The Community Strikes Back

A long time ago (five years to be exact)...

The Community Strikes Back

Season 5

The story so far:

It is a dark time for fans of US sitcom, Community. Series creator, Dan Harmon, has been sacked at the end of season 3 and replaced by David Guarascio and Moses Port for season 4. Harmon takes refuge in his podcast, Harmontown.

Although having its moments, Community season 4 is an enormous disappointment, stripping out much of what made the first three seasons exceptional in order to appeal to a broader audience.

Dan Harmon is asked to return to the reins for season 5 and accepts. Now, read on...

If you haven’t seen Community, what rock have you been living under? Only joking, it’s a line from the show.

In fact, you’re unlikely to have seen Community if you live in the UK as it’s only on Sony Television, a channel so far up the numbers on cable and Sky that you’re likely to lose the will to live trying to find something to watch before you ever get there. However, if you download the extension, Media Hint, or similar to your Chrome or Firefox browser, you can watch episodes new and old on the NBC website.

Community is set in a US community college. Its principal characters are members of a Spanish study group, based on series creator Dan Harmon’s own experiences of taking Spanish lessons at a community college. However, as Harmon himself has stated on his podcast, Harmontown, the setting of any sitcom is largely irrelevant. Good comedy and bad comes from its writing and delivery. The setting is just a construct. Scrubs would have been funny whether it was set in a hospital or on a construction site. The actors in Friends could have delivered their lines as they sky dived, it would still have been dire.

What singles out Community from most other sitcoms is the strength of its writing, its pop culture references and its tolerance to repeated viewing. Because I’m an obsessive ubernerd, I’ve been through the first three seasons four or five times now and still finding things to enjoy. Community’s nearest point of comparison is Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes’s sitcom, Spaced, which is the highest compliment I can possibly pay the show. Spaced remains the greatest sitcom ever made, even having seen its fourteen episodes countless times since it first aired in 1999. Community though is up there or thereabouts.

The first three seasons of Community run to 71 episodes. It can broadly be regarded as a satire of The Breakfast Club, Glee, Back to School, Real Genius, Animal House and countless other US films and TV shows set in college and high school. Its precedents are Police Squad, Son of the Beach and Scrubs in satirising police procedurals, Bay Watch and medical dramas respectively.  However, Community regularly steps beyond the bounds of its setting to pastiche spaghetti westerns, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, buddy cop movies, court room dramas, zombie movies, Armageddon and Deep Impact, M*A*S*H, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction and the Star Trek Mirror Universe. There are three episodes in the first two series involving paintball competitions, which owe a debt to the Spaced episode, Battles. It even mocks and shows up the laziness of just about every other American sitcom in living memory by featuring two clips shows that are made up of entirely fresh material.

The study group consists of Jeff Winger, a former lawyer who is studying to replace his fake bachelor’s degree; Britta Perry, a woman who dropped out of high school because she thought it would impress Radiohead (Jeff: You’d be surprised what gets back to those guys.); Shirley Bennett, a divorcee trying to set up her own business, and Pierce Hawthorne, played by Chevy Chase, the heir to a moist towelette empire, who takes classes out of boredom. There’s also Annie Edison, the high school over achiever who lost her scholarship through a pill addiction and Troy Barnes, the high school quarterback that she was secretly in love with. Finally, there’s Abed Nadir, the ubernerd who can only relate to the world in terms of TV and movie references.

What you come to realise is that the main characters are to one degree or another all extensions of Dan Harmon himself, which largely explains why the fourth season seems like a ship without a captain. Harman has said that Jeff Winger is pretty much a caricature of himself, having joined a study group whilst at community college and gradually came to drop his guard and get know the rest of the group. Jeff is undoubtedly the group’s leader (and manipulator), but the real driving force behind the show is Abed, as much a representation of Harmon as Jeff. Britta’s insane pronunciation of Bagel, Troy’s penchant for ‘butt stuff’ and the surly attitude of Pierce Hawthorne are all parts of Harmon too.

The show has a host of other characters that, as with Scrubs, start out as background scenery, but gradually come to have their own stories to tell. Community has a lot in common with Scrubs, the success of both shows in terms of execution coming from a lack of interference from the network. Scrubs was filmed in an abandoned hospital, meaning they were away from the glare of TV executives and could take more risks. Community’s success, you suspect, came from Harmon’s refusal to do what he was told in order to make the episodes he wanted to make, rarely taking notes from his superiors. It’s what ultimately got him sacked, but the fourth season shows how right he was.

