This post contains spoilers through the March 29 episode of Community.

It was, of course, tragic that Community went on a long hiatus if only for the show’s prospects and for our collective enjoyment. But who knew that the show’s long absence from airways denied us a hilarious sitcom riff on Mitt Romney’s declaration in Iowa last summer that “corporations are people, my friend.” Because it’s hard to imagine a show other than Community where an actual personification of a corporation—in this case, a hunky blond named Subway who wants to open a non-profit shelter for disabled animals, reads 1984, and pushes all of Britta Perry’s buttons—would walk jauntily onto the scene. Especially at a time when the show’s deepest friendship is in the middle of a reassessment.

Subway’s appearance on the show is a continuation of the plot that began with Community‘s return: Shirley wanted to own a sandwich shop, but the Dean circumvented her by welcoming a Subway franchise onto campus. Subway (the person) is a way of getting around the Greendale bylaw that requires any on-campus business to be 51-percent student owned. It’s terrific not only for Community to get a chance to make a bid for some of the product placement money liberated by the end of Chuck‘s run on NBC, but for Britta to get a truly entertaining love interest who wasn’t part of the main cast. Britta gets a bad rap for being a buzz-kill, but I appreciate the show acknowledging that it may only be within the disastrous dynamics of the study group that she’s a bore, and there’s a place where her passion is a better fit, and where there’s someone who shares her values and is available for gratifyingly kinky sex.

In keeping with, though in a much more veiled key, I thought it was a nice touch that, as Troy and Abed are facing serious problems in their friendship, Air Conditioning Repair School Dean Laybourne showed up to drive a wedge between them along the lines of their aspirations. Community‘s done a nice job of suggesting that blue-collar jobs can be not just legitimately rewarding but a calling and an art as high as filmmaking. And Laybourne sought to divide his prized target student from his best friends by playing with that idea. To Troy, he implies that Inspector Spacetime and Abed don’t have sufficient respect for Constable Reggie and Troy, that they devalue the work and creativity of the world’s journeymen. And Laybourne exploited Abed’s elitism and nerdery, suggesting that Constable Reggie—and Troy—are a drag on Inspector Spacetime’s wild adventurism and creative spirit.

And if this does escalate to full-scale war, I’m Team Troy and Team Blanket Fort. As much as it’s probably time for Abed to learn some realistic life skills and to experience some failures, it’s also probably time for Troy, now that his friendship with Abed has liberated him from jerky jockdom, to figure out an identity that’s more authentically his own.

The bridge is yours.

-This new James Brown biography looks pretty good.

-Modern Family‘s cast would like all the money, please.

-Could The Hunger Games get a Best Picture nomination?

-Gamers have bigger reward centers in their brains.

-One more day until Community day!

This post contains spoilers through the March 22 episode of Community.

I didn’t particularly like this episode of Community, which fell in love with a concept in favor of an idea. And I think I’m particularly frustrated with it because the idea was a good one: that one of the hardest parts of having adult friendships is figuring out the moments when you have to push a friend rather than simply enjoy or enable them, and that sometimes friendships that have served you well in the past don’t work any more.

The situation that raises that question, and the concept this episode fell in love with is pure Community, and pure Abed. The aspiring filmmaker’s discovered that he can hire celebrity impersonators to role-play through movies with him, and he’s $3,000 in hock to his dealer. When we met Abed three years ago, the core question for him was whether he’d be able to resist the influence of his embittered, falafel stand-owning father and pursue a career as a filmmaker. We embraced his decision to pursue his passion, and helping him make his movies (or ending up the subjects of them) has been one of the things that’s united the oft-fractious study group. But going down that path’s opened Abed up to repeated excess, whether he’s ending up with a messiah complex or invading his friends’ privacy to make a documentary. Abed’s father may have been right that he needed some sort of discipline or maturing influence, but freed from his ambitions, no one’s been particularly effective at giving it to him.

And the most interesting part of the evening was Troy realizing how important that check is. As befits a Dreamatorium partner, he started off the evening by defending Abed’s whims. “Abed is a magical elf-like man who makes all of us all more magical by being near us,” he insisted when Annie was tempted to break the spell and force Abed to face the consequences of his new addiction. But by the end of the night he recognized Abed’s recklessness for the self-centered junkie behavior it is. “We just spent our whole night paying off your debt and you’re blowing money on Patch Adams?” he asks, indignant. And he finally faced up to his fear of confronting Abed. “You don’t like people who tell you what to do and I don’t want to be one of those people,” Troy confessed. “You have to stop renting celebrity impersonators…Sometimes you’re going to have to trust that I know better than you.”

