Almost nailed it
As much as I wanted to like last night’s puppets version of Community, one massive flaw close to ruined the whole experience. Unexpectedly, it wasn’t due to a shoddy script this time around.
Unlike most of season 4, the setup for all the Muppets-y shenanigans is simple. The episode opens with everyone in the study group just sitting at the table, unable to speak to each other or even make eye contact. The Dean, worried about the group’s collective mental health, decides to do a little puppet therapy to try and figure out what caused this immense embarrassment.
Jump back to a few days earlier. Everyone in the studying group is suffering from immense ennui, in a clever nod (perhaps) to how fatigued season 4 has been. Annie suggests taking a hot air balloon ride together to liven things up. Unfortunately for the group, their balloon ends up floating away without their guide.
They eventually crash land in the middle of the woods, next to a hippie nomad who provides the study group with hallucinogenic berries. They stumble around the forest for a few hours, before setting up camp by a convenient fire and reminiscing under the stars.
Here, Shirley reveals that she told a rather terrible secret to everyone else in the study group –she accidentally left her kids at the grocery store while tailing who she thought was her husband with another woman.
This revelation causes a great deal of shock present day. Jeff comes to the realization that while everyone dished a dark, personal secret that night, everyone else was too stoned to actually remember anything. Unfortunately, this comes right after Shirley let the cat out of the bag. Rather than let Shirley be so miserable and alone, Jeff decides to get everyone else to retell their horrible secrets.
All told, not a bad plot. The script, as I said before, was mostly fine.
In fact, the vast majority of “Intro to Felt Surrogacy” worked for me. I liked the story, the tight editing and the warm fuzzies at the end. Heck, even the puppets gimmick was executed with a surprisingly degree of artistry and elegance. Almost all of the puppet sequences were gorgeous to look at thanks to very accomplished puppet modeling and the beautiful mix of practical, CG and scale model backdrops.
The biggest problem with the episode, the issue that crippled “Intro to Felt Surrogacy” severely, was the musical numbers. They sucked. Some sucked purely for stylistic reasons, channeling lesser editions of children’s programming, but all of them blew equally hard, regardless of the intent.
If the song and puppet-dance routines were a joke, then the episode could have gotten around it. But “Intro to Felt Surrogacy” ended up delivering the big, emotional climax through a horrendously lame camp fire song sequence that doubles as the moment Community finally jumped the shark.
It’s truly a shame that the show came this close to a classic only to get hurled back to the starting line. Especially disappointing is how much of a step up the rest of the episode was. Not only did Community finally narrow down its story to one arc, but the characterization, in general, was as strong as it has ever been.
Everything in the episode felt consistent to the earlier seasons – Britta’s fierce spark hasn’t been diminished, Shirley isn’t played off as wholly subservient and Annie actually gets something to do this episode!
If only, if only the writers realized the songs were god awful and had the foresight not to rely on these bits so much.
At the very least, “Intro to Felt Surrogacy” isn’t discouraging. I’ve ragged on season 4 a lot for being shoddily written and trying too hard to imitate past glories, but, considering the last two episodes, Community seems to have finally turned a corner.
Heading in towards the home stretch of season 4, Community feels as if it’s back in confident hands. Though we may not have gotten another “Modern Warfare” (nor does it look like we ever will), the recent installments have had a keen sense of where and how far the new showrunners/writer can take the show.
I now hope that Community gets renewed for an additional season, and that it does not get cancelled just as the new team is getting into a comfortable groove.
Tidbits:
· Not much in the way of quotable quips tonight. The episode was pretty funny throughout, but not in a pithy, memorable one-liner way.
· While I certainly understand the motivation for the behind-the-scenes tag, it feels a little lazy and a little too self-congratulatory. The puppeteering was impressive, sure, but that Claymation episode still ended on a funny, original tag. That’s two weeks without a stinger!
· Forgot to mention this last week, but “Herstory of Dance” is kind of genius. This week’s, however…“Intro to Felt Surrogacy” is a better title than most of this season’s, but that’s not saying much.
· Where the hell did Pierce go?
chzhang@umdbk.com
