Homage 401


I've recently been watching Community... again.

After having seen it twice already, my third watch is really cementing for me how genius the show can be when it comes to its various film homages. A very large percentage of the show's episodes exist as homages to specific film, film genres, or film tropes. Some of the most notable are "A Fistful of Paintballs," and "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas," parodies of Westerns and the Rankin/Bass stop-motion Christmas specials, respectively. They stand out because they are not only funny and effective parodies of their respective genres, but because they use the framework of the parody to reveal things about and develop their characters.

With that being said, I have just started rewatching season 4. For the uninitiated, Community's fourth season was plagued with production issues, mainly because the creator of the show and showrunner for the first three season, Dan Harmon, had been kicked off the show. He was replaced by two very inexperienced writers, David Guarascio and Moses Port, and it is a very common opinion that their interpretation of the show was not very good. They butchered characters, changed personalities, and humored long-running storylines that were unimpressive at best, a waste of time at worst. 

These are all surface level issues, though. The best example of their misunderstanding of the show would be season four's ninth episode, "Intro to Felt Surrogacy." This episode sees the Greendale Seven work through a rough patch with puppet therapy. The episode then transitions to the seven recounting the story that led up to the rough patch, recreated in a flashback with each actor replaced by Sesame Street-like puppets.

This could have been another great opportunity to parody a beloved genre, but there's one critical difference: the homage doesn't do anything. In homage episodes of previous and following seasons, the homage served a purpose. It revealed something about the characters, or furthered the overarching plot of the show, or served as a charming framing device for the story. This homage doesn't do that. If the characters weren't puppets, there would have been no change at all. It seems very much like someone in the writers' room said, "We should do a puppet episode," and then they did. 

It's a waste, and even looking past other missteps like out of character motivations and actions, unfunny lines, and so on, the episode serves as an example of a fundamental misunderstanding of genius convention, in lieu of cheap homage.

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