Abed, for example, appears to have completely regressed to his Season 1 form. He sees the world in nothing but pop culture references and regards his friends as characters on a show he’s in (something he openly stated in the latest Halloween episode). This might have been fine back in the first season, but for fans who have been following the show from the start, we know Abed had become something much weirder by Season 3. He was less reference-heavy and deeper into his own head, but now beginning to recognize how his behavior affected his friends. Dialing him back to Abed 1.0 suddenly feels completely wrong, especially when other characters are moving at least slightly forward… sort of. It’s telling that, though the writers did follow through with the seeds planted in Season 3 by making Troy and Britta a couple, they have no clue how to explore and further this relationship (or possibly they have no real interest in doing so), making only passing references to it and in episodes 4, 5 and 6 seemingly forgetting about it altogether.

Jeff is the only one the show has made obvious efforts to continue progressing. With the fifth episode, “Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations,” Season 4 picked up where Season 3 had left off by having Jeff meet his father (who he’d finally built up the resolve to Google in the prior season’s finale). And, when this plotline showed up, there was the small sense that this was the way Community should be: growing and changing. The drama between Jeff and his dad was handled fairly well and the hints of a genuine emotional moment (like the series used to achieve for realsies) came through. However, it was still couched in an episode that also contained a completely rote plotline about Annie, Abed and Troy demonstrating that they cared for Shirley. Furthermore, in the grand scheme of things, the introduction and dismissal of Jeff’s father was extremely anticlimactic. So, again, this ended up feeling less ambitious and more like something the writers knew they had to take care of if they didn’t want longtime fans at their throats. Now that that’s out of the way they can go back to easy will-they-won’t-they Annie and Jeff scenarios and Troy and Abed being a nutty pair of kooks.

If this had been a lazy sitcom from the very beginning, it would’ve been just that: a lazy sitcom serving its function for those people who watch that sort of thing and I would never have been interested in it. The reason Season 4 of Community seems so much worse than a more conventional, consistently lazy sitcom is that it keeps around a lot of the oddities, like the homages, of the Community of the past but tries to mesh them with triter, more conventional sitcom writing that has its characters shedding their prior development and re-learning already covered lessons. This creates a weird hybrid show and I have no clue who the intended audience is. It’s still too weird for newcomers to get into (there’s evidence of this with how the ratings completely tanked after the premiere) and it’s too unlike its old self to make fans happy.

So, hyperbolic though this might sound, I think that Community’s fourth season is a more egregious crime than something that has been less ambitious and more conventional throughout its run, like The Big Bang Theory. At least that show (I’m admittedly assuming this as I’ve only seen several episodes) continues to offer what people expect from it, not to mention it probably makes it easy enough for those just tuning in to get acclimated. But what is the purpose of this new Community that upsets veterans who had come to expect the unexpected and confuses newbies who can’t get a grip on these bizarre, half-baked homages and references to prior seasons? It serves no function for anyone.

I will continue to watch. And I will continue to allow for the possibility that Season 4 will salvage itself, at least temporarily. There are upcoming episodes that sound potentially promising, like one where the whole cast is replaced with puppets and another written by Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) himself. But, as of right now, I can’t at all feel the show’s former ambition and I’m seeing very little in the way of real growth.