Looking Back at Community

With its recent availability on Netflix, Community has been somewhat more in the public consciousness than it had been recently. Starting in 2009, the show was the creation of Dan Harmon, who I'd previously known from Channel 101, a website where people would compete with short-length webseries (also where I first encountered the Lonely Island, before they took over SNL with their Digital Shorts.)

I started watching Community a bit into its first season, and I came to really love the show. The humor was just my style, and I loved the way that it had the fun of being subversively playing with TV show conventions while still having a really beautiful core of loving one another despite all how extremely weird we all are. The show got a reputation for its pop-culture parodies and references, such as its famous paintball episodes (which helped propel the Russo Brothers to helm Marvel's biggest Avengers movies) but I always felt its emotional honesty amidst all the ridiculous silliness was its greatest strength.

I grew up with shows like Seinfeld, and another beloved hit from my early adulthood was Arrested Development, which both mined humor from deconstructing the idea of a sitcom in making its cast full of unlikeable, awful people. But in Community, I feel there was something of a reconstruction, avoiding the cloying sentimentality of Reagan-era 1980s sitcoms that Seinfeld had revolutionarily rejected with its "no hugging, no learning" ethos, but still giving us characters we could feel emotionally attached to.

People always talk about high-concept episodes like the first paintball action-movie pastiche, Modern Warfare, but my favorite might be Mixology Certification, in which a night at a bar for Troy's 21st birthday and the alcohol consumed leads to the study group learning a lot of things about themselves, most not exactly flattering.

Behind the scenes, Community is an oddly mixed bag. On one hand, most of the cast, to this day, remains in touch and they seem to still be friends. On the other, Harmon and Chevy Chase, the famous ringer who played Pierce Hawthorne for four seasons, famously detested one another. When Harmon was fired after the third season, the general impression was that NBC had bet on Chase's star power, though as Harmon eventually revealed, it had been because he had sexually harassed one of the show's writers, Meagan Ganz. That Harmon was the one who brought this to public attention, and Ganz's public acceptance of his apology, helped Harmon's career survive the scandal, but it does leave an uncomfortable shadow on the show's history.

Never a ratings juggernaut, the show struggled a bit to survive Harmon's firing, and after the fourth season, Chevy Chase quit. Through lobbying by star Joel McHale, Harmon was re-hired for a fifth season, but midway through, Donald Glover, probably the biggest breakout star of the show (though other alums have had quite a bit of success since then, like Alison Brie's starring role on GLOW) quit the show. With new cast members rotating in, the show was still good, but had lost some of its early season magic.

Still, it's the sort of thing that time has a way of smoothing out. I'm in the middle of a re-watch and I'm curious to see how the latter seasons hold up. The early ones absolutely do.

One of the great strengths of the show is its setting. Like many of my favorite sitcoms (or, in the cast of Welcome to Night Vale, podcasts,) Community takes its setting - Greendale Community College - and makes it a character in its own right. Greendale is relentlessly crappy, underperforming, a total joke, but also kind of lovely. Regularly, the absurdity of the classes that they offer (I particularly love when a professor climbs a ladder, and the camera follows him up to see that, high up on the blackboard is written the class's name: "Ladders," which he underlines, eliciting a round of applause by the excited students) and the Dean's many, many absurd school events (like an Oktoberfest Pop-and-lock-athon) make it clear that the place is desperately trying to be a great place, despite its inescapable crappiness. And isn't that just like all of us?

And that setting is embodied by an ever-expanding cast of characters, like sketchy weirdo Star-Burns (played by veteran comedy writer Dino Stamatopoulos) or perpetually freaked-out Gareth, or ancient agent of chaos, Leonard.

It makes me feel painfully old to realize that this show started eleven years ago (and has been over for five) but rewatching it has felt like meeting up with a friend I haven't seen in a while. Indeed, the show seems to touch some deep reality about friendship in a way few other pieces of art have.

Anyway, I like Community.