s Harmon saying that the show has collapsed without Troy, exacerbated by the loss of Shirley.  Leonard’s crumbling frisbee is the crumbling arc of his life in the show, and the crumbling of the show as a whole.

Without Troy, Harmon is basically in an impossible situation.  Imagery that came to my mind is that it’s like watching someone trying to put together a vase with missing pieces, when both you and they know it’s impossible, or trying to bring back an extinct animal when you have too few fragments of DNA.  The whole season is very angry and self-aware.  It’s like watching Harmon have a mental breakdown.  It’s a sad conclusion to a brilliant beginning.  You can see him speaking through Abed (who is essentially his avatar) in 6×08, and see him speaking through Jeff in the aptly-named finale, 6×13 Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television.  Jeff (who is Harmon’s secondary avatar) is basically phoning in his job (within the show), and throughout the season but particularly in the finale expressing how trapped he feels.  Everyone will leave and there he will be, eternally condemned to live a year at Greendale over and over.  How can you even make it work when the story has gone beyond its arc?  Do you make everyone teachers?  Do you bring back old characters and keep the new ones?  Do you cycle endlessly through variations of the same tropes and character quirks?  …  It’s a kind of showrunner hell that is depicted.  I feel really sorry for Harmon, trying to breathe life into the broken doll of his beloved show.

In any case, for the above reasons, season 6 is very much not recommended.

I imagine it may show up in future university curricula about television writing though.