So I’m wrapping my second re-watch of Community — as well as the third. Bear with me. I’m looking up the dates of when seasons run and I’m figuring it out myself. It turns out Community’s troubled lifecycle align with the phases of my early twenties. I’m also framing it within a J̴̝̦̼͕̹̣͇̯͙̅̑̌͝ͅȩ̸̧̼̻͓͖̭̥͈́̕s̶͖̆̌̈̏̒̋͋̾̕u̸̦̦̔̉̊͒͒̐̿̆ŝ̸̡̪͔͎͍̬̂͗̎̌̚ analogy, which is piling it on, but hey.
Dan Harmon was fired after Season 3 — you might say that was the show’s Judas kiss moment, after which it would never be the same again. Until then I was in Uni. Most of us who love the show like we love life probably were in or around campuses around that time. I re-watched those during a break-up. I remember Three had felt a bit over the top the first time, but after the second I posted that it was like the Beatles reaching Revolver. In a way Two remains peak Community, the moment when the show’s conceptual hijinks are truly on full blast. But Three is when the show’s craziness both turns outward, giving us a glimpse of Greendale World; and, at the same time, inside out, pointing fingers at the hijinks for being elaborate coping mechanisms, like everything Abed did, or like writing a blog. Three is the cusp of adulthood, and I guess I wasn’t ready for it until I was a bit closer to that myself.
Community’s disciples were true and their hearts too pure for the Golgotha of Season 4*, but they weren’t really that many, and so 5 came to be Harmon’s Crucifixion spectacular and the show’s cancellation. Saving the show had been a campaign — Five would turn that into its core premise. But by the time it happened, I was out of school as well as army service and I don’t remember caring much for it. I vaguely remember messing up the playlist on VLC and actually missing out on Lava World. Which I did see eventually, so I guess I re-watched the whole thing? It’s hard to say. I was in the interval before hitting the job market and intervals are weird times. Abed says about as much in Repilot: shows often stagger when they try to reboot themselves. And True Community had returned with a self-awareness that was no longer silly quirky — in fact it was silly grim. As Jeff says, “in real life, the robot wins.” Cue heavy silence. Ꙩ • Ꙫ
*(a parenthesis that says nothing)
Re-watching now I can say with confidence that both Three and Five are absolute gems. What shines through, in the end, is the show’s resilience in the face of change. It is deterred neither by the loss of its resident joke butt Pierce, who is more or less replaced by Hickey who’s an old white guy we can take Season Five seriously, nor the collapse of its central Abed/Troy bromance, which it ingeniously uses to clash Abed with Hickey in a classic theatrical setup. Community is a show that keeps trying to outgrow itself. Its self-referential gymnastics is a way of shedding its devices by degrees, exposing the heart of its characters. It’s fitting that it had to die so many deaths, cross so many thresholds. Three already has a provisional and frankly wonderful series finale, gestured by the use of a longer cut of its theme song in its ending montage (shows approaching their final end will do that) and of course its hashtag laughing in the face of death (death laughed back, Harmon laughed last.) It’s a note of seriousness that says we can be sane in the madhouse as long as we stick to each other. Five takes the opposite approach: it’s one last hurrah of full-on conceptual crazy, because even though we fixed the madhouse we’d never stand a chance with the world outside. And Six, friend, is the long goodbye goodbyyyyeee *-_ to the madhouse.
What makes a house mad is magical thinking. Community is a show where characters are in a state of constant imagination play, and they often need to carry themselves over emotional thresholds through play, essentially enacting symbolic ritual. Aleister Crowley illustrates magic with his famous train mongoose story. Troy and Abed need imaginary friendship hats goodbyyyyeee *-_ to make up. Magic is all about thresholds. Abed’s threshold is of course Lava World. Hilariously, Britta (so underrated, BTW, especially after you’ve seen
Gillian Jacobs on Love) keeps pointing out to him that his Lava World is an elaborate denial scenario — that the lava floor, in a metaphorical fashion that’s clever lame in a so essentially Community way, is his realization that Troy is leaving. Of course, she achieves nothing but to be more consumed by the game than any other character. Abed, as well as Troy, needs to arrive at acceptance organically. He needs to brave Lava World.
