Community

The comic timing isn't as tightly paced as it once was, but there's a certain WTF thrill in watching story lines meander where ever they please. [20/27 Mar 2015, p.92]

It still feels, moves, and thinks like the Community you know. It has changed, yet it hasn’t. Its essence remains.

It feels familiar and fresh, with myriad possibilities in front of it thanks to smart new cast additions and a renewed focus on those characters over just getting lost in the creatively inane.

Community continues to achieve a tricky balance of cynicism, sentiment and surreality.

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.

The heart remains the same. If you loved it before, you’ll still love it. And if Community wasn’t your kind of humor in the past, it’s not going to be now.

These episodes are not their finest half-hours, but they’re laying a foundation for greater things to come.

The season premiere makes a gentle effort to re-establish the show’s shrinking original cast.

The premiere, which is funny moment to moment while also being a thoughtful referendum on the nature and style of Community and whether it needs to change.... The season’s second episode is a little flat over all, but the scenes in which Mr. Rash is strapped into a pair of cut-rate virtual-reality goggles, navigating a computer landscape out of the “Tron” era, are worth the effort of finding Yahoo Screen.

The college was saved and the show was saved, but that left each with a question: what now? The first two new episodes still seem to be figuring it out. Community still feels very much like the same show in tone, sense of humor and production quality.