You may not be aware, but season 4 of Community was kind of a mess. The shock departure of
the showrunner and creator Dan Harmon, his replacement by a writing duo of dubious credentials,
together with the first phase of the core cast s partial exodus, resulted in a 13 episode
run of fluctuating quality sometimes great, sometimes forgettable, sometimes just seeming
to misunderstand altogether what had made those first 3 years so memorable. And, uniquely
all of this is visible at once in the season s premiere episode, History 101. So, in this
episode of Streets Ahead, the series where we go season by season, looking at every Community
season premiere, let s jump into History 101, what it tells us about this show, how it works,
more widely, and how perfectly it prefigures the controversial season that d follow starting
with the fact that it s not a bad episode. It isn t a great one of course, not really,
and we ll get to that soon, but it is decent. The episode sees the Greendale 7 attend their
first day as seniors, the first day of their last year at Greendale theoretically, at least.
Abed, who s famously not overly fond of change, is struggling with this, so Britta tells him
to go to his happy place when he s feeling anxious about this finality. This is Abed
we re talking about, of course, so that happy place is the show he s always talking about,
his vision of their life at Greendale as a conventional TV sitcom. (clip ABED, SINGING:
This is my show, it s about me, and all my friends on Abed TV)
) But while Abed s resisting the end, Jeff s doing his best to hasten it turns out all
he needs to graduate now is a history credit - honestly, I ll never understand how American
colleges work but the school system was hacked, there s a problem with the class registers,
so the Dean tells everyone that anyone who wants to preserve their spot in History of
Ice Cream has to compete in The Hunger Deans, a lavish, loosely-themed series of tests,
trials, and feats of strength. (clip - GEORGE: Not the feats of strength ). Eventually, these
two stories come together, Jeff lets go of the Dean s balls, he helps break Abed out
of one of those classic Abed imagination jams, the seven end up in a regular history class,
and that s about it. Here s the thing - there is plenty to like.
At times, the dialogue feels like it s trying too hard to sound Harmon-y, but there s no
shortage of snappy lines (clip SHIRELY: Is all this for history of ice cream?
NEIL: They overbooked it so it s first-come-first-serve now
TROY: Just like real ice cream!) ) But most of the positives here come in those
Abed TV sequences. We ll talk later about why these work conceptually, but they re also,
just, really well put together. These parts of the episode pull off the multicam, studio
sitcom look perfectly. The way History 101 uses unorthodox camera angles and blocking
to suggest an open-fronted set, distorts the cast s familiar timing, has them wait for
the laugh track, and injects the odd few bazinga-esque artificial catchphrase reads (Clip SHIRELY:
OH LORD NO!) all this is equal parts amusing and uncanny, and having Abed recast Pierce
as Fred Willard is the icing on the cake. When Abed TV gets folded in on itself, when
we swap out multicam mode for Greendale babies, the animation is spot on, and I m not ashamed
to say that this theme song very regularly gets stuck in my head (GREENDALE BABIES THEME
PLAYS). And the speech Jeff gives or doesn t, really - between Babytown and Abed TV,
that feels like vintage Community. There is plenty to like, particularly in this side
of the episode but this is Season 4. So it's not all sunshine and roses.
You may have noticed I didn t mention the Britta-Troy C-plot yet, and that s because
there s really not much to mention. After the two fan-favourite characters grew close
last time round, Season 4 coupled them up properly, but whatever spark once lit up episodes
like Virtual Systems Analysis never really reappears in this episode or, really, throughout
this season. Ironically, the only really involving part of the Britta-Troy romance is its end
(Clip TROY AND ABED: I wish I had my own body back!). That being said, I do wonder how much
this was Season 4 s fault. Maybe we d be right to lay the blame here at the new showrunners,
the newer writers, but maybe these characters simply weren t as compatible as they seemed.