Five episodes into the fifth season and Community is back to something approaching its best (episodes four and five up there with the very best). This season seems to be going down the road that Spaced took in its second series, abandoning pure plot for straight up pastiche of other genres, but that’s not a bad thing. The first episode is called Repilot, deliberately and systematically destroying any trace of the previous season’s incarnation, like the short lived reboot of Scrubs or a Doctor Who regeneration, and moved on to better things. Some characters have gone, some are new, some have returned or achieved greater prominence within the dynamic. The show has been cut back to thirteen episodes a season, but one hopes we get at least one more season out of it (six seasons and a movie). The second season was probably the high point, but season five is shaping up to be as good as the first or third, with a few surprises thrown in for good measure (no spoilers).

There’s very little other US comedy that I regularly watch these day other than The Big Bang Theory and that’s a very different beast. The Big Bang Theory is basically recycled Friends scripts with the addition of an occasional Star Wars joke (“I'm sorry, but I'm not going to watch the Clone Wars TV series until I've seen the Clone Wars movie. I prefer to let George Lucas disappoint me in the order he intended.”). The Big Bang Theory is my idea of trash TV.  The characters are poorly drawn stereotypes, the humour so broad and telegraphed that you can see each punchline coming from a mile away. Yet I continue to watch it. It’s like that relative that you constantly argue with, but secretly love just the same.

There’s also VEEP, but as that’s written and directed by many of the cast and creators of The Thick of It, I don’t even think of it as a American show (even though it’s cast are all American). The US office became better than the original UK version, but that’s finished. Parks and Recreation is not bad, but it doesn’t always hold my attention.

The Big Bang Theory occasionally makes me snort, but Community is laugh out loud funny. It has no audience or laughter track, which is always a good thing from a country whose studio audiences seem to need to whoop and cheer at everything all the god damm time. Community sometimes drifts into saccharine sentimentality, but Dan Harmon is enough of a evil genius to rein things in before they go too far (see his new Adult Swim cartoon, Rick and Morty, to see just how dark he can be). At such moments, the show’s tongue is usually planted firmly in its cheek, lampooning the sentimentality of the shows that it pastiches.

All in all, it’s good to get back to the Community we love and remember. It was touch and go for a while there. The fourth season had its moments (there’s an Unbreakable homage in one episode that I quite liked), but Community without Dan Harmon was like seeing The Magic Band without Captain Beefheart. Rudderless. It’s a victory for our community over the state.

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #15

Spaced

"You are so blind! You so do not understand! You weren't there at the beginning! You don't know how good it was, how important!"

I like funny. There are a handful of shows that I have seen dozens of times, know almost every line, and yet still find myself roaring with laugher at. Jeff’s rants in ‘Coupling’ and virtually everything that Malcolm Tucker says in ‘The Thick of It’ are two examples. However, for no other comedy is this more true than the cult classic, ‘Spaced’.
 

‘Spaced’ was broadcast over two series on Channel Four between 1999 and 2001, running to a total of just fourteen episodes. It tells the tale of two twenty-something underachievers, Tim Bisley and Daisy Steiner, who meet in a cafe and fake being a couple in order to rent a flat in North London. Tim works in a comic book shop, but dreams of being a graphic artist. Daisy wants to be a writer, but uses every distraction as an excuse for not doing any work (a character I can completely identify with). A small band of friends and associates join them in a series of mundane adventures which, through the rose tinted filter of pop culture reference, take on a whole new level of excitement.

It is the pop culture references which drive the show. There are simply too many to name every film and TV show that ‘Spaced’ references or pastiches, but they include ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘Fight Club’, ‘Robot Wars’, ‘The Omen’, ‘Scooby Doo’, ‘Rhubarb and Custard’, ‘Terry and June’, ‘An American Werewolf in London’ and ‘Platoon’. In the ninety second opening to the episode ‘Change’, ‘Spaced’ manages to reference ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Dawn of the Dead’, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘E.T.’, as well as every war film ever. It is a geek’s paradise, a rich vein and a rare example of a TV show that assumes the intelligence of its viewer rather than dumbing down to serve the lowest common denominator. If you don’t get it, well that’s your loss.

