Community

If this strong start is anything to go by, the show is going to produce an interesting, challenging, and hilarious batch of episodes for its fifth season. That’s reason enough to rejoice for now.

Community is back, and back to being itself.

The cult favorite’s fifth season deftly hits the reset button and starts out strong with back-to-back episodes.

Fun jokes, strange setups and surprisingly touching moments are all present as Community dances its fine edge between silliness and the abyss of the insane.

Judging from the first three episodes of this fifth season, Harmon is vindicated and triumphant, but also still pretty torn up about everything. Community is no longer a zombie, but the new episodes feel plenty funereal.

The engineering of the plot is pretty obvious, and the sentimentality that’s part of the Harmon package goes overboard toward the end of the episode.... Everything is back on track, though, in Thursday night’s second episode, a sterling example of Mr. Harmon’s ability to deploy fanboy obsessiveness in the service of funny and affectionate storytelling.

In the three episodes sent to critics in advance, Community sounds like itself again.

Whether riffing on the show's past, unruly present ("re-piloting" as an act of reinvention) or unpredictable future, Abed is always hilariously self-aware of the TV and sitcom clichés Community excels in upending.

The second episode in particular has touchstones of what made the show so great under Harmon.

Throughout, there’s a sense that ­Community is building, or rebuilding, toward something big and bold--that what you’re seeing is not so much a revamp as a restoration. Few live-action sitcoms are so aware of their artificiality and yet so ­singularly alive.

Community's premiere is a focused, confident piece of storytelling about a humbled enterprise and screwed-up people scared straight by the reality of their squandered potential. Subsequent episodes are lighter if spottier than the bittersweet premiere.

The bittersweet hilarity of all of this is where “Repilot” succeeds. Longtime fans of the series will delight in how it is just so Community. Newcomers there to watch a “pilot” of sorts of a series just won’t get it.

The first few episodes available for review feature several moments--callbacks, sight gags, and just plain funny jokes--that will likely feel like rewards to longtime viewers. But Community has also always been plagued by low ratings, and that is unlikely to change now given that some of those rewards probably won’t resonate with newcomers giving the show a try at the urging of those already on board.