Six seasons and a movie, people. That's still the noble goal we should all shoot for, and we should thank the Yahoo gods for making season six of Community a reality. The show would have died had they not picked it up after NBC dropped it, and now we have glorious new episodes available online.
Two episodes in, the new season of Community has everything I wanted (well, except for Troy and Abed in the Morning. And Shirley's constant presence is also missed). I mean, the season kicked off with a Frisbee avalanche and has already given us a cameo return of Nathan Fillion, a quick and subtle dig at Pierce, the knowledge that Chang is a 4chan user (he would be), crazy meta-commentary about the show itself and hints of a sinister dark future that might one day torment our heroes.
Also, Keith David.
From that image alone you can tell that the show is no less crazy, no more risk-averse than it was before. Which is as it should be. Sure, things have changed (something the characters address matter-of-factly, as is the Community way), but change is good. Change is what has kept the show from becoming too stagnant over the last five seasons. The fact that everything can be turned on its head at a moment's notice is what keeps me coming back.
Sadly, the experience isn't perfect. You won't find the show on the usual streaming sources like Hulu or Netflix. Instead, you have to go directly to Yahoo's own service, Yahoo Screen. You can do that through a web browser easily enough, but watching it on other devices will require downloading a dedicated app -- if your device is even supported at all. My wife and I tend to use our PS4 to stream our favorite shows, but Yahoo Screen isn't available on the console.
I don't blame Yahoo for using the show to push their own service, but it's a flawed system, and using it is a pain if you already get all your streaming content elsewhere. In attempting to watch the show through my web browser I encountered a lot of problems:
- The video performance is often jittery and hard to watch.
- At one point the show just stopped, never to start again.
- Sound randomly wouldn't play during some ads (thankfully this problem didn't spread to the main show).
- When coming back from ads, I would be dropped several seconds ahead of where the show was supposed to pick up.
- One time the show just jumped to the end credits of the previous episode after an ad break rather than continuing the episode I was watching.
Other people online have reported similar problems -- and even solutions, though these shouldn't be issues that your users have to fix for you.
I want to be clear, however: I'll take a less-than-ideal Community viewing experience over no Community at all. When considering the darkest timeline future in which Community is dead and buried, I'm very thankful that Yahoo has saved Greendale. As long as the episodes remain as good as these first two, I'll keep watching.