Maybe those flashes of chemistry earlier on in the show were just that - flashes. I guess
we ll never know. Speaking of squandered potential, the end of this episode sees the Dean move
next door to Jeff, and the rest of this season does diddly squat with this. There s, like,
one bit in of one episode this whole season that halfheartedly brings this back, but it
s such a feeble payoff that it taints the setup, exposes it, reveals the utter lack
of purpose here. And, hey, on that note The Hunger Deans story is the quintessence
of Season 4. It s a misfire. It s a crudely fashioned approximation of the show s past
pastiches. It s the aesthetic of Community with empty space beneath. And if you re sat
there wondering why I m being so negative, what differentiates the Hunger Deans from
similar referential setpieces in the show s past, its future even, ask yourself this.
Why is it here? What purpose does it serve? A narrative one, obviously it s the mechanism
by which Jeff attempts to keep the group s history seats - but beyond that, why does
the episode choose to move that story forward in this way?
Because, typically? Community does stuff like this for a reason. The Claymation fantasy
adventure in Abed s Uncontrollable Christmas wasn t made because Claymation is fun and
cool well, I guess that s part of it but there? Abed regressed into the childhood mythology
of Christmas because his messy, adult reality had become untenable. His mum s choice to
spend her holiday with a new family had shattered the narrative Abed had built around Christmas,
what it meant, and so we re thrown into this Christmas-fiction pastiche, this soupy hodgepodge
of holiday characters, tropes, settings, and stories. Abed s sifting through this world,
this composite space of public-domain Christmas narratives to try and find a replacement,
a new meaning of Christmas hence the story, hence the presentation, and so on. And sure,
it isn t always quite that elegant, but there is always a reason, some interesting way in
which the high-concept rigamarole speaks to our characters and where they are. Season
5 s MeowMeowBeanz episode comes to mind - the way the app s effects, by the third act, transform
Greendale into a classic 70s sci-fi dystopia ruled by empty niceties and emotional blackmail
is an extension of Jeff and Shirley s beef at the start (clip SHIRLEY: Part of making
sacrifices for my loved ones is not expecting my loved ones to make sacrifices). Earlier
in the season, the hot lava game is engineered and stretched out by Abed, both consciously
and otherwise. Hot Lava is a game that could go on indefinitely, and that s why it was
picked here. The prolonging is the point, the staying in the fantasy, because when it
ends Troy goes. There s none of that in the Hunger Deans. The Dean wants Jeff to compete
for him, dance with him, sure, but why frame that around the Hunger Games? What s the link?
What s the reason? If anyone watching this has an answer, drop it down below, but I ve
got nothing. There is no point to the pastiche, and, yeah - that d be a recurring problem
for this season. The other reason this part of the episode
feels wrong is similar, actually. There s no reason for it conceptually but there s
also no real reason for it diegetically. Why would the Dean do this? As we ve seen, Greendale
is a place where all manner of wacky nonsense ends up happening but there s always a ramp-up,
always some nominal cause and effect. Perhaps everyone at Greendale is a level 7 susceptible,
maybe they take things way too far, but things start sensibly. The first paintball fiasco
was supposed to be a controlled affair, but the Dean made the mistake of offering too
desirable a prize. Next time round, there s obscene amounts of wealth at stake, and
the same thing happens with Hot Lava. Pillows and Blankets gets off the ground because of
the potential World Record, the election episode happens to try and get Sleepy Joe to drop
by, the KFC spaceship affair was a PR stunt, and the Law & Order yam trial tomfoolery is
the result of our characters desperate attempt to salvage their grades. It s never just abstract
parodic mayhem. The stuff that happens here may seem unreal, but it s unreal in a real
way. There is some logic to it. And we don t get that here, the only thing History 101
gives us is the suggestion that the Dean did it to, what, dance with Jeff and all this
time and money spent, all this disruption to the school for that is just out-of-character
for the Craig Pelton we d seen beforehand. So like all the worst parts of this fourth
year - it feels wrong, like an ill-thought-out parody of Community that s missed the mark.
