Originally published at: Gillian Jacobs thinks Community fans need to reevaluate season six | Boing Boing
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I agree with her! Season six came off better than most “comeback” seasons that most shows attempt.
The whole show was never the same after losing Donald Glover, but against the bar of the post-Glover second half of the show, season six held up just fine. Certainly much better than, for example, season four of Arrested Development. I’m glad they tried, but with the actors being obviously a lot older and a completely different production look, it was a different show without the spark that it had.
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When it aired, I’d only seen a few episodes here and and liking it but wasn’t great about watching anything regularly at the time.
I watched the whole thing from scratch on Netflix (save for the banned D&D episode I had to dig up online) and that includes Season 6. I tend to agree… it wasn’t ever going to be as good without Donald Glover, the real life happenings with the network/Dan Harmon and then a move to a single Yahoo season, and the fact that a show about a college went past 4 years.
All that in mind… some of episodes in Season 6 were almost as good as the first few seasons, and the spirit of it all was definitely there. The last five minutes of the RV episode (which was honestly almost on par with the sailing episode and the spacecraft episode by itself) upped the ante of experimentation.
And Season 6 contains the actual series finale, which is by far one of the best wrapups to anything, comedy or otherwise, I’ve ever seen. The existentialist closing gag is one of my favorite bits of the entire series.
Season 6 did the best it could with a lot of baggage and has enough solid gems to not deserve the hate when you look at it objectively. It’s not S1-S3, but it’s still better than a large number of long lasting sitcoms are late in their run.
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Yah this point is important. Season five had no business being as good as it was for this reason! They almost made all the characters fail so they could have a reason to hold everyone back another year but mercifully steered clear of that. You could see that they thought about it in the writers’ room, though. The clues are there. They did a good job of continuing to find reasons to keep everyone there long past when they graduated.
I think in season six they were also making an attempt to roll the cast over with new young people, in case the spark was still there and they could keep going. It was never going to work, but I appreciate that they tried.
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Having previously identified Will Shortz by his voice and more recently had a story on 99% Invisible, Gillian Jacobs is now my undisputed favourite person from the Community cast. Which is saying something, because Joel, Danny, Nicole, and Donald are also pretty great in their own ways (“Larry, I’m on Duck Tales”).
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Jacobs’ performance on the show is seriously underrated. She’s overlooked for everyone on the cast, save for Chase, just because the writers never really knew what to do with Britta.
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Everyone except Chevy Chase is delightful. Fine humans, all.
Agreed! Aside from being a source of sexual tension for Jeff, they never figured out how to give her actual agency. A shame, because they did so much better with Annie and Shirley.
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I totally agree. There were good episodes in season 6. Even if you disliked season 6 or even the gas light season there were really funny episodes in both. Community, even in its bad episodes was light years more funny than things like Big Bang Theory.
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That line rated with Bob Hoskins talking about the first “Super Mario” movie (“…I used to play King Lear”) as one of the great deadpan interview-killing lines of all times. Genius.
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