[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4FAkxanvEE]
I really wanted to enjoy the “new” Community, I honestly really did.
I really wanted to be able to say, “YES! It’s back to the glory days of the first 3 seasons! They don’t have to please anyone but the fans! It’s back in the hands of its creators! YES!”
But here I am really wishing I had the last hour and a half of my life. Yes – hour and a half.
Community premiered their sixth season on Yahoo! March 17th and it was honestly a major disappointment. When a show loses half of their original cast it’s usually time to move on, but the fans of Community were determined to get to their “six seasons and a movie” and it seems like it will likely go that route if enough people watch the new season – if they don’t give up because of Yahoo!’s poor video player.
I can’t talk about this new season if I don’t address how awful of a viewing experience this was. I waited a few days for the hype to die down to watch the show, and boy was it excruciating. To be honest, if I hadn’t agreed to write something for Nerdophiles, I would have stopped altogether. In total the two episodes that are released should have been only an hour, but including time to refresh the page, go back and restart episodes, and more it increased my viewing time by 50%. When I started the first episode, I barely got through the opening scene before it cut to a scene that I would later discover is halfway through the second episode. I wish I could say this was the only time I would jump from scene to scene but it wasn’t.
.@NathanFillion, thanks for stopping by Season 6. See you soon? pic.twitter.com/J0ZaUy8VBA
— Community (@CommunityTV) March 19, 2015
And don’t get me started on how often the show itself just stopped playing, or the audio would cut out. I refreshed the first episode maybe 6 times total to finish it? And I refreshed just as many times during the second episode in its first five minutes. Yahoo! made a mistake with allowing ads for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to run because it made me yearn for Netflix, where the most annoying thing that has ever happened is when the episode doesn’t start from the beginning on a rewatch because of how they transition from episode to episode, or how maybe it will pause to buffer once during a 10 hour binge.
As for the show itself? It’s done. I was a huge fan during the first three seasons, but even I know when a show needs to end. Paget Brewster of Criminal Minds fame seems out of place and most of the jokes about her or her “role” in the “show” according to Abed weren’t that funny and it didn’t make me feel for her in the slightest. The second episode introduced Keith David, the creator of a virtual reality simulator that the Dean becomes obsessed with, and the best moment that revolved around him was when Chang sees him for the first time and mutters, “You’re back, Troy.” Other than that Chang, who is easily the least developed and most thrown around character in the show, is there in the background doing nothing.
Ladies and gentlemen, your Season 6 cast. pic.twitter.com/JNIlwkXWCu
— Community (@CommunityTV) March 15, 2015
Overall, this season seems to be nothing more than a final push for the show. It was done after the third season, barely lived on during the fourth, and should have ended at the fifth. Yahoo! did shell out more money for its production, and it looks a lot better than the fifth season did, but production value doesn’t make up for a boring and unfunny show in general.
Remember the webseries that MySpace put out back in the day? If it wasn’t for how good the show looked I would honestly think it was of the same caliber of those “shows.”
I’m sorry fans, and I’m sorry Yahoo!, because this is a show that simply shouldn’t have made it to six seasons, and the idea of making it a movie is just a self indulgent farce at this point.
English
Even a bad Community episode is better than most television.