'Community' review: It's back, both great and insane, on Yahoo!
"Community" fell one season short of its goal of six seasons and a movie. Credit: NBC
"Community" is back -- right now, on Yahoo!, where it arrived, unbidden and unheralded, at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.
Now that we've cleared up that business, on to the review!
What it's about: Not all that much has changed at Greendale, except there is a new proprietor of Shirley's sandwich shop and she's not Shirley ( Yvette Nicole Brown has moved on to "The Odd Couple," but don't be surprised if she turns up. Greendale is that kind of world, after all.). The gang's all back otherwise: Annie (Alison Brie), Britta (Gillian Jacobs), Chang (Ken Jeong), Jeff (Joel McHale), Abed (Danny Pudi) and Dean Pelton (Jim Rash). A new efficiency expert has arrived on campus too: Francesca 'Frankie' Dart. (Paget Brewster). And she's gonna whip this shape into dump.
My say: On the Internet, where old TV shows go to live or die -- or live and die in a Schrödinger-like box where the TV cat, so to speak, is both living and dead all at once -- arrives "Community," where nothing has changed or everything has changed or whatever you wanted to have changed has changed.
Which is to say: Nothing has changed ... much. It's as if Yahoo! has turned into NBC for one half-hour span, where even the commercials remain overwhelming. But get past those, and what you encounter is pleasing indeed -- something that's brillig, and a place where the slithy toves still gyre, and also continue to gimble in the wabe, where the mimsys and the raffs and borogoves still outgabe with Leonard. (With apologies to Lewis Carroll and "Jabberwocky.")
And shut up, Leonard.
Also: Where Abed has entered a new and possibly treacherous timeline or reality or quasi-reality, or no-reality-at-all because "Community" never was about something so tiresome as "reality" and isn't about to begin just because it's gone virtual on a website with a name accessorized with a "!."
Which is also to say all very much and happily remains the same -- and unless you are an absolute die-hard insane fan who will find something to complain about here ... there really isn't all that much to complain about whatsoever.
The spirit largely remains intact: Specifically, the world is mad. So is Greendale. So is Dan Harmon.
Did I say I love Paget Brewster.
I do.
And the refurbished, reborn, reconstituted, regenerated, re-undead "Community?"
That too.
Bottom line: Great start. Or insane start. Or just a start, which is infinitely better than the alternative.
Grade: A