Abed said he would, but whether that’s actually the case, and whether their friendship can survive honesty when it involves something Abed doesn’t enjoy hearing are open questions. That revelation obviously hurt enough for the Abed from the darkest timeline to reappear, suggesting that sometimes, you’re better off traveling alone.

For me, the two arcs on Community that have consistently worked best have been Annie’s coming back to herself in the wake of her addiction, and Troy’s journey from being a fratty jerk to a nuanced human being. I wrote last week that Britta and Jeff actually make much more sense as a couple of Jeff and Annie do, no matter how often Annie may get entranced by the sight of Jeff’s abs. And I think Annie and Troy ultimately make sense together, if we’re going to go that route: they’re people growing into a truer understanding of each other and how the world works. People who don’t work together, as friends or as anything else, at one stage in their lives can become more alike. That’s a wonderful process, but it also means that you can grow apart.

This post contains spoilers through the March 15 episode of Community.

I appreciate that the day I wrote a post arguing that Community’s static approach to its characters and their potential—or lack thereof—for growth was one of the benefits of the show, it returned with an episode that moved a number of the characters forward, if in fits and starts.

Community’s sometimes had trouble deciding if Pierce is just an unpleasant, manipulative person, or if he’s deeply wounded, and this episode was a convincing example of the later approach. Dressed up to look like, as Troy puts it, “a wealthy murderer,” Pierce is looking for business opportunities to prove that he can be as impressive an investor as his father was. And the other members of the group point out that he can move one of their number forward as part of his project, turning Shirley’s long-dormant plan to open up some sort of baking business into a reality now that a vacancy’s opened up in the Greendale cafeteria.

But Shirley has to figure out what she really wants. At first, she insists that when she and her husband get engaged again that it means the ends of her plans, at least temporarily. “I am going to start a business! Soon! I just have floral arrangements to pick and a DJ to hire!” she tells Britta. And when planning sessions don’t go exactly according to plan, Shirley complains to Pierce, “I’d rather be with my man planning my wedding, and you’d clearly rather be with Halle Berry in 1999.” But when they get down to brass tacks, impressing Dean Pelton with their pitch—”I cannot believe you learned all this at Greendale!” he marvels—Shirley’s clearly in her element. And she and Andre work things out even after she’s late to the rehearsal dinner when she tells him she’s ready to step up and take responsibility for their family, and he needs to let her. For someone who often seems so mired between frustration and a carefully controlled emotional facade, it’s great to see Shirley standing up for herself because she has a dream, rather than because she’s on the defensive about religion or where she’s at in her life. And I hope she and Pierce can find a way to fight back and beat the Subway: Community hasn’t had a villain for a while, and it would be nice for the study group to have an affirmative cause.

In that vein, I really appreciated Britta’s emergence as a genius wedding planner, even though she dismisses her mad skills at floral arrangement with the reminder that “There are people dying in Uganda.” Her ambivalence about what her talent means for her politics was very funny. “This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers,” she intoned sadly. And as the episode progressed, it was a reminder of why Jeff and Brita are actually a much more compelling pairing than Annie and Jeff: they’re both misanthropes with gooey centers who hate themselves more than they hate the people around them. “I promise to make no more than 70 percent of what you would make at the same job,” Britta promises bitterly as she and Jeff stumble drunkenly up to the brink of a mock wedding. You can hear her terror of surrender.

The C story, in which Troy and Abed decide to normalify themselves to make sure they won’t upset the wedding didn’t carry quite as much heft, and I was sorry for that. The show’s had an interesting debate in the past about what embracing weirdness means to each character, whether it’s Troy figuring out that he’d rather be in a goofy costume inspired by Alien fighting zombies with his best friend than hitting on chicks as a sexy Dracula; or Abed finding a potential flirtation with a secret service agent who sees the world the same way that he does. I wish the episode had more time to explore what it means to Abed to be getting along with a pretty girl at a wedding, for once, what it feels like for Troy to be back in his normal guise. They’ve gained an enormous amount from their friendship, but I’m curious to see what that relationship gains them when they aren’t hanging out in their Imaginarium or shooting Troy and Abed in the Morning.

