Remember that thing that happened in that show and how funny it was?
What little hope I ever had in the clip show format — “it’s not a repeat, they’re just repeating old material” — died with the ill-conceived Seinfeld finale and the pointless retrospective that preceded it. Entertainment Weekly tried to justify that “Office” clip show like a top-ten list, validating your taste and sense of humor, their biggest concession is that the experience could’ve been more of a waste of time. “Luckily, Office clips are still hilarious, even upon multiple viewings.” That they are, which is why The Office is syndicated about fifty times a day.
The clips in “The Banker” episode of The Office, and the dull, expository framing device, added up to nothing more than examples of what a morass of ineffectualness Dunder-Mifflin is, which most of the audience already grasps. It’s as much to do with the context — here, some financial bureaucrat is examining the viability of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton, asking questions that most of us have already asked and dismissed: How does DM Scranton make any money, since no one’s ever working? And how has Michael not been sued for sexual harassment yet? And the episode doesn’t even answer them.
I guess that’s what makes it a clip show: clips we’ve already seen, plus a reason to be showing those clips. The 30 Rock plot gave a couple of pretty compelling ones. Family man Kabletown CEO Hank Hooper threatens to cancel TGS, an ever-mediocre sinkhole that probably deserves it, except that our protagonist Liz has devoted her life to this dreck of fart machines and werewolf bar mitzvahs, and Jack has hitched himself to a co-dependent relationship with Liz and is falling farther and farther away from the corporate titanhood Don Geiss groomed him for. Reason enough to reminisce, but the show is a bit smarter than that — even taking the opportunity to show a montage of 30 Rock’s famous guests and nixing the idea. The Jack and Liz clips, in quick succession, add up to a picture of their relationship that’s usually more obscured among the shenanigans at TGS — there have been a couple of suggestions that, deep down, Jack doesn’t think Liz is worthy of his mentorship, but the implication that she’s dragging him down is both completely new and completely obvious, now.
Arrested Development used to repackage old clips that way, too, sometimes just in place of the previouslies that might start an hour-long serialized drama, but usually to drive home a point about a character with a quick collection of examples. Because people do have memories and recall events from their pasts, but unless the framing story fits the clips in organically, they come off as selfish and solipsistic, the characters re-living an experience that we the audience had to sit through and enjoy vicariously. It’s like looking at someone else’s vacation photos, a second time.
I believe I’d have loved 30 Rock‘s meta approach to the clip show except that it had the misfortune of airing after Community did a brilliant clip show — only in its second season — of “clips” we’ve never seen, some from episodes we’ve never seen. It feels like a clip show, with the characters announcing their intent to reminisce then cut to a scene that (looks like something) we’ve seen before. The clip from “Epidemiology 101,” for instance, re-contextualized the Jeff and Britta relationship in the episode — they’re the mom and dad of the group who respond to stress by turning away from the group and hooking up with each other. Which motivates “Paradigms of Human Memory,” instead of the other way around.
I especially like the clips of the study group’s adventures that we haven’t seen — the western ghost town, the mental institution, the Scooby-Doo haunted house, and the meta-suggestion that Community is always the same show in different locations, as if that’s not true of every show. Glee — I thought the parody was great — is always Lea Michele emoting about her need to be a star. Scooby-Doo is always the gang solving the mystery and realizing that it’s not a ghost but some old farmer guy in a mask. At least Community is clever enough to tell the story differently every time, to look at the group dynamic through funhouse mirrors: as a conspiracy thriller, as a zombie movie, as a bottle episode. Each of the genres sees the group differently even as they’re the same disparate people who’d otherwise have nothing to do with each other.