“This seems like a really dark chapter in our group’s story.” (Abed)
Near the midway point of a wonderfully disjointed second season, NBC’s Community offered up “Mixology Certification”, an episode that found the study group taking a dive bar field trip to celebrate Troy’s twenty-first birthday. Airing on the heels of absurdist meta parodies taking on zombies, conspiracy theories, and ‘bottle episodes’, “Mixology” returned the show’s feet to the ground of (sitcom) reality, bringing us face to face with its disoriented failures who attend community college. And in a season marked largely by over-the-top homages, references and gimmicks, it quietly delivers one the show’s most satisfying nods to date: Taxi.
I don’t know that creator Dan Harmon and his writing staff intended this – there is no direct or even subtle reference to the show within the episode – but the weary and wistful notes of “Angela (Theme From Taxi)” would find itself perfectly at home in a number of scenes. “Mixology”, like Taxi at its finest, is unflinchingly bleak and melancholy, the loose ends of its characters’ tribulations not so much confronted and tied up, but rather accepted with a quiet, lonely resignation. Towards the end of the episode, we see young Troy momentarily adopt the pragmatic cynicism of Judd Hirsch’s Alex Rieger – he’s stuck with these people and, in the end he’s not fighting it, because it’s not all that bad. But knowing that won’t stop the world from seeming so forlorn and confusing.
This is certainly not an angle limited to Taxi, but no other sitcom ever really captured the gritty desperation of those moments quite like it. Cheers, helmed by Taxi alumni, was quite capable of hitting these somber notes on occasion, but at the end of the day, it shied away from some of the more raw displays of flawed souls. Norm, for instance, was a drunk who never seemed to get drunk, and was never pressed to pay on his ever-mounting tab. The fact that he showed up before noon for a beer was never lingered upon with any sense of examination, only used as a premise for a Coach/Woody-Norm beer joke.
At its core, Taxi was not so much about the wacky adventures of mismatched misfits, but rather the idea that at the end of the day, the bitter boss, the dumb boxer (and actor), the divorced mother, the zany burnout and the ambitionless lifer were all essentially the same thing – terrified people who feel they’ve failed. Many shows since have attempted to portray this notion, along with the subsequent comfort that the characters all find in mutual company that can nullify or even reverse some of the misery, but very few ever travel beyond singular incidents or conventional tropes, and these days a great deal simply subcontract the emotional notes to a pop tune.
Community has been trying these pants on since its debut, though it often finds itself deluded amongst the other fifteen pairs it attempts to model. “Mixology”, however, proves as adroit as Taxi when it comes to stark portrayals of such an existence, while working within a medium that has seemed to wash away introspective depression and loneliness as the color brightened. Consider, for instance, that by episode’s end Shirley leaves still embarrassed by herself and unwilling to take the group’s loving cracks in stride, or that Pierce has only dug himself further into a cycle of Louie DePalma-like self-destruction and alienation, or that Jeff and Britta become realistically obnoxious when imbibing alcohol and make out, an event that barely registers as a blip in terms of the group’s dynamic (Elaine and Alex once spent the night together without lingering consequences on Taxi). These sorts of events are rare in today’s sitcom landscape, and no other attempts dare to dwell on them as candidly as “Mixology Certification” does, a sort of irony given that many critics wonder how Community can manage developing interest and depth in characters amidst such lunacy and surrealism.
Though not the funniest episode of the second season (that would be the postmodern clip show, “Paradigms of Human Memory”), “Mixology Certification” provides the bittersweet feeling that accompanies a visit to the world of Taxi – I sort of want to be with these people, in that study room or garage, even though I know it would be a very sad and aching place to find myself.
Tags: cheers, dan harmon, judd hirsch, mixology certification, nbc community, taxi
