Field Guide to Returning Fall TV Shows

[Cross-posted at Bitch Flicks.]

The roster of new television shows premiering each year in the fall ought to be an exciting time for any TV fan. Unfortunately, I am a jaded, cynical curmudgeon, burned by my previous experiences in the field of new fall shows, and I read the previews with dread roiling in the pit of my stomach. In our age of podcasts, webseries, and countless other competing forms of entertainment, the networks seem to be getting more and more desperate, scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the barrel.

Broad stereotypes? Check.

Dominated by straight white men? Check.

God help us all, a new Ryan Murphy show? Check.

It's predictably depressing and depressingly predictable. Once upon a time, as a starry-eyed viewer full of hope and gillyflowers, I had a “three-episode rule” for judging any show whose premise piqued my interest even a tiny bit. This year, I don't expect to watch any of the new shows unless critical opinion snowballs in the course of the season.

However, fall still brings its sweet gifts even unto the cantankerous television fan, in the form of returning shows. Some of these shows have spiraled so far down the U-bend that I can't even hate-watch them anymore, but there are still enough watchable returning shows to compensate for all the awful new ones (and to wreak havoc on my degree). In the absence of new shows that don't make me want to claw my eyes out, here is a list of returning shows worth watching.

The Thick Of It (9/9)

I already covered this. It's on Hulu. Watch it. (N.B. Because it is full of swears, Hulu will make you log in to watch it, and for some reason this entails declaring yourself male or female. If this disgusts you as much as it does me, and you wish to, ahem, seek out alternate methods of watching, I will turn a blind eye.)

Boardwalk Empire (9/16)

A questionable creative decision last season nearly made me rage-quit this show, but it drew me back in with a jaw-dropping finale. Slow, dense, and luscious, this isn't a show to everyone's taste, but I remain compelled by the epic-scale world-building of 1920s New Jersey, and especially by the way the show explores the lives of not only the rich white men who run things but also marginalized minorities: people of color, women, queer people. This is not a perfect show by any means, but it fascinates me.

Parks and Recreation (9/20)

Yaaaaaaay!

 This, on the other hand, might well be a perfect show. Leslie Knope, April Ludgate, Ron F---ing Swanson... Just typing the names gives me a big goofy grin. Every episode is a half-hour ray of blissful sunshine, brightening my spirits with a healthy dose of feminism, Amy Poehler, and laughter. Roll on Thursday (by then I might even have stopped crying about the breakup of the century).

How I Met Your Mother (9/24)

I still watch this show, I guess. I can't really remember why.

Bob's Burgers (9/30)

The charming adventures of the most delightful animated family since The Simpsons deserve a full-length treatment at some point. For now I simply say: Watch it. If the hijinks of close-knit siblings Tina, Gene, and Louise don't fill you with joy, you have a shriveled husk in place of a soul. Also, Kristen Schaal! Eugene Mirman! H. Jon Benjamin, for crying out loud! (HEY, FX, WHEN IS ARCHER COMING BACK ALREADY?)

Tina's my favorite. No, Gene is. No, it's Louise. Oh, don't make me choose!

 The Good Wife (9/30)

For a sitcom-loving sci-fi nerd like myself, a legal drama is well outside the comfort zone, but this is about as good as they come. The juxtaposition of title and premise alone should grab any feminist's attention: When her husband is embroiled in an Eliot Spitzer-style scandal, Alicia Florrick returns to the bar in order to make ends meet. The rich ironies and tensions suggested by the show's title play out on Julianna Margulies' understated yet beautifully expressive face as she navigates personal and professional life when she has so long been defined as Peter Florrick's wife. And sometimes Michael J. Fox guest stars, and it's awesome.

30 Rock (10/4)

For several seasons now, 30 Rock has been but a pale shadow of its best self, but laughs are still guaranteed, and my love for Liz Lemon is fierce and undying. I will almost certainly complain vociferously about every episode, but I wouldn't dream of missing out on bidding farewell to the TGS crew.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (10/11)

In some ways, this is the anti-Parks and Rec: A crass and often vicious show about crass, wholly unlikeable people. You won't see anyone hailing the Sunny gang as feminist icons anytime soon (though, for what it's worth, the jokes are usually on the holders of prejudice rather than the victims thereof). I'd like to revisit the episodes featuring Carmen, a trans woman, to see how they stack up against the generally appalling mainstream pop-culture depiction of trans women, but I'm honestly a little afraid to do so. When Sunny misses, it misses hard, but it's also capable of making me laugh until I cry; and, unlike a certain other 2005-premiering show mentioned above, I'm actually optimistic about the chance for creativity and entertainment in Sunny's eighth season.

Community (10/19)

The date is on my calendar and on my heart. Friday, October 19^th, 8:30pm: The stars will align. The cosmos will come into harmony. Wars will end. Justice will prevail. God will be in his heaven and all will be right with the world.

