Been watching a bunch of season one episodes.
It reminding me of something I don’t need reminding. I LOVE this show. It’s so
good. And in the midst of all this sadness of harmon leaving and the producers
and writers and the day change and shortened episode numbers, It’s important to
think of the positives. It’s always important to thing of the positives in
moments of crisis. It brings hope. Hope is laughed at and mocked and such but
it’s so necessary. People think it’s
foolish to be hopeful. People think they are better, smarter, than to have to
rely on hope. But I say screw you. I
could go into a whole other thing about all that, but it would stray too far
away from the point. Back to the point.
The positives. It’s not cancelled. We get
a season 4. That’s more than Arrested Development got, and now they’re coming
back to do another season and a movie. There’s hope right there. The new
producers have worked on good/great show like Happy Endings and The IT Crowd.
Hope. But the most important positive to remember is that in the fall we’ll
turn on NBC on Friday and we’ll still be at Greendale. And isn’t that what we
fell in love with? Greendale? The study group? We didn’t fall in love with the
show because it can pull off a genre parody. Of course, it’s one of the reasons
we do love the show, its ability to successfully do an epic and fantastic
parody of an action movie or spaghetti western or Apollo 13 or a video game.
It’s great. And it will be a hallmark of the Dan Harmon era. But the reason why
those episodes are fall-in-love worthy is because they don’t forget about the
characters just to get the genre right. Modern Warfare was “the episode with
the paintball,” will be what everyone says first. But the second thing that
should be remembered about that episode is that it’s the one where Jeff and
Britta finally have sex. ON THE STUDY ROOM TABLE. (Remember. The Table. Is.
Magic.) The Claymation Christmas episode is not just the one where it’s Claymation
but it’s the one where we understand a bit more about Abed’s psyche (of course
there are like 10 episodes about this, my favorite being Intro to Film).
Epidemiology is the zombie apocalypse episode, but more importantly it’s the one
where Shirley and Chang have sex in the bathroom and she GETS PREGNANT. There are the “high concept” episodes whose
primary subject is the characters before the genre parody. Cooperative Calligraphy
is a bottle episode. But they use the bottle episode format to get into the
characters so much deeper. Remedial Chaos Theory could’ve been some awesome
adventure of crazy timelines filled with crazy events. It was awesome, of
course, but it was used to take a closer look at the group dynamic to see how
it would be without one specific person. We love those episodes because of THE
CHARACTERS. We love the second paintball because they were fighting. Not just
fighting a paintball war in a spaghetti-western-turned-Star-Wars style, but
because they were fighting FOR GREENDALE.
When season Four starts we won’t have Dan
Harmon. We won’t have the Russo Bros. We won’t have Chris McKenna or Neil
Goldman or Garrett. But we will have Troy
and Jeffrey, and Annie and Britta, and Shirley and Pierce, and Abed and Jeffrey.
And the Dean! And we have to believe, because it is
true, that Harmon created enough of a foundation in these characters and that
place that it will be hard to totally mess up by people with hardly any
qualifications, let alone two people who are as capable as Moses Port and David
Guarascio.
I’m not saying it will be the same. I’m
not saying it will be better. I’m saying it will still be a place I want to go
to every Friday at 830 after I make sure I don’t see a bit of Whitney. Greendale’s
where I belong. The study group is who I love. Not a movie parody.
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