That’s the crux of it, really. Humans need to go through the mushy-mushy. The more Jeff whines about the pointlessness of whatever insanity is happening
the more
the insanity
entangles him
. Intelligence doesn’t get you through, neither does detachment: you need to believe or at least suspend-disbelieve. Lava World made me tear up, this time. Starting from the episode before and the scene of Pierce’s bequeathal to Troy, as a matter of fact. I’m in the viewer demographic that more readily relates to Jeff and Abed, perhaps even splitting their identifier selves between the two. But I think that, in the end, as Community fans, we really are all Troy. We are dumb but sweet, quite fragile, and quite desperate for a true friend. And we need someone to tell us we have the heart of the hero, and we have a long journey ahead of us.
That’s my generation. We grew out of a world that had become too grown-up for ironic detachment but not quite grown-up yet to see itself faltering. In that short decade between the financial and migrant crises something drew us to try and navigate a world that seemed past belief with at least a kind of self-aware and self-reflexive sincerity. I remember a thesis akin to this coming out of the Metamodernism movement, which was audacious enough to see a cultural future outside picking sides and making statements. Then there was the PBS Ideas thing that did a video on Community collapsing metanarratives — one rather asinine FB friend dissed that Community’s metanarrative is that for all their diversity its characters all want the same bourgeois things. Which is true, but also a compliment. Community’s metanarrative is in the title: we all can’t afford a life without connection. goodbyyyyeee *-_ This admission comes with a certain amount of political baggage that could stand to go unaddressed back in these carefree years when Trump was still a curio of American exoticism. Community is, at the end of the day, a show that tolerates the racist for the entertainment of a more evolved socius, where politics doesn’t work unless to prove that only fix-it-yourself does. Through this lens, even Netflix’s disheartening decision to pull the beloved D&D episode over drowface seems less an awkward arbitration of wokeness and more a drawing of the line. It’s disheartening because, in its time, Community really was a show that made you nod along. But who are you? Odds are, you’re a white boy — I know I was.
It’s centered around the deconstruction of a handsome male antihero, a hallmark of Golden Age TV that’s become an echo in an empty chamber. Its aww’ing female characters are meek by the cutthroat standards of even a show like Sabrina. Yet, in a way, Community doesn’t feel so much past its time as before it; its gentle push to include everyone harkens to a time with less rioting and police brutality, among other things. For all the unironic awareness it has built itself, the world is certainly darker than in the short decade. Which is Harmon’s primary obstacle should he ever want to complete the hashtag and make a movie. Rick and Morty style existentialism won’t cut it. Community, both the show and the very concept, is about hope. Ꙩ • Ꙫ
I broke ground on Six today and I realize I remember nothing of it but for the very end. Six is the Resurrection by way of streaming and the Ascension of Community to must-watch pantheon. When it came out I was fooling myself that I was adulting. I looked at the months it was on and tried to remember which flat I was in then, and if I watched it weekly or all in one go. I guess I’ll look up my posts from the time to dig up old opinions. I’m sure to generate new ones, at any rate. I text people about Community these days with the intensity I would have back when the show was running and everyone was twenty years old. I know I have maybe three sittings left and I already miss it. It helped see me through a small portion of this weird interval that is the pandemic. It reminded me what it’s like to find your place in a group, to function in a group, to want a group. The tragic thing is that stories with lessons are usually written by people older than their target group, and as deftly as they may rub your face in you still don’t get it. You don’t get that you go through life
seeking,
needing,
aching
to find community.
When I started the re-watch I got a pang, an actual heart pang. I badly needed to still like it, still agree with it. After I’m done I’m tempted to pull an Abed and loop back into One. For all the pyrotechnics of storytelling later seasons gave us, something now draws me to the relative sitcom simplicity that started it all. We’ll have to leave the madhouse at some point goodbyyyyeee *-_, and we’ll be at One again goodbyyyyeee *-_. We’ll be — goodbyyyyeee *-_ we have to — goodbyyyyeee *-_ back to a place where everyone is new, where we can make believe again that we do better together.
the Budafoki amended 