Alison Brie

Community finally returns tonight for its fourth season, and I, for one, could not be more excited.  While Community has been off the air since last season’s finale in May, fans’ grumblings over changing premiere dates and show times has attracted some serious backlash. What’s the big deal with this show, anyway? Folks complained that Community is too weird, too meta, too full of Chevy Chase’s sour, unlikable antics (Chase, incidentally, left the show mid-season).

Community’s detractors and skeptics take issue with the show’s heavy reliance on parody (each episode is loosely organized around a well-known film or genre—Thursday’s episode is rumored to borrow from The Hunger Games), sometimes-obscure verbal and visual pop culture references, and constant potshots aimed at the show’s shabby fourth wall. But Community’s weirdness and fondness for self-reference are precisely what set it apart from other sitcoms’ bland, recycled jokes and story lines. Its penchant for parody does more than plant Easter Eggs for film geeks. All of these tactics put Community in a position to be, well… feminist.