Surfing Sitcoms: Community – “Competitive Wine Tasting”
These spoilers for this week’s Community have actually been to China several times. It’s the only place to get fireworks that are too dangerous for Mexico…
I suppose I will remember “Competitive Wine Tasting” as the episode where Britta kissed Troy and a Chinese woman called Jeff “Veronica Mars.” Other than that it certainly flailed around a bit, coming in at a level below what we’ve come to expect from Community. Consider that there were three major guest stars in this episode, all of whom would have been more than enough to structure an episode around, but here all of them have limited screen-time. Most egregiously, one of my favorite character actors of all time, Stephen Tobolowsky, shows up only to be shunted into a weird C-plot with Abed. I would say these scenes, in which Tobolowsky plays a professor whose specialty is the study of Who’s the Boss?, played like a Saturday Night Live sketch, if SNL was in fact still producing anything resembling quality material. In particular, that final moment where the dejected professor, humiliated by Abed, reaches into a drawer that we see contains a gun… and then opens it further to see his copy of What Was Happening? and smiles, was well above SNL levels.
The most emotionally resonant plot, and thus the most interesting, involves Troy lying to his acting class (and Britta) about getting molested, due to the fact that he’s jealous of all their stories of pain. It turns out that Britta is attracted to emotionally damaged men, and before you know it she’s surprising Troy with a smooch. After some prodding from Abed, Troy admits his charade, and Britta says she will never kiss him again. Normally I love Community‘s metafictional streak, but when the acting professor announced “We are actors, not writers”, implying that guess what, you weren’t going to get the ending you wanted, it felt more like a cop-out than a real joke.
As for what the episode seemed to think was the A-plot, it contained some decent jokes about how self-centered Jeff is and I enjoyed the fact that Pierce and We Mei actually turned out to have more in common than they thought and went on a real date. (“You’re both rude, you’re both racist, you’re both heirs to moist towelette dynasties…”) However, that was pretty much it. It might have been able to pop more if this episode wasn’t trying to shoehorn so much in. In a lot of ways this felt like an episode from the first stretch of Season One, before the show found itself, a stretch I have little to no urge to revisit. That said, I have little doubt the show will have many great episodes to come, so a below-average outing with some fun moments is forgivable I suppose.
Quotes:
-”The professor of the class is the author of the book.” “We got him?!” “I know.” (It’s worth pointing out that I’m fairly certain Jeff & Abed are talking about the show getting Tobolowsky to guest star here.)
-”We don’t discuss the special gym.”
-Chang on why he’s taking Wine Tasting class: “Drunk ladies. Fancy bathrooms. And a room full of free coats.”
-”Please take weird haircut, stupid grin, and go sniff another dog’s ass.”
-”When do we get to choose our stage names? Which do you think is better: Trevor St. Goodbody or… David?”
-”I’m on the chapter right now where he traces Tony Micelli’s genealogy all the way back to Caesar.”
-”Don’t preach to me about romance, Annie. I had a three-way in a hot-air balloon.”
-”Britta’s attracted to men in pain. It helps her pretend to be mentally healthy.”
-Troy finds a new use for air quotes: “I wasn’t ‘molested’ so much as I ‘made it up.’”
-”Very impressive, Veronica Mars.”
-”Before my ex-boyfriend Pablo was arrested for forging church relics…” I love the occasional glimpses we get into Britta’s life outside of this little group. She is truly messed up.
-”The professor wants me to star in his all-Black production of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s called Fiddler, Please!“
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