Christopher Robin Has Left The Study Room

I've been avoiding writing this post.

I have now seen the first two episodes of the new season of Community and honestly, I don't have too much to say.  It's not great.  It's not the show I fell in love with.  It is instead a Bizzaro version of the Greendale world that resembles far too closely the traditional sitcoms it used to skewer so well, and even the actors, whom I adore, seem to be fumbling to find out who their characters are now that they're not a pure embodiment of Dan Harmon's neuroses.

Donald Glover is handling it the best; all of the even-approaching-funny lines last night came from him ("Things.") and he's such a brilliant comedian that's he's making the best of a difficult situation.  Danny Pudi seems to be struggling to find the right tack to take - he's still playing Abed, but Abed is being written very differently now and you can sense his discomfort with the changes.  The character faring the worst is definitely Britta, who was a delicate and complex balance of awkward to begin with and has now become clumsy and obvious.

But it's not just the writing of the characters that's off - it's the staging.  Harmon knew when to pull out all the pop culture stops and when to scale back and focus on relationships, and these first two episodes try to mash it all together with very little success.  Everyone on Twitter was talking about how the Valloween episode was "a REAL Community episode" but it felt hollow compared to "Epidemiology" or even "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps". Abed and Troy's Calvin and Hobbes costumes were a great visual joke that made me smile but were tragically never used or referenced to any other comedic effect.  The Dean wearing a wig for his ring-girl costume just felt WRONG, like a joke from some other show.  There was an attempt at a Clue reference that was hasty and half-assed and the big reveal of Hawthorne Manor wasn't anywhere near as exciting as the glimpse in to Joan Callamezzo's bedroom that Parks & Rec gave us last year.  And the through-line of Jeff's daddy issues was painfully forced and completely inauthentic to his character.  Remember in "Advanced Documentary Filmmaking" when Jeff straight-up BEAT UP PIERCE because of his anger at his dad (and, to be fair, at Pierce)?  If the new Community insists on having a selective memory towards its characters' motivations, it is going to fail.

Surprisingly, one of the things I miss most about Harmon's absence is his skill at incorporating the right kind of music into a scene, whether it's ambient or the Dean's Abba/grocery playlist.  Watching these first few episodes the scenes felt empty, like they were missing a character - the character of Harmon.  I know that Community still has some of the same writers and directors, but, for me at least, every scene feels like an attempt to recreate a magic that simply doesn't exist anymore.  It lacks the childlike joy that Harmon  imbued into the entire show.  Community has become The Thousand Acre Wood without Christopher Robin - a bunch of characters who like each other alright but are missing the one person whose imagination created and connected them in the first place.

I held out hope for the new Community, but the sad truth is this astounding show was so wonderful because it was hilarious yet bursting with heart - the heart of a man named Dan Harmon.  Without that injection of honest and passionate emotion, Community is just another sitcom on a network that increasingly does not understand what young, intelligent viewers want to see.  And even though Donald Glover can still make me laugh, the empty, unbearable sadness that blankets every Harmon-less scene has turned my favorite show into something I dread even having to talk about. 

So I'm gonna go listen to some Harmontown and turn that frown upside down.

Image via reddit

Weird. Weird weird weird.

If you're wondering what I thought about last night's premiere of Dan Harmon-less "Community", well...I'm about to go out of town, so you'll have to wait.  I'll have more to say once I watch it again and give it some time, but my feelings are pretty well summed-up by this tweet:

It's like, I love it because it's Community and I love Community, but it simultaneously makes me unfathomably sad. @nbccommunity @danharmon
— Lauren Renee (@the_hedgepig) February 8, 2013

So.  You should watch the episode if you haven't already - I'm really interested to know what other fans think.

Moving Forward With "Modern Family"

Damn, it's been too long, folks.  Unfortunately, when you're applying to grad school and traveling and picking up extra jobs to pay them bills, your little-read blog about television is the first thing to fall by the wayside.  That doesn't mean that I haven't had things to talk about, or been building up posts in my head for when I finally have the time to write them.  This season of Boardwalk Empire has been spectacular, and I'll be writing about it some time in the next week.  The Mindy Project is going well, but the real surprise of the new fall shows has been Ben And Kate, which is just a delightful, smart, playful romp every week.  Go On is solidly enjoyable.  Last Resort keeps getting better.  Revolution keeps getting worse.  The Office is, surprisingly, mostly turning it out for their last season, although everyone agrees that making Andy into a horrible monster was a terrible move.  Parks & Recreation is great, of course, although I do have some small nitpicks we'll get to eventually.  How I Met Your Mother is what it is, which is to say a little dull, very repetitive, a nice vehicle to get my Jason Segel fix, and still very staunchly Not Friends, however hard they try.  RuPaul's Drag Race All-Stars is so poorly formatted that not only are the wrong people going home every week, but the show itself is actually boring.  What a disappointment.

