By Pat Holohan, Staff Writer
Stop me if you’ve heard it before: Twitter is a social media revolution and Betty White is just hysterical because old ladies don’t speak so crudely.
It’s been done and it’s tired.
But the new season of “Community” makes both ideas look fresh, with Betty White playing a near-homicidal anthropology teacher and Troy creating an “Old White Man Says” twitter account to follow Pierce’s misanthropic and ill-informed comments.
When Pierce says that the group should turn the Twitter account into a television show, everyone groans. The comment is a shot at “Community’s” CBS rival, “$#*! My Dad Says,” based off of a popular, more obscenely titled Twitter account.
And it’s no wonder that “Community,” with its constant stream of popular culture references (mostly the product of Abed and Troy), goes after some of its less clever competitors.
“Community” is refreshing compared to the tired shows on the same network. NBC is still running “The Office,” in which the writers have recycled the same plots for more than six seasons (Jim, you’re going to pull a prank on Dwight and then look in the camera? No way!), and the new comedy “Outsourced,” which is best described as “The (Racist) Office: Stereotyping Indians.”
The new season starts by panning through each character’s bedroom with a Fratellis song playing, giving a snapshot of each character. Even this sequence is full of pop and self-references. Abed springs out of bed to look at his calendar featuring the once-mentioned all-gay Greendale Basketball team, Troy wakes up in Spiderman pajamas after a summer where the actor Donald Glover was considered for the lead role in a new Spiderman movie and Pierce has a “Family Vacation”-era portrait of a handsomer Chevy Chase above his bed.
Much of the action in this episode felt like what should have occurred in last season’s finale, with the Jeff-Britta romance getting more extreme than even Starburns’ new top hat.
Despite some dramatic moments, the show never falls into the “Scrubs” trap of taking itself too seriously. Abed’s self-aware, meta-commentary makes the viewer wonder if he’s at least partially aware that he’s on television. At one points, Abed suggests plots for the characters to play out, which Jeff describes as “very season one.”
Still, the shows writers have built in plenty of room to grow, with the potential inclusion of the former Senor Chang into the study group as he deals with a split personality disorder reminiscent of Gollum.
For now free of romantic entanglements, the group has plenty of room to play zombie paintball, or captain a fake ship, or whatever else comes up at Greendale.