The funniest thing about Community's fourth season is how it is underhandedly referred to as "the year of the gas leak" in season five, whenever the characters need to address any continuity that may have carried over, and to also give itself a sort of "clean slate," and with Abed at one point explicitly saying, "That was the year of the gas leak," as a means to explain everybody's oddThe funniest thing about Community's fourth season is how it is underhandedly referred to as "the year of the gas leak" in season five, whenever the characters need to address any continuity that may have carried over, and to also give itself a sort of "clean slate," and with Abed at one point explicitly saying, "That was the year of the gas leak," as a means to explain everybody's odd behavior and what an utter failure this season turned out to be.
Season four will always be an infamous season for fans of Community. It is disastrous. Everything goes wrong and it's difficult to pinpoint individual aspects. For starters, all of the jokes are shockingly tepid. I don't think a single episode contains enough jokes that stick that I can't count on a single hand. I remember letting out a single, pitiful "ha" at a reference to how professor Duncan sort of just dropped out of existence during that puppet episode, but not much more. And on the note of that puppet episode, season 4 is constantly attempting to capture that unpredictable nature of the previous seasons, where every episode there would be some new gimmicky premise that would allow for plenty of self aware nodding at its own absurdity, such as the paintball episodes, or the videogame episode, or Abed's dream room episode, or the animated Christmas episode, or any of the mockumentary episodes, or the blanket fort episode, or the Goodfellas episode, and the list goes on and on. Each episode in the fourth season features some new gimmick that you might think would fit in with the previous seasons on paper, but something is just "off" about them. Each gimmick doesn't feel like it grew naturally out of the internal logic of the overall series, but like somebody in a think tank thought, "People really liked that claymation episode, so how about we do something like that, but like, they're all muppets, and it's also a musical, because people really liked that Glee parody episode from season 2." And that's precisely where every episode goes wrong. None of these gimmicks feel like they were inspired from the show's internal logic in order to reach new emotional and psychological depths within the characters, but instead they feel more like a cynical exploitation of things fans enjoyed from previous episodes, without understanding that it was the emotional sincerity that these absurd premises were implemented with that made each episode engaging and memorable, and not simply the gimmick behind the episode itself.
There's so much else wrong with this season, but I'm about six years late reviewing it, so it probably isn't worthwhile to get into much more depth. I'm mainly writing this for myself, because I loved every other season of Community, and since it's a show that meant so much to me, I think it's worth while for me to just write down why this season is so fundamentally broken. With all of the drama that was going behind the scenes throughout its six season run, season four is the externalized evidence representing what that drama culminated into. All in all, I hope Dan Harmon has sorted out the things in his personal life that led to him being kicked off of Community in season four, and that he goes on to create something as meaningful as Community was (Rick and Morty is great, and it also has a lot of heart and emotional sincerity, but I'd like to see Dan Harmon do something with that same level of heart, but do it without stripping it of the "wholesomeness"), because Community is probably the only show I've seen that I genuinely never wanted to leave, and it's a real shame that it's fourth season will forever remain a blight on the show's reputation that I feel the need to explain immediately after I suggest it to anybody.… Expand
CommunityYour Score0 out of 10User Score