I am, and I suspect many of you are, excited for Community’s return to NBC’s airwaves tonight and for the possibility of a fourth season of the much-adored, little-watched experimental sitcom. But a dissenting voice comes from Larry Fitzmaurice in GQ:

In real life, the desire to have friends doesn’t excuse decaying, bigoted excuses for human beings. Yes, this is television. It’s unreasonable to expect a portrayal of real life from a show that considers zombie outbreaks and runaway monkeys a part of its balanced breakfast. Still, for a show as episodically self-contained as Community, watching these characters step on the same rake over and again has devolved into pure frustration. In “Comparative Ecology” the beloved study group were branded the “Mean Clique.” But, more accurately, it exposed their toxic, mob-mentality inertia. A frequent third-act gambit involves Jeff, the group’s alpha male, giving a clear-hearts-full-assholes speech about how all conflict must be resolved with the group dynamic fully restored and faults forgiven because it’s essentially better that way. That’s it.

This is a fairly succinct recapitulation of the reason most of Community‘s critics can’t find a way to emotionally attach to the show, and it’s one I can kind of understand. But I think there’s something interesting about the fact that we’ve had a decade of television in which we told ourselves we were morally sophisticated for sympathizing with monsters on dramas, and yet anyone would object to the idea that a comedy isn’t working because its characters are merely stuck or unlikable.

That’s part of what I like about Community, actually, the prospect that this is essentially as good as it gets. Abed is probably not going to grow up to make nationally-distributed movies. Troy seems likely to go into a trade. Shirley’s never going to open her brownie business—she’s returned to her husband rather than getting some sort of revenge on him. Jeff may return to his swinging lawyer ways, but it’s not really clear that he was genuinely happy in that life, either. Pierce is a fixed curmudgeon. Annie and Britta’s destinations have yet to be determined, which does mean the show’s invested its potential for fully surprising trajectories in two women, one who returned college sadder and somewhat wiser from her jaunt into the world, another of whom never even got out into it before heading to rehab. Not everyone gets their dream job, and an apartment with a lot of brushed steel and big windows, and the perfect relationship. Everyone plateaus at some point.

And if that’s not the narrative of most sitcoms, that doesn’t make it untrue, or uninteresting. Norm is not less funny or less warm on Cheers for essentially being the same person over the course of the show’s run. Ron Swanson plateaued at a place that’s very, very funny and complex but that doesn’t exactly open up enormous potential for emotional growth. That doesn’t mean I’m bored with them and their flaws and virtues—just that the writers have to be very smart about a very narrow window they’ve been given. Community‘s wild inventiveness is a testament to how that show’s writers have found their lanes and are working miracles within them.

In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob, Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley on NBC’s Community explains what she and her fellow black female actor friends do when someone asks them to play “sassy”:

As a black actor, it’s refreshing that I’m not playing the “sassy black woman.” It’s something that Dan Harmon was cognizant of from the beginning. It is something that I’m always cognizant of. Every woman on the planet has sass and smart-ass qualities in them, but it seems sometimes only black women are defined by it. Shirley is a fully formed woman that had a sassy moment. Her natural set point, if anything, is rage. That’s her natural set point, suppressed rage, which comes out as kindness and trying to keep everything tight…Female friends that are in my tribe, black girls, we all have stories about that. We find interesting ways to make [directors] tell us to be sassy because they know that it’s racist. I say, “Can you show me how to do that?” They don’t want to do a black version of sassy, so then they move on.

I can’t even imagine how much pressure there must be to go along to get along when you’re trying to get a job or keep one, so the folks who are pushing back at all get kudos. And I think, just rhetorically, there’s something smart about playing uninformed in this sort of situation. It lets the person giving awful instructions know that what they want isn’t just an accepted default for everyone. And it forces them to acknowledge they’re asking folks to do something they’d find embarrassing and artificial to carry out themselves—if they’ve got a whit of shame or smarts.

