Review: Community Has The Biggest Heart But The Weirdest Habits
- Apr 24, 2018
- 2 min read
This year marks 9 years since NBC and Dan Harmon's strange love child, Community, was born. The show rapidly became a cult classic, spawning rallying hashtags, 6 new timelines, and a fan-made video game based on an episode that takes place in a video game. (The link goes to an article I wrote about the game.)
But the six-season masterpiece didn't get to this without a lot of drama. After being cancelled, NBC fired head writer Harmon and brought it back for a comparatively awful fourth season. Then they brought him back for a fifth season where multiple major cast members were lost, then it was cancelled again, only to be bought up by Yahoo Screen for a sixth and final season.
It's difficult to properly review six seasons of cult television, especially as it is my favourite television show of all time. But other than a few strange in-jokes and sayings that miss the mark (such as their constant usage of words such as "sha" or "duh-doy"), and some poor episodes in the second half of the show (like "Ladders" or "Heroic Origins"), I dare say it's a fairly perfect show.
Community is a show about a study group of seven people (including Chevy Chase, Alison Brie, and Donald Glover) attending Greendale Community College, a school run by an incompetent dean (Jim Rash). Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) is the charismatic leading man - an ex-lawyer who's so good, he became one without a degree. Together the Greendale Seven have crazy adventures ("Intro To Felt Surrogacy", "Basic RV Repair and Palmistry"), ridiculous homages ("Contemporary American Poultry", "Basic Lupine Urology"), and school-destroying games of paintball ("A Fistfull Of Paintballs") and hot lava ("Geothermal Escapism").
There's some classic sitcom episodes ("Football, Feminism, and You", "Pascal's Triangle Revisited"), but then there's crazy stories about an ex-teacher's plot to blow up the school using his child army ("The First Chang Dynasty") or one member of the study group going crazy and seeing the world in claymation ("Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas").
It's a show that is completely aware of itself and its weirdness, and it's constantly questioning itself and lampshading everything. It's what happens when the head writer is an alcoholic who spends too much time on TV Tropes (true story) but it's beautiful, it draws you in, and it's somehow universally relatable. The ensemble cast truly create something beautiful when they're together, and some of the best moments in the show come simply from all of them being together and just talking - in fact, multiple episodes are made up entirely of this ("Cooperative Calligraphy", "Cooperative Polygraphy").
Community is more than just postmodern - it's almost an ode to postmodernism. It's a sitcom discontent to just be a sitcom, but in a way respectful and glorifying to the sitcom format. In six seasons, they tried a lot of things, and almost every one was written masterfully and with a wink. Community may just be the best sitcom since television began. #sixseasonsandamovie
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