Community - "Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations" - Review

The more television I watch, the more it seems to me that what makes a series work is its ability to form a foundation that it can always fall back upon. In the case of comedies, the comedies that are the most likely to leave you satisfied and that don’t retread themselves terribly in later seasons are the ones with emotional and character cores. These character and emotional underpinnings establish series as not just vehicles for being funny but explorations of whatever is on the writers’ minds. This allows a show to make jokes without the series getting its head too lost in the clouds and losing all purpose.

This may not sound revelatory but it’s a huge distinction that sets apart shows that are bad and mediocre from those that are good. For example, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, especially in its earlier seasons, is a funny series. However, it also is a series that has its characters do inexplicably terrible things in the name of being funny. Sometimes it goes too far and the characters feel like unrepentant cartoon characters out of something like Drawn Together. These characters are amusing but they frequently have to no basis to any actual human being or reality whatsoever. Take a totally different example, Modern Family. Modern Family, starting in its second season, and increasingly so afterwards, lost the whole premise of tension and emotion underlying it. The characters on Modern Family early in the series had to fight and finagle their way to understanding and appreciation of one another. The characters didn’t always immediately forgive and forget; they didn’t always just return to status quo of “We’re family = We love eachother unquestioningly”. 

Community was able to get away with its many homages, spoofs, and parodies because it would ultimately use these crazy antics in the service of telling something meaningful about the characters (as well as breaking down just why it is we love the particular pop culture genres we do). In the season four premiere with The Hunger Games parody, there was no real reason to do it other than to try to provoke laughs out of us; to essentially shock us into some guffaws. It wasn’t a cleverly designed means of exploring these characters and their relationships and therefore it felt very, very empty. The Inspector Space Time Convention was an even more extreme case of this phenomenon. 

"Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations", on the other hand, feels like early Community in how it utilizes homage and ties it back to the characters. The jokes aren’t just for the sake of jokes. They’re funny, yes, but more importantly the jokes are used with the intention of saying something about the characters. The prison break/Shawshank Redemption spoof is amusing; however, the ability to ground that in how it pertains to Troy, Abed, Annie, and Pierce’s relationship to Shirley elevates it. Similarly, Jeff meeting his dad for the first time is an interesting examination of Jeff’s character, and it brings up an aspect that’s been hinted out constantly throughout the series run. In turn, the way this plot manages to touch upon Britta and Jeff’s relationship is another great use of joke telling and storytelling in order to look at that pairing and why it matters.

This is a step up from the previous episodes of the fourth season, and I really hope they keep it up.

Grade: B+