What Did Everything Think of NBC's 'Community' Reboot Last Night?

After canceling Community at the conclusion of its third season and sending show creator Dan Harmon to the unemployment line, NBC made the curious decision to air a new show also called Community last night. Seems kind of soon for a reboot, but you gotta fill primetime somehow. The network even made it more interesting by hiring back most of the original Community's cast and using that show's sets. And on top of all of that, this new Community show even kept the character names that the actors played from Harmon's show. I'm not quite sure why NBC went this route, but I'm guessing it was an easy way to save a few bucks and keep the workload on the light side for the actors. If everyone doesn't have to learn new names, that's one less thing to worry about, right?

Unfortunately, NBC's attempt at a second show called Community just didn't resonate the same way Harmon's version did. Yeah, it seemed kind of the same, but that's a given when you bring back all the same actors, give them the same names and put them in the same setting. It was missing something though. The original Community, Harmon's show, always had a certain spark. It was never interested in dumbing down its humor to appeal to the biggest audience as possible. That's what we have The Big Bang Theory for, and Harmon didn't want any part of that. The first show called Community knew it's audience, and while that audience may have been small, it was on the same pop culture wavelength as Harmon. As much as the show was his, it was ours too.

The new Community that premiered on Thursday night seems like it's more interested in being loved by everyone than it is in delivering smart, quirky humor. Thanks to whatever budget decisions NBC made regarding staff, sets and costumes, the showrunners on this new Community show were able to create a sitcom that looked very much like the show that Harmon once produced for NBC. This new show, however, fails to understand that there's a difference between stealthily spoofing a sitcom trope and actually succumbing to that sitcom trope while you think you're doing something else.

Let's take the character that Jim Rash plays. In the original Community, Rash played Dean Pelton, the man in charge of Greendale Community College. He had a bit of an obsession with Joel McHale's character (Jeff Winger on both shows), but there was so much more to the character. Over the three seasons that Harmon's Community ran, we learned that the Dean deeply cared about the success of the students at Greendale and that his fascination with Jeff stemmed from a level of loneliness. For a character without friends, blackmailing Jeff into having dinner and singing some karaoke with him didn't seem like a bad move.

In the new Community, Rash also plays a character called Dean Pelton, who's once again the man in charge of Greendale Community College. NBC's new Community seems to put all of its budget into buying ridiculous costumes for the Dean, sticking Rash (an Oscar winner for The Descendants) in cross-dressing scene after cross-dressing scene. This money would have been better spent on hiring writers who could have made this new show's Dean as three-dimensional as the old show's Dean. In the new Community, the Dean is in love with Jeff, and that's his entire character.

I'm not really sure if the new Community is supposed to be some kind of fan tribute to Harmon's original show, but that's what it comes off like. Maybe the showrunners of this new show used to write Community fan-fiction online, and NBC spotted them and hired them to run this new show. The idea of NBC trolling Community fan-fic messageboards seems odd to me, but who am I to question the geniuses that run that network?

I'll give this new show a few weeks to see how it evolves, I guess. Maybe the showrunners will find their own voices as time goes along, kind of like how the American version of The Offices stumbled its first few episodes as it tried to mimic Ricky Gervais' original version. If the Community remake can't find its own footing, though, all we're ever going to hear is how much better Harmon's version is than the new version.