What makes ‘Spaced’ unique amongst its contemporary sitcoms is its reliance on more than merely its script and performance. Since the beginning of television, most sitcoms have been recorded in a studio with a two or three camera setup and the comedy comes from the individual performances of the actors. Even modern, verite comedy like ‘The Thick of It’ and ‘The Office’, which use hand held, one camera set ups, are still largely reliant on an interpretation of the script in order to generate the laughs. The script for ‘Spaced’, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes (Tim and Daisy), is brilliant, as are the performances of all involved. However, the devil is in the detail and what elevates ‘Spaced’ to comedy gold ('Fried Gold', to use Nick Frost's phrase) is as much to do with director Edgar Wright’s use of camera pulls and wipes, which give ‘Spaced’ a style all its own. What other show references ‘Evil Dead’ by having the camera make a series of graded, staccato movements from top right of the set, to top left, to bottom left? Or has such confidence in the strength of the script that it can afford to underpin so much of it with a contemporary soundtrack and trust that it won’t distract or detract from the plot? 

Comedy has an important social role to play in allowing cliques to gravitate towards each other and coalesce. Great comedy is repeatable and quotable, like some form of arcane language. As teenagers, my friends each had scenes from Holy Grail and Life of Brian memorised and would rattle them off at a moment’s notice (“Found this spoon sir.”  “Well done Centurion. We’ll be back for you. Weirdo.”). In ‘An Audience with Billy Connolly’ (a video tape I wore out through repetition), Connolly talks about the parties he used to go to in 70s, where people would sing songs. For us, it was always the comedy routine, from Python to Red Dwarf to the Fast Show, that we would perform for each other. We were not drama students, none of us went on to be actors (although some of us did dabble in Media Studies). We were just bored, working class kids with too little money and too much time to kill and this was how he kept ourselves entertained.

Later, it was through ‘Spaced’ that those same friendships were reinforced and a whole new set formed. As good as shows like ‘The Office’ are, their appeal is so broad that a common love isn’t conducive to long-term, lasting friendships. It’s like saying you like to eat bread: It tells you nothing. A mutual love of ‘Spaced’ doesn’t guarantee mutual understanding, but it’s a better barometer than most. I have friends in the States that I have introduced to ‘Spaced’ by watching it together over Skype. When I came to write the short story, ‘Re:JJ13h’, I used ‘Spaced’ as the catalyst for two of the main characters becoming friends. I could think of no more effective a shorthand for geek friendship.

In terms of sheer quotablity, ‘Spaced’ must have the highest density of quotable lines of any show. Its idiom has become such an integral part of my vocabulary, that I’m barely aware I’m even doing it. “Hello you.” “Skip to the end.” “Oh my God! I've got some fucking Jaffa Cakes in my coat pocket!” Whenever someone returns from an holiday or an event, I feel compelled to ask, “So how was it kitten, was it magic?”

Yet because ‘Spaced’ doesn’t dumb down, the viewer is rewarded for their knowledge. The ‘Star Wars’ references are often so obscure that only a true sci-fi geek would notice them. “How’s it going?” “Same as always.” “That bad, huh?”: “Ok, well take care of yourself Tim, I guess that’s what you’re best at.” Not to mention the entire plot to ‘Change’, where Tim gets sacked for shouting at a child for wanting a Jar Jar Binks doll (and vocalising the general disgust that we all felt at the abysmal prequels). Or the coup of having Peter Serafinowicz, the voice of Darth Maul in ‘The Phantom Menace’, repeat, verbatim, Maul’s lines in the guise of Tim’s nemesis, Duane Benzie.  

In fact, ‘Spaced’ has an impressive list of cameo appearances from the elite of British comedy. Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith from ‘The League of Gentlemen’, Jo Scanlan, who would go on to play Terry Coverley in ‘The Thick of It’ and co-write the darkly funny, ‘Getting On’. David Walliams of ‘Little Britain’, Paul Kaye, Kevin Eldon, Bill Bailey, even a blink and you’ll miss it appearance by Ricky Gervais. It also launched the career of Nick Frost, who hadn’t acted before, until playing Mike.

However, perhaps the greatest legacy of ‘Spaced’ is its big-screen spin-off, ‘Shaun of the Dead’. Following on from the episode ‘Art’, where Tim takes speed, stays up all night playing ‘Resident Evil 2’, causing him to hallucinate being under attack from zombies, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright discovered a mutual love of zombie movies. They therefore set out to write and make a parody of the zombie movie genre, with the usual rugged hero replaced by an incompetent slacker (played by Pegg). ‘Shaun of the Dead’ brings with it all of the same subtle references and attention to detail that made ‘Spaced’ such an exceptionally good show. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ was followed up in 2007 by ‘Hot Fuzz’, Pegg and Wright this time satirising the buddy cop genre. A third film, ‘The World’s End’ (working title) is due to be made at some point in the future.

