Community Changed Sitcoms 10 Years Ago
Not to get all "personal essay" on you, but I visited the United States for the first time almost 10 years ago to the day to spend my college savings on a three-month internship I was unqualified for. I know this because the first thing I did when I got to New York was find the quietest hostel I could, plop my bags down on a bed that would eventually gift me my first experience with bed bugs, and turn on the TV in time to catch the final few minutes of the Community pilot. It was a show I, and many others, quickly identified as a lightweight but fun enough series about a group of misfits forming a study group. It was fine, but certainly playing second (or fourth?) fiddle to a Thursday night primetime lineup that also had The Office, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock. A golden age!
Community’s initial premise was simple: A cocky, well-groomed anti-hero named Jeff Winger (Joel McHale, ably proving some brilliant acting ability) gets busted as a charlatan who never actually got his law degree and has his license revoked, forcing him to go back to any podunk college that’ll take him. Struggling for the first time in his adult life, he wields his charisma to form a study group, including octogenarian boomer Pierce (Chevy Chase), idealistic weirdo Britta (Gillian Jacobs), academic overachiever Annie (Alison Brie), and reformed jock Troy (Donald Glover). They all learn stuff from each other as the seasons go on; sometimes some of them kiss, as these things often pan out on network TV.
A decade later, Community has become more a symbol for the evolution of television, for better or worse, than an (eventually) fairly successful show about friends hanging out. That’s in part due to its smart, mercurial creator, its amazing foresight for talent in front of and behind the camera, and the evolution of its more out-there high concept episodes, which would become the rule rather than the exception by the end of the show’s run. Here’s how it all happened:
Community was created by Dan Harmon, now best known as one of the creators of Rick and Morty alongside Justin Roiland., A lot of the DNA that impresses that fervent fanbase can be traced to Community's earliest episodes, including an adherence—sometimes to a fault—to either honoring or subverting traditional story structure; meta explorations of tropes across every conceivable genre; and questions posed to viewers about what it really means when we call a character "unlikeable."
Community's "big break" came during its third-from-final episode of its first season about a schoolwide game of paintball that quickly turns Greendale into an all-out battlefield. Directed by Justin Lin (now the director of five of the Fast and Furious movies), the episode spawned multiple sequels across its later seasons and increased the rate with which Harmon and his writers would play with tone and formula. There was a rousingly successful "bottle episode"—identified as such by Danny Pudi's neuroatypical Abed, a character all but fully aware he's a character in a scripted TV show. Abed increasingly became a self-referential stand-in for the writers, most notably in the Season Three episode "Remedial Chaos Theory," which not only is one of the most successfully entertaining episodes of the show's entire run, but one that introduced the world to the phrase "darkest timeline," a concept (understandably) embraced more and more by the Internet with each coming year.
Despite modest ratings, Community’s critical acclaim grew by the year. That, and its uniquely passionate fanbase, kept the show in good standing with NBC for longer than anyone expected, but other behind-the-scenes issues plagued the show moving into its fourth year. Harmon reportedly clashed with Chase, and had built a reputation for being alternately unreliable and over-demanding of his writers. Former fan-favorite Community writer and current It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia writer/producer Megan Ganz documented the harassment she says she received from Harmon during her tenure. Harmon apologized unreservedly on his podcast earlier last year. Ganz accepted.
NBC dismissed Harmon without explanation (at the time) after the show's third season, having already renewed it for a fourth. New show-runners were brought in to very diminishing returns: it was called “anonymous” by critics and has by far the worst reputation among devotees of any of the show’s seasons, including the first year while it was finding its feet. Harmon was asked back a year after he got the text firing him. Season Five improved, as had Harmon, by all accounts.
Of course, no story about a cult TV show in the 2010s would be complete without streaming butting its way in somewhere. After Season Five, NBC finally canceled the show and a new platform, Yahoo! Screen, swiftly picked it up for its sixth. It was an experiment in Netflix and Hulu competition that failed miserably, and stopped the momentum of the Community's revival dead in its tracks. By then, key players like Chase and Glover had departed; Brie was becoming a major star in her own right, and Harmon had a new cult TV show to helm. It seemed like the right time for everyone to part ways.
Ten years on, Community remains as iconic an example of what to do as what not to do. Do: Use even the most outlandish experimental episodes to reveal something more about your characters' connections and emotions. Don't: Over-rely on gimmicks to paper up the cracks of a dysfunctional and disruptive behind-the-scenes atmosphere. Do: Hire Donald Glover (Troy and Abed became a dynamic onscreen duo in their own right). Don't: Lose Donald Glover, if you can help it.
Community occupies a strange place in the entertainment zeitgeist. It’s now perhaps better known for its missteps (and occasionally cloying superfans) more than its successes, but one need only look at the meta-fication of television since the show first went on the air, the popularity of Rick and Morty, and where a lot of the show's talent ended up (The directors of Community’s 2009 pilot episode? Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame’s Joe and Anthony Russo) to realize modern storytelling owes more than it’s willing to admit to this messy underdog of a show.
Community is available in its entirety on Hulu. Like a lot of the students filling Greendale’s halls, maybe it too deserves another chance.
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Originally Appeared on GQ
