Entertainment
Why The Hated Final Seasons Of TV’s Best Comedy Are Secretly Brilliant
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The NBC sitcom Community is rightfully regarded as one of the best television comedies ever made, at least for the first three seasons. However, showrunner Dan Harmon was replaced in Season 4, a season whose poor quality and reception would give it the Harmon-approved nickname “the gas leak year.” Harmon came back for Seasons 5 and 6, but the show continued to lose original cast members, and after leaving NBC, its final season was broadcast to a much smaller audience on Yahoo!
Because of this, there is a general belief in the Community fandom and the internet at large that the show should have ended after Season 3 and that the last three seasons are worth skipping altogether. While it’s true that Season 4 was pretty iffy (it lacked Dan Harmon’s special brand of crazy), Seasons 5 and 6 are excellent. Not only are they worthy of the seasons that came before, but these episodes are dramatically better than almost anything you can find on television right now.
Six Seasons And A Movie
First, some context about the rise and fall of Community. From the beginning, the show was something of a paradox for NBC: it gained widespread critical acclaim and major awards buzz, taking home a Primetime Emmy (one of four the show would ultimately be nominated for) in its second season. At the same time, the show struggled with ratings, and it was put on hiatus in Season 3 before being brought back after a prolonged #SaveCommunity fan campaign that even the actors took part in.
Community got renewed for Season 4, but after he clashed with NBC executives and Chevy Chase in increasingly public ways, Dan Harmon got the boot and was replaced as showrunner. He was brought back for Season 5, but this was the season where beloved cast member Donald Glover left the show. As the show faced low ratings yet again, NBC officially canceled Community, and it would later air its sixth and final season (one that saw the departure of Yvette Nicole Brown) on the brief-lived streaming service Yahoo TV.
The Fan Disappointment Was Streets Ahead
It’s not hard to see why the second half of Community got a bad rap: Season 4 is so tonally different, and everyone feels out-of-character without the presence of Dan Harmon (who famously based the show on his experiences as a Glenndale Community College student who became part of a study group). When Harmon came back for Season 4, he used a throwaway line about a gas leak to casually explain that none of that season’s events had actually happened.
However, a lore reset wasn’t enough for some fans: by the end, Community had lost three of its core cast members (Donald Glover, Chevy Chase, and Yvette Nicole Brown), greatly affecting the show’s dynamic. This was a show whose entire charm came from the weird chemistry of vastly different characters who banded together to survive their college classes. Because that dynamic changed so dramatically with the introduction of new characters, many fans think that Seasons 5 and 6, even with the return of Dan Harmon as showrunner, aren’t worth watching.
They Didn’t Britta The Final Seasons
Here’s the thing, though: those seasons are surprisingly excellent, and that’s in large part due to Community getting some new blood. It’s true that the show lost something special with the departure of original cast members, especially Donald Glover. His Troy character’s interactions with Abed formed the heart and soul of the show. But Season 5 saw the addition of Breaking Bad icon Jonathan Banks, whose gruff, no-nonsense professor gives our favorite deranged students someone hilariously crusty to bounce off of (he is particularly impressive in “Advanced Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”).
Similarly, Season 6 saw the introduction of Paget Brewster as an administrator who, despite her softer edges, provides a similar role: she is someone relatively strait-laced that the other characters (who are as immature as ever) can easily play off of. But the real secret sauce of Community’s sixth season is Keith David, whose quirky inventor combines the best parts of Pierce (old and hilariously out of touch) and the most transgressive parts of Troy (especially with jokes making racism into a raucous punchline). Davis is a genuine cinematic treasure, and he breathes so much life into Season 6, you’ll never guess it’s the final season until the very end.
Funnier And Weirder Than Greendale Itself
Aside from the awesome performances from newcomers like Keith David, the other reason that Community’s final two seasons are worth watching is that the episodes are just as funny and ambitious as anything that came before. “G.I. Jeff,” for example, tells a moving story about Jeff through the medium of some top-notch animation, and all the humor involving the old G.I. Joe cartoon is sure to keep any ‘80s kid worth their action figures laughing until the credits roll. Similarly, “App Development and Condiments” makes profound commentary on the modern obsession with social media, but it does so through laugh-out-loud scenes that remind you that Community is the most bonkers TV show ever made.
This was, of course, always the Community formula: showrunner Dan Harmon specialized in wrapping moving, often poignant stories in the form of episodes featuring unhinged characters and subversively meta humor. The show’s final two seasons keep this momentum up and prove the formula is still great with episodes like “Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal Care,” which pairs Britta’s story of rebellion against her helicopter parents with a tale of the Dean becoming obsessed with virtual reality (a gag that seems even funnier after the repeated failures of unpopular technology like Google Glass and Apple Vision Pro).
Escaping The Darkest Timeline
Even to the end, Community is great at subverting our expectations in the funniest possible way: “Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing,” for example, has the college’s bumbling Board inviting Dean Pelton to become a member because it will look good for them to have hired a gay man. Pelton struggles with this, though, because he identifies as far more than “gay” and doesn’t like the idea of being placed in such a restrictive box. Amid this thoughtful tale of queer exploration and inept school politicking, we get a B plot about Chang performing as Mr. Myagi along with a frighteningly catchy earworm of a song (“Gay Dean,” sung to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”).
Long story not very short: Community remains one of the best sitcoms ever made, and no show in modern television has managed to reach this show’s humorous heights. But I want this to be a PSA (or at least a very special edition of Troy and Abed in the Morning) that the show’s final two seasons are just as good as seasons 1-3, and if you left the series during the gas leak year, there’s still time to come back and watch the rest of the show. If you do so quickly enough, you’ll be just in time to enjoy the upcoming Community film, one which will fulfill the prophecy so frequently quoted by both Abed and the fandom: “six seasons and a movie!”