Watching ‘Spaced’ a decade on since it concluded, it has dated surprisingly well. Some of the references, like those to ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Sixth Sense’ are very much of the time that it was made in, but there are enough other references to previous decades that they don’t stand out so much. And while I know every line, there are still bits I roar with laughter at, no matter how many times I see them. Daisy moaning about trying to find a flat in the opening episode, crying that, ‘Every morning I wake up and it's the same. I get up and I buy the paper, and I circle them all, and I phone them only to discover they've been taken by a bunch of fucking psychic house hunters’, makes me laugh every single time. It’s all in Hynes’s delivery. I like funny, but I love ‘Spaced’. A few shows have since come close, but it has yet to be bettered. It’s unique. A one-off.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and bogle to Aswad. Research. >>Skip to the end.

Best Things Ever #7 The Thick Of It/In The Loop

“Authority, though it err like others,
 Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
 That skins the vice o' the top.”
                       Measure for Measure









As with nearly all that have gone before it, Armando Ianucci’s sublime political satire, ‘The Thick of It’, has been accused by politicians of adding to the general level of cynicism towards politics. It’s like Simon Cowell calling you a wanker. Or blaming your reflection for its ugliness. For centuries there has been a fine tradition of satirising politicians in this country, because at all times they have been greedy, venal, and entirely motivated by self interest. Human in fact. Indeed, behind the satire lies the simple observation that aside from the occasional Einstein or Da Vinci, human beings are in fact crap. ‘The Thick Of It’ films them in their natural environment.

The first episode typifies the show’s focus. Hugh Abbott, Government Minister for the fictional, ‘Department of Social Affairs’, ill-advisedly announces a new benefit fraud snooper squad, believing he has the approval of the Prime Minister. Abbott is ordered to kill the story and his advisers put it about that it was entirely the invention of a disgruntled civil servant. At the official launch, having failed to come up with an alternate policy, Abbott gives a press conference “so boring that none of the papers will even touch it.” But when the Prime Minister inadvertently makes reference to the snooper squad, Abbott and his team have to blitz the night desks and convince the media that they had in fact made an announcement earlier that day. The story of the disgruntled civil servant is blamed on a disgruntled civil servant.

Circling around this farce is the Prime Minister’s Press Co-ordinator, Malcolm Tucker, chillingly played by Peter Calpaldi. Malcolm appears out of nowhere, even in open-plan offices¹, bollocking everyone in an invective as poetically offensive as it is hysterical (“If you do think about running with this pill story I will personally fucking eviscerate you, right? I mean I don’t have your education, I don’t know what that means, but I’ll start with ripping your cock off and I’ll busk it from there.”). Malcolm is ‘The Thick of It’s dark heart, manipulating the press, spreading dirt on rivals, even spinning against his own Prime Minister when it suits his Machiavellian purposes. Malcolm spends most of one episode trying to kill an embarrassing story about Abbott only to have it bumped to the top of the One O’Clock News when an even more unwelcome story threatens to break.

This is ‘Yes Minister’ for the 24 hour rolling news age (New Labour, New Satire). Yet unlike Yes Minister, where Jim Hacker occasionally got one over his Permanent Private Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, Tucker always get his way. Yes, this is a cynical interpretation of British politics, but it is set against the political landscape of the last decade: A decade which has seen Britain embroiled in one illegal war in Iraq, as well as two equally dodgy ‘conflicts’ in Kosovo and Afghanistan. It has seen Labour lie repeatedly, maybe even perjuriously, about the Bernie Eccleston affair, about top up fees, about 100,00 displaced Kosovans, about WMD and 45 minutes, about rendition flights, about the opposition, about no return to Boom and Bust, and finally (though perhaps more forgivably) about the top rate of tax. Cynical does not even begin to describe how I feel.

Chris Langham’s tenure as the minister came to an end following his arrest for downloading child pornography, although Hugh Abbott was still referred to in two subsequent one hour specials, ‘The Rise of the Nutters’ and ‘Spinner and Losers’. Following his conviction, it has been confirmed that Langham will not return for the new series. Ironically, your perception of his character little changes. If anything it makes Langham’s performance more convincing.

