Community is Back -- Really Back

When a show begins to fizzle and lose the magic, it's hard to recapture it.  Community season 4 seemed to be the beginning of the inevitable decline, with the creator Dan Harmon being fired and the on-set drama between Harmon, Chevy Chase, and pretty much everyone else.  Season 4 was by far the worst season, with forgettable and mostly laugh-less episodes. There were a few gems, but it mostly missed the point of everything that made Community great and was instead a cheap imitation trying to live up to something it just couldn't pull off.

By some weird miracle, the show still managed a season 5 pick-up.  I didn't have high hopes for it, even after it was announced that Dan Harmon would be returning.  Chevy Chase was gone, Donald Glover was announced to be leaving shortly. How could it possibly return to its former glory with all odds against it?

Well, I'm here to say I was wrong. Last night's episodes cleverly entitled "Repilot" and "Introduction to Teaching" proved it is possible to reclaim the road with the right driver at the wheel.  There's no doubt in my mind that Dan Harmon's kind of a jerk, but absolutely brilliant.  He fixed and excused season four by subtly writing dialogue that mentioned that last year there was "a gas leak in the school."  He reminded us why we love these characters, and how those one-liners are gold, and simultaneously moved the characters forward into new roles and conflicts.  I laughed so hard I cried, just like the good ole days with the Greendale Human Beings, those lovable losers we missed dearly.

Still, we haven't seen episodes without Troy yet and it's too early to tell if they can hold up this quality without both him and Pierce, who I'll also miss despite my distaste for Chevy. Meanwhile, the season 5 premiere had record low ratings though I blame that on whoever decided to schedule it on January 2nd against new episodes of ratings-hog The Big Bang Theory.  It is also possible that even a number of loyal fans skipped out because of the rough season 4 and were waiting to see what critics would have to say before they invested their time into it.  Community has never been a ratings winner though, so I'm gonna just thank the tv gods that have allowed it to run this long.

Can't wait to see the rest of this season!

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

(Mild spoilers for episode 8)

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, starring Andy Samberg,  is considered to be one of the new break-out comedies of the 2013 season and has managed to get a full-season pick up AND the coveted Post-Super Bowl spot (tag teaming with New Girl to form a 1 hour comedy block). For better or worse, the comedy is sticking around through Spring.

Let's talk about "the better" first. The first and most essential good thing about Brooklyn Nine-Nine is that it's actually fairly funny and often enough has some legitimate "laugh out loud" one-liners. If you like a one-camera style similar to the The Office, Parks and Recreation, or Modern Family you might be able to find a place in your heart for this one as well. It's got the same types of quirky characters, family/work place dynamic, and some characters to root for. And like these shows before it, it's taking awhile to figure itself out. That's fine. It's also nice to see something new with the cop/comedy hybrid. It's all very "has potential" and that's good enough for now.

Now onto the things it could improve, the first and most essential (to me) being the main character of Jake Peralta. Jake's a gung-ho cop who seems more interested in the fictional action cop life than the real cop life, which includes paperwork and due process and routines. I'm fine with that -- if Jake played by the rules, it'd be a pretty boring show. What I'm less okay with is his conceited attitude and constant smirk. He's a know-it-all and considers himself the best, puts himself first a lot, and makes quips only he thinks are funny. Overall, he's not very likable. Now, while I do believe to a certain extent that main characters should be likable, I could see many cases in which they aren't and the show still works out just fine. No, the real issue is that Jake needs to be realistically vulnerable to something so audiences can care. Thus far, not much has affected him. He wins a lot of his arguments one way or another, even when he does wrong or causes problems for the precinct. Nothing has affected him, nothing has hurt him, nothing has given him the added layer of being a character who matters.  

However, the most recent episode, "Old School," gave me hope for the future. It was not the best episode by a long shot, as it just wasn't as funny, and the first half was complete characteristic Jake -- neglecting the job to idolize his personal hero, getting drunk, and talking bad about Captain Holt while intoxicated to a writer who was going to quote him. The second half of the episode, however, is where my appreciation comes in -- Jake sought to make it right and make sure those quotes went unpublished even if it meant upsetting his personal hero. It was nice even if it was obligatory, since he was the cause of the trouble in the first place.  But what I really appreciated was the end. At first we're meant to believe that Jake punched the writer because of an unwillingness to get rid of those quotes.  But Santiago later reveals that Jake actually punched him because he called the gay Captain Holt a "homo" in a clearly derogatory fashion.

At this point, I was ready to cheer. Jake cares about something! He's not going to tolerate homophobia or disrespect for his captain, even by someone he once admired!  He did something good even though it cost him (the writer wrote bad things about him instead)! Yay!  This is what I've been asking for since the beginning. Let him be crazy and narcissistic as much as he wants, but make him redeemable. Make me love him in the same way I grew to love Parks' Leslie, Ron, and even Tom for all his faults. That, combined with humor that improves every week, will really be what makes the show worth watching. 

New Show, New Girl

Due to the recommendations of multiple friends (thanks Lena and Jaz), I binge-watched all episodes of New Girl this weekend. I'm not sure why it took me so long to get into this show. I know I had doubts made on vague assumptions, one of them possibly being that it was a "girly" show -- the television equivalent of a chick flick. Well, though I can still see it holding special appeal for women, New Girl pretty much took all my preconceived ideas about it and threw them out the window. It's got boy humor and nonsense and what I would have thought was an unreasonable amount of yelling, but it works. The early first season definitely tried too hard and at first I wasn't sure what to do with it (I was laughing but also cringing and genuinely unable to tell if it was actually good or if I was just sleep-deprived) but it really figured itself out by mid-season one. I can already tell it's going to nicely fill in the sitcom gap in my tv schedule and heart left by The Office.

The best thing about the show is definitely the chemistry between all of the characters. The crazy personalities and situations are generally unbelievable, but the constant back and forth between Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Winston and even Cece totally sells the ridiculousness as reality. In short, I've never wanted to have three crazy male roommates as much as I do now, but I'm settling for scheduling New Girl onto my DVR and joining the loft gang for a half hour every week.