ASDFSDALF;HDSLGJKHSJDK

The Religious "Community"

Anyone who is even casually acquainted with me in meat-life will be aware of two facts: (1) Community returned this week, and (2) I was very, very, very, very happy about this.

Community is straight-up my favorite show on TV. Its midseason disappearance from NBC's schedule was devastating to me, and the announcement of its return had me capslock keymashing all over the internet. I celebrated Thursday's episode with friends and champagne: it was glorious and beautiful, and it's not really an exaggeration to say that this show is a religious experience for me. Here's why.

1. The community of television

I tend to be fairly generous with my definition of “the religious”. Like Tillich, I think religion is an orientation toward ultimate concern; like Barthes, I believe we are surrounded by images that signify ideologies – and if popular culture reveals and reflects a society's most deeply held values, then it's not a huge leap to argue that pop culture can be a locus of religious experience. (Tom Beaudoin's Virtual Faith makes this argument very nicely.)

Although TV ownership in the US is apparently declining, television is still the most ubiquitous form of mass media in this country (of that 3.3% of TV-less households, it's a fairly solid bet that many of them still watch shows online). As such, it is the most unifying artifact of American popular culture, and thus television as a whole could be considered a site of religious meaning. Even for a small cult show like Community, several million viewers participate in the weekly ritual of watching it – a shared experience that nonetheless resonates on a personal level for each individual, much like a religious service.

2. The community of the individual

Some people have accused the Community ensemble of being uniformly terrible human beings who evince no character growth and are unlikeable and completely unrelatable. I will not link to the people saying these things, because they are erroneous, incorrect, inaccurate, misguided, mistaken wrong-mongers who are very very wrong.

I see myself in Jeff: his walls of sarcasm and cynicism that try but fail to hide the true depths of his emotional responses.

I see myself in Britta: her enthusiasm for political causes and her morality that stems from a heart in the right place but is often ill-thought-out or hypocritical in practice.

I see myself in Abed: his profound love of pop culture, his social discomfort, his use of pop culture to understand those around him.

I see myself in Shirley: her deep Christian faith and her struggle to overcome her personal failings to live a really loving Christian life.

I see myself in Annie: her neurotic perfectionism and intense fear of failure.

I see myself in Troy: his goofy sense of humor, his deep bromance with his BFF, his quest for a place and purpose in the world.

I see myself in Pierce: his desperate desire for acceptance and inclusion, insecurities often masked by acting like an almighty asshole.

I really, really love these characters. Each one of them speaks to a different part of my own personality, often in ways that illuminate my flaws and weaknesses. They are complicated, imperfect human beings, but they love each other and I love them. They embody the complex, messy reality of being human – of being simultaneously wonderful and terrible, capable of beautiful things and horrific things, worthy of love and of hate.

3. The community of friends

It's called Community because that's what it's ultimately about. This is a show about a group of people who are thrown together in a situation that's for none of them ideal, and who learn to make the best of it. The interpersonal dynamics at play in this show are special because they are bold and because they speak a truth that is rarely spoken in television.

Compare the show Friends. That was also a show about a group of friends, and it was often a sweet show with a good heart, but all the friends came from the same social location: straight, white, young, of a certain socioeconomic bracket. Community dares to portray a very diverse group of people who find common ground without erasing their differences. The relationship between the Self and the Other must involve both the unity of commonality and the space of respecting difference. Friendship is the experience of navigating this Scylla-and-Charybdis – learning to find common ground in your shared humanity while celebrating and benefiting from each other's difference – and Community portrays this wonderful, difficult process better than any other show I've ever seen.

4. The heart of Community

Community is a dizzyingly inventive show, playing with pop-culture history in endlessly fun and creative ways, but it is still a television show, and as such it follows a certain formula. The characters love each other; they learn lessons about the value of friendship; they make missteps and hurt each other, but they ultimately make the right choices and warm our hearts. Like religious truth, Community's heart is both inexhaustibly profound and completely obvious.

So very many religious and philosophical traditions hinge on the Golden Rule. Jesus himself said that everything else was pretty much window-dressing. Love your neighbor as yourself: it really couldn't be simpler. And yet we have to be taught it, over and over again, in different ways and by different people, and we still don't do it. It's childishly simple, but it's also really difficult.

In the same way, Community is a television show. More specifically than that, it's a half-hour network sitcom. It plays by established rules and conveys a simple, feel-good message. At the same time, though, it takes such delight in exploring the limits of those established rules and finding new and awesome ways to express that simple message.

Community is a show about love, it's a show written from a place of love, and I believe it's a manifestation of God's love in the world. I leave you with the moment I first knew this show was something really special and a nugget of pure wisdom: cabeza es nieve, cerveza es bueno.

