'Community' Returns, Weird and Passionate, With Welcome New Characters
At the start of Season 6 of Community premiering Tuesday, a voiceover provided by Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) provides quick updates to catch you up on all the major characters. This being Community, it turns out that voiceover was written by Abed (Danny Pudi) “for the sake of, as he put it, catching everyone up,” as Pelton says in words written by Abed, which were actually written by Dan Harmon and Chris McKenna.
In other words, the multi-layered, self-conscious joke machine that is Community is back. The sitcom much loved by everyone except NBC and most houses with Nielsen ratings boxes begins its sixth season starting tomorrow on— hey, talk about one-stop-shopping — Yahoo Screen. Let’s get this out of the way up front: Yes, I’m working for the same company that now produces Community. No, no corporate hand has messed with this review. All overreaching metaphors and misguided theories are mine.
Now then. The first two episodes of the new season establish a few key new concepts and introduce a couple of new characters. Greendale remains, as always, a haven for eccentricity and an institution always on the verge of collapse, as a few hundred Frisbees thrown on the roof of that edifice demonstrates dramatically in the season premiere. And its eccentricity/collapse ratio is a tricky metaphor for the show itself as created by Harmon, whose pop-culture presence is felt both heavily and lightly. At his best, as is frequently on display here, Harmon knows how to overload a scene with references to everything from dinosaurs to Lawnmower Man, and still keep the action moving.
Most of the core players are back, including Joel McHale’s Jeff, Gillian Jacobs’s Britta, Alison Brie’s Annie, Ken Jeong’s Chang, and Pudi’s Abed. In an excellent move, Paget Brewster joins the show in the season opener as Frankie Dart, an administrator brought in to keep Greendale’s budget down.
Related: 36,000 Episodes and a Movie: On the Set of the New ‘Community’
Brewster is probably best known for her long stint on Criminal Minds, but she’s done much of her best work as a bristlingly intelligent comic actor, both on stage and in TV shows ranging from the wonderful Andy Richter Controls the Universe to Adult Swim’s Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.
As such, Brewster fits right in with this ensemble. She immediately establishes Frankie as a bean-counter who chooses her words carefully, and gets her initial laughs from reacting vividly to her first encounters with the Community regulars. In this sense, Brewster’s character serves two functions: She’s a point of entry for newcomers to the show, and Frankie is a partial replacement for the irreplaceable absence of Yvette Nicole Brown’s Shirley, in the sense that Frankie, like Shirley, is a stabilizing force in a community of oddballs forever threatening to spin out of control.
In the second episode, we meet Keith David’s Elroy Patashnik, an inventor who hit his stride in the 1990s and has never quite recovered from not achieving great success. David’s deep, warm voice combined with his character’s world-weary experience gives Community a new sort of personality to bounce off of.
I’m not going to start spoiling things by quoting jokes or trying to summon up the sort of lunacy that pops up on Community and vanishes quicker than it would take me to type out a description. Be assured that, as Frankie says of Greendale, this new funky version of Community is “weird, passionate, and gross.” But, you know, gleefully gross.
Community starts March 17 with two episodes on Yahoo Screen, with one new episode a week thereafter.
