Monsters of Television

“Alcohol just makes people sad. It’s like the Lifetime movie of beverages.”

One thing that has been mentioned about this season of Community is that it seems every new episode is “the best episode of Community ever.” I certainly don’t think this is true, and I don’t think “Mixology Certification” enters that discussion, either. I do, however, think that is a very good episode of the show, one whose character and setting beats work better than other episodes, like “Accounting for Lawyers” earlier this season.

Much like “Accounting for Lawyers,” “Mixology” is a remarkably standard sitcom episode, with very little in the way of what we normally think of when we think of Community. And while I do love Community for its joyful embrace of meta humor and homages, there’s something  very refreshing about watching the crackerjack cast and writers pull back from their general approach to tell a very simple, straight story.

One of the big reasons “Mixology” works is that it doesn’t stray too far from the college experience. One of my issues with “Accounting for Lawyers” was that it went too far away from being a college show, and couldn’t quite make that stretch work. Here, however, going to a townie bar to celebrate a friend’s twenty-first birthday is exactly what would happen in college, and what would happen in any other sitcom.

And like any other sitcom about college drinking, there’s a message to be had: alcohol is a dangerous thing. But instead of playing it for laughs and then undeserved PSA levels of awareness, the episode wisely uses the bar, and not the alcohol (since only Jeff and Britta get drunk) as what allows the group to be different and allow a lesson to be learned about who you want to be as your grow up.

That the episode locates this story around Troy and Annie is smart, since they’re not only the youngest of the group but also the characters that have the most room to grow and change. Both characters have pushed the boundaries of their identities throughout the show, whether it be trying to transfer from Greendale or be a sexy Dracula, and the bar gives them both a chance to see those ideas play out more.

Annie’s reckless abandon to become Caroline Decker from Corpus Christi gives her that obvious chance to reflect on her life, as she describes the current state of her life to the bartender and stares down the barrel a life devoted to school and then career. Annie has a chance to change this course, and between the fake ID and the bar, she has an opportunity to figure out if she wants to do that.

More enriching, however, is Troy’s beats within the episode. That he gets to see what could become of himself: drunk and douchey (Jeff and Britta), sad or ashamed about his life (Annie and Shirley), or quasi-aware/oblivious about others around him (Abed), is a real eye-opener. He a has a chance, as Jeff notes, to start this next long chapter of his life off correctly. Even more engaging, however, is how well Donald Glover plays this all. The show can be so genuinely goofy sometimes that we can only assume that these actors are only good at that particular setting. But Glover brings genuine weight to Troy’s conflict in the episode, and his scene with Alison Brie at the end really knocks home the value of the episode.

Again, this sort of character and emotional honesty works better and feels fresher than it did in “Accounting for Lawyers,” where Jeff’s story felt old hat by this point, and the rest of the cast out place in the setting. I’d even go so far as to say that I felt like the character beats came through clearer here than they did in “Calligraphy” because the self-awareness of the whole bottle episode premise coupled with the very funny hijinks in the episode, while not muddling the character beats, certainly kept those beats at arm’s length. In “Mixology,” the lack of Community‘s trademark humor distills the emotion,  giving them real opportunity to shine, and I really appreciate that.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• “I broke my leg, not my gender.”
• I was waiting for Jeff and Britta to make out the entire episode, given the fact that constant bickering set it off last time.
• I don’t mention Pierce in Troy’s emotional development here, but Pierce is so stuck in his ways, literally, that he can’t even get through the door. His absence is far more important than actually being visible.
• You know it’s a bad birthday when you’re the DD.