Dear NBC: About Community

No rational human could deny that our world is a very sick and broken place. (Well, maybe some dead white guy could.) Wars rage; people are beaten and raped; children die of preventable diseases; vast social and economic injustices crush lives in every way, from the smallest microaggressions to the ongoing famine no one is talking about in the Horn of Africa.

Yea, this brief tragic life is a vale of tears.

And yet, in the midst of all this horror and suffering, there arise, like shimmering soap bubbles on the wind, tiny glimmers of hope and beauty. These small moments of grace must be cherished like the fragile butterflies of love and happiness they are – not trampled under the jackboots of dream-crushing.

Community is one of these delicate flowers of blessing putting forth tentative blossoms of joy on the dung-heap that is this world. Last year I proved, using the most stringent scientific method, that Community is the best sitcom on television, and everything I said then holds true with cherries on top.

NBC, I understand that you are a business. Profits are your priority, and in comparison to the other three big networks you are struggling. But please, spare a thought for the bigger picture. In these times of unprecedented corporate greed, when the spiritual and artistic aspect of human existence has been almost entirely subsumed by the money-grubbing of the wealthiest among us, it is absolutely vital that Art be fostered wherever it raises its precious head.

Will future generations judge us on the profits we posted for this quarter, or on the lasting legacy of sublime emotional truth we produced?

Community is a flickering candle-flame in the long dark night of the collective human soul. For all our sakes, don't snuff it out.

BRB, Sobbing Forever

"'Community' Benched".

'COMMUNITY' BENCHED.

Excuse me. I... I need to be alone right now.

(And yes, I know it's not technically canceled yet, but springs to mind something about writing and walls.)

5 reasons Community is the best sitcom currently on television

It's fresh

Obvious when you compare it to the other sitcoms currently on TV (well, the other ones that I watch):

· Modern Family won all the Emmys, but it’s pretty old-fashioned in form – doing that non-committed, sometimes-video-diary/documentary-except-when-it’s-not thing that’s going around – and its jokes won’t light the world on fire.

· The Big Bang Theory has always been hoary, clichéd, and never more than half a good show; and it’s rapidly squandering my reserves of goodwill.

· How I Met Your Mother, 30 Rock, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia all started out doing something a bit different with sitcom tropes, but they’ve all been running so long that they’re foundering somewhat.

· Parks & Recreation has been displaced by a show full of racism and poop jokes.

Community has the advantage of youth, of course, but it also caters to a post-Arrested Development audience without going the copycat route. It’s very hard to be zeitgeisty without being cutesy, obnoxious, and quickly irrelevant, but Community does it, in part because...

It gets pop culture references just right

A plethora of pointless references to flash-in-the-pan pop culture phenomena can be a source of spleen-rupturing rage for all sapient beings. A smart reference should provide an additional note of humor or emotion for those in the know, but without being smug, condescending, or incomprehensible to viewers unfamiliar with it. Community is produced by film-and-TV-literate people, for film-and-TV-literate people, and its metafictional humor skirts the line of smugness without actually touching it, thanks in part to an excellent sense of when to dial the snark way down. In fact…

It has a heart without being schmaltzy

Scrubs could be a funny show. My favorite episode was the one where the janitor stuck Zach Braff inside a septic tank in the cold open and the entire episode proceeded without him. But Scrubs always lost me in the last few minutes, when Braff would rhapsodize in voiceover about the lessons he’d learned from the last 22 minutes of zany goings-on, while a saccharine pop ballad caterwauled a cheesy montage into existence. Community won’t have any of that. Its teachable moments are always undercut in a way that resonates from real life: sure, you and your friends all love each other, but if anyone actually talks about it you have to kill the sincerity with a good joke. That doesn’t mean the sincerity isn’t still there, underneath everything, but we don’t talk about it. The bonds between characters shine through without the show needing group hugs and anvilicious Aesops – or they do if, like Community…

It utilizes its diverse cast to the fullest

On paper, the ensemble cast for Community almost out-Glees Glee in the “fulfilling minority quotas” game: young white man; young white woman; young Indian man; middle-aged black woman; young Jewish woman; young black man; old white man – each with different religious beliefs, political beliefs, and backgrounds. But, whereas Glee tends to focus on the fan-favorite characters to the exclusion of others (has Tina said anything so far this season?), every member of Community’s main cast is a well-rounded character. The show takes great pleasure in showing us how each character interacts with the others, and consequently has managed to make them feel like people, rather than just types whose personalities change as the plot requires it. Are you taking notes, Glee? Well, you completely ignored Community’s David-and-Goliath attempt to start a feud last season, so I’ll just assume you’re not.

And the final reason why Community is the best sitcom on TV right now is…

It's hilarious

I could prove this entirely in stingers, but really, just watch it. You won’t regret it.