Community returns with a fifth season trailer and a need for reinvention

With all of the build-up to Community’s fifth season being behind-the-scenes reports, it’s sometimes been easy to forget that there’s also an actual TV show, with fictional characters whose stories we’re ostensibly invested in enough to care about those reports. So, let this first brief teaser put you back in that mindset by picking up where Community last left off: with the graduation of Jeff Winger, and the promise of a brighter future as he resumes his law career. But with the plot ever-meta in its mirroring of the show’s own off-screen life, any chance at starting over quickly falls apart, and soon Jeff is grudgingly returning to run the halls of Greendale, this time with a lot more authority. The trailer tries to play it all off as a new show called Mr. Winger (because why begin promoting Community now?), but with the winking Scrubs references, some classic weird costumes, and a brief cameo from a TV badass doing comedy (in this case, Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks), there’s no question what show it is. And it looks more like that show in these 60 seconds than it has in a long while.