Community - The Complete Sixth Season

After NBC finally dropped the axe and Yahoo snatched it up at the last minute in an attempt to reinvigorate their ailing streaming service, I feared that "Community", Dan Harmon's often-brilliant sitcom, had finally been shunned to the dilapidated porch under which it would curl up and die.

It may be dead-maybe-but it went not with a whimper, but with a bang: season six takes everything that makes "Community" different and turns it up to eleven.

There was reason to worry. Yahoo's streaming service was, at the time, ad-heavy and irritatingly buggy, and when I managed to load the first episode, the first few minutes were inauspicious: the opening pivots on a cartoonish tidal wave of CGI frisbees-a limp gag that's also out-of-place in a mostly-realistic universe-and, shortly thereafter, it's revealed that yet another integral member of the cast, Yvette Nicole Brown, has departed from the show.

But it quickly turns around, and by the fourth episode, wherein an inmate with a telepresence robot-basically an iPad on a Segway, and it's a real thing... a real stupid thing-tries to murder one of the main characters remotely, it's clear that the writers have regained their footing, and they intend to stay there.

What follows are some of my favorite episodes to date: Honda launches a guerrilla marketing campaign, featuring Billy Zane with a jaunty beard; another chamber episode, this time set in an RV, with dialogue so tight that it should be taught in schools; a multi-episode meta-gag featuring Lisa Loeb and a fake 90's alt-rock band; and even one last paintball game, a nod to the first-season episode that put "Community" on the map-and a middle finger to the fourth-season finale, after NBC fired Harmon and tried to co-opt the paintball gimmick themselves, with embarrassing results.

To explain "Community"'s appeale is futile. You had to be there. You had to see it conceived as a run-of-the-mill network comedy with a quirky sense of humor and a standard-issue will-they / won't they romantic sub-plot; you had to watch as it revealed, gradually, the enormous chip on its shoulder; then you had to nervously look on as it morphed-incrementally at first, but then full-on-into a truly gonzo chimera: goofball slapstick, dadaist nonsequitor, machine-gun repartee, and a carpet-bombing of anthropological deconstructionism-all helmed by a petulant, alcoholic show-runner dead-set on zeroing the whole thing into the ground if his fragile pride wasn't cowed to on a weekly basis.

Like I said, you had to be there.

DVD extras include the usual fair, deleted scenes, and a gag reel. More interesting is the "Community" Trivia, a half-hour-long feature with a twenty-question quiz given to the cast and crew that invites the viewer to play along-though don't bother unless you're familiar with the entire series. After that is a short segment about the series' emotional quasi-finale, with revealing tidbits about the series-at-large, including the liberty afforded in changing formats, and the stress of constantly working under the gun.

Much to my disappointment, though, was the exclusion of Dan Harmon's commentary tracks that were recorded for the original broadcast on Yahoo-perhaps they weren't part of Sony's contract, or perhaps they were just overlooked. That's too bad, because Harmon delivers some of the most lively, passionate, and enlightening scene-by-scene commentary on the unsung aspects of production that you'll ever encounter. Though Yahoo's streaming service is defunct as of January, you can still find the commentary online, buried without a grave marker somewhere on the website's video section. You can find it easily if you search "Communitary" on Google.

"Community - The Complete Sixth Season"
DVD
www.sonypictures.com
$45.99