How does Community ring in its recently announced 13-episode renewal? With an episode that proves a truncated fourth season is an insult to one of television’s most inventive sitcoms. I know we should be thankful for anything at all, considering NBC could have easily just cancelled the show (and incited an Internet uprising in the process) but I hope network executives watched tonight’s episode and felt deeply ashamed of themselves.
What’s most impressive about “Curriculum Unavailable” is that it shouldn’t work as well as it does. The episode is essentially just a rehash of last season’s “Paradigms of Human Memory,” which completely reinvented the clip show tradition. The group, two months removed from getting expelled from Greendale and forced to resort to potluck dinners to stay together, take Abed to a psychologist (John Hodgman!) after he’s been caught trespassing as Professor Spacetime on campus. This leads to a group therapy session thankfully not led by Britta (though she tries – "Psychology major. Got your back, brah") and a series of flashbacks that reveal more about everyday life at Greendale.
While the episode is not as high concept as “Paradigms,” it’s essentially structured the same way. But whereas “Paradigms” was meta in that it tackled common sitcom tropes, “Curriculum Unavailable” is more personally meta, in that it tackles the group’s – and by extension Greendale’s – tenuous grip on reality. There’s that brief moment when the suggestion that the school never existed seems like it really could be true, especially when it’s followed with the gang in an insane asylum, acting out past episodes as they probably would look in the real world. Of course, the gang realizes how stupid that sounds almost immediately, but it still forces us to take a step back and think about how we’ve come to so easily accept Community’s ridiculously flexible universe as normal.
And while the actual laughs in an episode of Community sometimes take a backseat to the more cerebral stuff the show tries to accomplish, tonight’s episode was a reminder that the biggest reason people so passionately defend the series is because of how funny it is. “Remedial Chaos Theory” is still this season’s highlight to date, but I think this is the hardest I’ve laughed at Community this year. The cutaways to Greendale’s many completely useless electives, which include classes dedicated to holding your breath, the possibility of frying things, and ladders. The examples of every character having the odd “banana in their pants” moment, from Britta coming off what looks like a pretty intense peyote high to Troy driving an ATV into the study room and exclaiming, “It’s all terrain, dummy!” And the Dean portrayed as the group's pansexual guardian angel, making them a priority when the school catches on fire and even saving them the last seven slices on the cafeteria’s pizza day. It’s an episode so dense with rapid fire jokes and gags that it’ll probably take another viewing or two to process them all.
"Curriculum Unavailable" is an episode of Community that clicks on every level, where the meta and the emotional and the funny all work in synch to reach sitcom nirvana. I haven't been feeling the show all that much since it returned from haitus, but seemingly every time I wonder if it's run out of steam, Community delivers something like this to make me feel guilty for ever doubting it.
SumOlogy: A reminder why Community fans are an insufferably passionate bunch. Only two more seasons and a movie to go, guys!
Grade: A
Leftovers
Britta's delivery of "I know I have!" when Jeff asks who hasn't had the odd banana in their pants was perfection. The right mix of awkward and oblivious.
"Reggie, to the time booth! We haven't much... space."
“He's out there somewhere, alone and cold and most likely trying to cobble together a sexy Patti Hearst costume.”
Thanks, Community fans. Your cynicism lost us a gangster-themed paintball episode. I hope you're happy.
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