But you know what's not a disappointment?  This season of Modern Family.  Oh, there have been some missteps (that stereotypical lesbian couple?  Let's not ever mention that again.) and just last night Jay made a homophobic joke ("If you had a man who wanted to pick out strollers with you, you wouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place" UGH).  But this season seems to be focused more on the individual characters we've developed a relationship with, and less on making lazy jokes about whatever boring archetype they belong to (shrewish wife, trophy wife, nerdy girl, effeminate gay man, etc.).

"Guys With Kids" Parties Like It's 1999

So, I watched the Guys With Kids pilot.  Here's what I'll say - it wasn't sexist or homophobic or racist or anything like that.  It also wasn't very funny.

The show is filmed in front of a live studio audience, and it very much feels like an attempt to return to old school classic NBC sitcoms.  I say attempt because such a return doesn't really feel possible.  When shows like Louie, Parks & Recreation, and Community are pushing the boundaries of what television can and should be, a show like Guys With Kids feels out of place and perilously un-hip.

Why It's Important To Keep Talking About Girls

One of the interesting (read: super depressing) things that has arisen over this whole Girls brouhaha is the backlash against the backlash.  Everyone was fine to talk about it for a week, but to keep talking about it was to "not be able to let things go".  But to not keep talking about it is, in my eyes, to ignore it, and like it or not, ignoring it is not the way to handle the issue.

I admit that my last post on the subject was a bit vitriolic, and my friend said, "It kind of sounded like you just hate the East Coast" which isn't the case at all.  There are many, many, things that I adore about the East Coast, but the tendency of people who live in New York City and produce work for the screen (or write, or blog, or photograph, or paint, or whatever) to be navel-gazingly obsessed with living in New York City and what that means is one of my least favorite things about pop culture in general and the East Coast in particular. I have lived in and spent a lot of time in different states up and down the East Coast and no matter what, my feelings about it always come back to Joni - "I wouldn't want to stay here; it's too old and cold and settled in its ways here".  In California, everyone is from somewhere else.  The importance of old money and history and who your family is and where you went to school fades here; we care about who you are now and where you're going and if your actions will help the world or the community.  Oh, we definitely trade in other weird issues (go watch some Portlandia for examples) and in certain circles all the dumb moneyed social crap still stands, but in my extensive experience, it's not as pervasively a part of the culture out west.

I see this idea of The Way Things Are Done not only in Girls, but in the backlashbacklash as well.  Famous people's children have always had an easier way of it, they say.  Why are you punishing Dunham for writing what she knows? the handwringers cry.  The types of people Hannah and her friends are probably DO only have white friends and it is ridiculous to expect otherwise, I'm told.  And my favorite, why aren't you as mad at any of the other all-white shows out there?  Why has Girls been forced to try to fulfill so many expectations?

Let's address these one by one.

Save Our Shows!

I've been wanting to talk for a while about ratings, and the system that determines what shows get to stay on the air. It's a fucked-up, broken system and it's really clear to me that something needs to change.

We're living in a time now when almost everything is connected digitally. We can tell our friends instantly about the songs we just purchased on iTunes (argh, I hate Ping, especially the fact that I can't turn it off) and Tweet in realtime about whatever is happening in our lives. So why is it that we're still living in the archaic age of Nielson ratings? People watch TV differently today than they did even five years ago. Many people, including the majority of young people, watch their favorite shows online - on Hulu or the network websites or they do some minor internet sleuthing and find them for free, like I often do. Many other people don't have time for live TV and record it on their DVR. However, TV ratings do not reflect these numbers, and if they do, it's inefficient.

Television is in a golden age right now; some of the best shows that have ever been made are currently on the air, and it's getting more respect as a medium than it ever has before. So why can't we adjust the technology used to measure the true popularity of a show? I'm sure there's something complicated with advertising budgets and whatever, but I'm also positive there are vast informational improvements to be made. Nielson ratings work using a statistical model, but with the amazing technological networks that we have today, why not set up a system where the viewer can digitally submit a record of what they've been watching? Can we set up Hulu so that I know my many viewings of Psych and Castle aren't going unnoticed by the networks? I don't like to feel that I'm betraying a struggling show because I watch it online.

I can already hear the argument against this system: invasion of privacy, Big Brother, yadda yadda yadda. But honestly, do you really care if a robot or a pencil-pusher know that you just spent the weekend watching a Hoarders marathon? I think we're long past the point where you should be embarrassed for watching crap television, once the Real Housewives and Toddlers & Tiaras started to take over our pop culture consciousness. Honestly, I miss the wholesome motives of Rock Of Love - at least they were there for Bret. And imagine the shows that could have been saved (Arrested Development! Firefly! Huge!) if the networks were getting a real count of the people watching.

But I digress. My point is that the system is outdated and in need of some serious redesigning. The American people like to feel that they have a voice, and right now that voice is not being adequately heard. I know that television ratings could be far more accurate...maybe if we fix it than some worthwhile shows will be rescued.