In reviewing the big screen spin-off, ‘In The Loop’, former Conservative politician Michael Portillo summarily dismissed its significance. Portillo’s reasoning was that as this was a film ostensibly about the invasion of Iraq², it was already six years out of date. “Why don’t they still make films about the Second World War then?” he seriously asked, conveniently forgetting ‘Flags of our Fathers’, ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ and ‘Valkyrie’. Anyone would think that a politician had never lied about the reasons for war before, as if Iraq was a one off and can therefore be posted down the memory hole. Politicians have always lied about the reasons for war. Even World War Two was sold as a battle for freedom and democracy, rather than the fight for the survival of the unfree, undemocratic British Empire that it was. Even then, given the holocaust, the twenty million Russian dead, the atom bomb, and the setting of the Empire’s sun, it can hardly be viewed as anything other than a Pyrrhic victory.

Portillo’s disingenuous performance did however throw light on the source of our cynicism. It is precisely because we have seen all this before. After all, the last time Portillo and his colleagues were in power they weren’t aversed to lying about the occasional war; training the occasional genocidal regime; bombing the occasional North African country for something it didn’t do. Never forget that one month after the Halabja gassings in 1988, the Conservative Government had two back benchers in Baghdad pledging more aid to their old buddy Saddam. Given its years of collusion, the Tory Party should be disqualified from having a policy on Iraq.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Only Alistair Campbell could trump Portillo on affected indifference towards ‘In The Loop’. Tony Blair’s former Director of Communications dismissed the film as being “too boring” to be personally offensive. But then when it comes to Iraq, Campbell is like Diego Maradona confronted with a still from ‘The Hand of God’ incident. The image clearly shows his hand against leather, yet still he lacks the courage or the good grace to confess his sins.

Campbell’s demeanour was as threadbare as his attempts to build a pro-war consensus. Beneath the surface it was clear he was seething. Or maybe he was pissed because Campbell’s on-screen persona, Malcolm Tucker, actually manages to get a UN Resolution passed. You see, the point isn’t that we went to war in Iraq (in Iraq you notice, not with Iraq, because that, in the words of Bill Hicks, would imply that two armies were fighting). Nor is it that our elected officials lied about the necessity for war. What the point is is that they did it with such breathtaking incompetence. Despite a certain historical revisionism that is now taking place, very few people were convinced by the Bliar/Campbell exaggerations or half truths. A million people, nearly two percent of the entire population of the country, marched on the streets of London demonstrating against the war. Every poll showed that the majority were against an invasion without a second UN Resolution (for all that was worth). Yet despite overwhelming opposition, British forces invaded nonetheless. It showed us once and for all how New Labour felt about democracy and due process.

Lyndon Johnson was in office when Dylan recorded ‘It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)’, which includes the line, “But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” By not naming the incumbent, the song could still receive huge cheers when played during the Watergate scandal ten years later. And again in Sheffield, England 2003, when a certain George W. Bush was in the country (and they say Dylan doesn’t do politics anymore!). As with 'Yes Minister', so with ‘The Thick Of It’, the political parties are never named, we never meet the leaders. This is engine room politics, like that episode of ‘Star Trek: TNG’ seen from the perspective of the junior officers. I can watch ‘Yes Minister’ with a mate who was barely alive in the eighties and he absolutely gets the references, because politics is as cyclical as it is crass. The relevance of Bill Hicks’s comedy goes through cycles roughly equal to sunspot activity for the selfsame reasons. The jokes from the first Iraq War were as funny replayed in Iraq War II (Clone of the Attack). A president feeling vulnerable was still a dangerous thing.

‘The Thick Of It’ is superbly well written, acted and improvised. It is also infinitely quotable (“Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off. “ “How much fucking shit is there on the menu and what fucking flavour is it?” “I’m left to mop up a hurricane of piss.”). It will be as relevant fifty years from now as it is today. As for ‘In The Loop’, the conspiracy is executed far too expertly to be directly comparable to the farrago that was Iraq. In that regard, it has more in common with World War One, or Vietnam, or the Falklands. The events of 'Dr Strangelove' never came to pass, yet that film remains as darkly funny an examination of the absurdity of war as it was in the 1960s. And like 'Dr Strangelove', ‘In The Loop’ is not about the last war, it is about the next war: It’s about the one that they get away with.

Ultimately, politics is the art of being seen to be doing something, even when you’re doing nothing. If politicians are made uncomfortable by Ianucci’s bleak view of their existence, it is because in the final analysis they are shown to be vacuous and kind of irrelevant. Or as Macbeth so aptly framed it, “’tis a tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury: Signifying nothing. “ “Fuckitybye.”

Notes
1 ‘In The Loop’ even sees Malcolm able to suddenly appear on the other side of the Atlantic.
2 Although Tony Blair continues to deny this, despite being shown a video confession made by Armando Ianuccui in the days prior to filming.