I also think Brown’s discussion of Shirley’s anger is really important—and it’s what’s the key to what made Octavia Spencer’s Oscar-winning performance as Minnie Jackson so good in The Help. Minny is full of justifiable rage, whether it’s at the husband who abuses her and their children, the employer who treats her dreadfully, or even sometimes at the white lady who thinks she has the presumption to tell Minny’s story honestly. The pursed lips and sarcastic remarks that make the character funny aren’t really for anyone else’s gratification. They’re an escape valve for the anger it would be so dangerous for Minny to express directly.

The bridge is yours.

-Downton Abbey and Luther will move from the miniseries category to the drama category at the Emmys next year—and the category may expand as a result.

-Inspector Spacetime, to tide you over until the return of Community on March 15.

-How Oscar voters made their decisions.

-Kid Rock turns out to support the Detroit Symphony.

-Estelle’s back! Summer’s here!

Joel McHale’s confirmed that, whenever Community comes back, “someone you’ve seen a lot” will die in the show. This seems like a good decision: I think the show’s done a good job with its younger characters this season in terms of both giving them emotional stakes and moving them towards figuring out what their adult selves will be like. But the older characters feel a little stagnant. Shirley’s relationship with her husband, the impetus for her to go back to school in the first place, has been resolved. Pierce is settled as a static character. And Jeff’s quest to get back to being a lawyer feels like it’s stagnated, but it’s not clear if it’s because he doesn’t actually want to go back to his own life or if he’s stuck. A death, if done right, could shake things up a bit. But who is the show going to kill? I can think of a couple of candidates:

Leonard: This would be the lowest-impact choice. Leonard is the oldest character on the show, and perhaps the most peripheral of the minor characters. It would be relatively easy for him to pass away of natural causes, and for it to be low-impact and touching. Person most likely to be affected by his death: Pierce, for whom Leonard’s been a hook for anxieties about his age before.

Neil: Neil’s suicidal impulses were the basis for perhaps the best episode Community’s ever done based on a peripheral character, “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.” That means we’ve got an emotional hook into his continued survival. And if he died, it would lend a dose of darkness to the college experience—and the show’s been very good when it’s accessed that unexaggerated pain, as it did in “Mixology Certification.” Person most likely to be affected by his death: Jeff, who was the architect of Neil’s inability to get a clean slate at Greendale.

Professor Ian Duncan: He is a rather impressive alcoholic, and his role in the show’s been so reduced that I can see them getting rid of him to shed salary. Person most likely to be affected by his death: Again, Jeff, for whom it would be a reminder that Greendale isn’t an escape: it’s a trap, if he really wants to live the life he says he’s committed to.

Vaughn. Or Rich. Or both: They’re both so annoying. And maybe Community could kill them off in a goofy accident involving City College. Person most likely to be affected by their deaths: Annie. Who maybe would react to the deaths of both of her college boyfriends and flirtations by finally having things happen with Jeff.

I sat in on a bit of Alan Sepinwall’s interview with Cougar Town co-creator Kevin Biegel, and I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that what the small, scrappy shows are doing to fight for audiences will be what everyone has to do in the future:

TV now doesn’t just exist from the writers room to the television. People like to be engaged. People like to know that you care about them caring. I really believe that…If I can do these little events and people actually respond to it and feel like they’re getting something special, I think that’s awesome. And I don’t understand why other TV shows don’t do this. And I literally think – I don’t care if I get in trouble; fuck it – there’s a laziness on the part of a lot of TV writers, where they think, “My job is just to write the show and produce the show and that’s it.” Bill and I are on the same page: “Fuck that. That’s not true. Your job now is to go out there and sell the show and tell the fans how much you appreciate them.” Because one little spark – like Katniss in “Catching Fire,” book 2 – can really start a whole big thing…What’s the alternative? I sit on my own in the writers room and the show goes away? That’s so lame! That’s so defeatist! That’s so 1980s, “Okay, we’ll just write a shitty sitcom, and people will like that.” Fuck that! That’s not the world anymore.

In the ABC executive session yesterday, Paul Lee joked that he loves Cougar Town‘s Bill Lawrence because he’s a “pirate,” when it comes to roguishly and independently promoting his shows and “I used to be a pirate when I was a showrunner and now I’m the Navy.” I think the interesting question will be whether all shows, hits and scrappy underdogs alike, have to do this, or whether the willingness of creative folks like Lawrence, and Biegel, and Dan Harmon on Community to fight for their shows mean networks will simply be willing to do less work to support them.