The Hunger Deans is nothing. It doesn t work in the same way as Community s past referential
showstoppers, and there s no reason for it. It s a semi-timely reference, and that s pretty
much it. But the same cannot be said for Abed TV. It
all tracks Abed s happy place being this show fits perfectly with what we know about him
already, as does his overuse of this new mental tool. This side of the episode works, it makes
sense, it has a reason, and it speaks to Abed. This is a character well known for his aversion
to change, his use of complex imagined scenarios to resist or acclimatise to change. He s a
character for whom TV, particularly classic sitcoms, with their endlessly renewing status
quos, is the lens through which life is approached. Abed s been using this lens to navigate his
college experience, he s been viewing Greendale, in part, as his Cheers, as his Friends but
sooner or later this was going to run into difficulties, because sooner or later he d
have to leave, and the first day of senior year understandably brings this problem into
sharp focus. The way Abed gets sucked into his happy place, then, the way that happy
place breaks down, folds in on itself, is a really interesting and enjoyable visualisation
of Abed s journey to resolving this problem first avoidance, then the unwelcome realisation
that time this isn t something you can avoid, and finally Abed s use of this mental construct
to reconcile himself with change. It s even more poetic in retrospect acting almost as
a premonition of Community s eventual finale, which also employed imagined versions of the
show to have those last remnants of the Greendale 7 reach an acceptance of the group s end.
Abed TV is all of this so what better way to open the fourth season, the fourth and
supposedly final year this group will spend at Greendale? This is great and yet we find
it lodged in an otherwise limp episode, opening an often limp season. That disconnect is disconcerting
but, in a way, it makes sense. When thinking about Season 4, it s important
to remember that not everyone left. Harmon left, the writers room changed, but that change
wasn t total. Plenty of the minds behind plenty of classic episodes were still here, there
were still people who really got the show, what it had been, what it could be - but they
were rubbing shoulders, were led by people who maybe didn t so much. Danny Gonzalez has
a video that touches on how strange a choice the studio s hand-picked replacement showrunners
were for this show, which I ll link below, and the result was this, the so-called gas-leak
year, at once familiar and alien. We see all this in History 101, it exemplifies the contradiction
and liminality of Season 4 - it isn t Community, not quite, but it isn t not Community either.
There are some points which feel familiar, feel solid, feel unreal in a real way, feel
like a natural continuation of the show s halcyon days and for a moment you forget about
what s to come, about the Puppets, about the everything-is-connected prequel episode that
utterly misunderstands the appeal of the show s basic premise but then we cut back to the
Hunger Deans and it all comes flooding back. Dan Harmon compared Season 4 to watching your
family*& ()$%& $%*()$ )(% $% and that s fucking stupid, obviously, but even as a viewer, that
mix of the familiar and the alien in the gas leak year feels unnerving, wrong, even. And
if you re the guy who came up with this show, with these characters? Watching this must
have prompted some complicated emotions, feelings of jealousy, violation even. So maybe it isn
t like that, but maybe it is like being split from your family, like seeing someone else
take your spot, take your family to all the places you went to, take them to fancier,
better versions them, even, but without knowing what it was you all enjoyed, together, about
them. Even as you look on, though, every now and then, though, things click and it looks
just like old times. So there is a sort of synecdoche here. The
experience of watching History 101, is the experience of watching Season 4 not a bad
experience, per se, but often a perplexing one. There are great moments here, just as
there are great episodes to come. This isn t Community, but this is still Community.
It s at once the last gasp of that original Community - the last year with the full cast,
the last year with our characters as students and a strange aberration, a 13-episode intermission
before that original Community starts up again. Watching History 101, you see all this at
once, as Season 4 flickers between a worthy attempt to follow up the show s golden era,
and gas-leak-induced-mayhem. And at the very least there s something interesting there,
right? Maybe that s why, at the end of the day, I do have a soft spot for this episode,
why in my mind the good edges out the bad. For years Community viewers have dismissed
this fourth year, not altogether unfairly. Some have even followed after Harmon, talked
about with pure vitriol. The dominant narrative is that the whole thing is a writeoff. Watching
History 101 makes you wonder if maybe as a fanbase, as a Community - we ought to rethink
that, just a little. But that s all I ve got for you today thanks
for watching, and I hope you ve enjoyed episode 4 of Streets Ahead. If you did, you are legally
obligated to like and share the video. Special thanks as always to all my Patreon supporters
onscreen now, especially Daniel Goldhorn, Heather Long, Ryan Emerle and WeirdyBeardy
I m eternally grateful to all of you, the support really makes a difference and I ll
see you all next time!