Community is a show that rewards its viewers for having a childhood in which they consumed the same media that the writers did.
Every sports fan has their favorite athlete, but their favorite athlete is rarely who they say it is.
If you ask someone between the age of 20 and 40 who their favorite basketball player is, the overwhelming odds are that this individual will respond “Michael Jordan;” and with good reason. Jordan is one of the most successful players in the history of basketball, and he was a cultural icon. But as a basketball fan in that generation, I can tell you that all of my friends had a favorite player that wasn’t Jordan. They all had one player that played the exact way they wanted to play; someone that was exceptionally relatable.
In conversation, our “favorite” athlete often gets translated to who we think the most dominant athlete is. And while Jordan was unquestionably the most dominant basketball player of his era, my favorite player was actually his teammate.
Scottie Pippen defined the way that I wanted to play the game of basketball. He was the quintessential role player, and his role literally changed every game. If he needed to stop the opposing team’s best player, he did it. If he needed to crash the boards, he did it. If he needed to be the facilitating guard, he did it. And if he needed to be the team’s leading scorer (watching Pippen in his only full season on the Bulls without Jordan remains one of my favorite sports memories as a child), he did it.
The most dominant player is the person that deservedly gets all the attention. Our favorite player is the person that only gets that attention from a smaller circle; the one who is under-appreciated to the point that it is almost baffling.
This analogy is easily transferrable to pop culture. There is your favorite movie (The Shawshank Redemption), and then there is your favorite movie (Garden State). There’s your favorite book (Freakonomics), and then there’s your favorite book (Killing Yourself to Live).
When people ask me what my favorite television show is, I almost always reply with South Park. The show is supremely offensive, but it is offensive to everyone, and most often offensive to ignorant white Americans, which is probably why I love it so much. But it’s also pretty easy to love South Park. It’s been around since I was 11, and I know exactly what to expect form it every time I turn it on.
But after 90 minutes of television on Thursday night, I had my grand epiphany. South Park is my favorite show, but it’s not my favorite show. My favorite show on television, and after Thursday night, probably ever, is Community.
Community is the Scottie Pippen of television shows. Every week, Community balances narrating part of their story arc (most recently, the seven main characters’ wrongful expulsion from Greendale Community College, which [in the interest of not spoiling the plot] has severely affected all seven of them) while also either completely spoofing or playing homage to another television show or genre. I never know what I am going to get from community. I just know that I am going to laugh really hard.
Last night’s three-part finale was no different. The first episode felt slightly out of place because it deviated from the plot; but I forgive it for two reasons. 1) Community has a pattern of doing episodes that totally deviate from everything else happening; and 2) It was my favorite episode of the show ever. 90% of the episode was done with the characters trapped inside an 8-bit platform videogame. This featured a seemingly infinite number of Mega Man and Zelda references, but also featured the characters being themselves in videogame mode. Pierce couldn’t figure out how the game worked, and subsequently had a meltdown for not being included, Troy wouldn’t stop jumping the entire episode, and Abed started a family with one of the videogame characters.
The finale continued with a one-hour episode that featured an “Ocean’s Eleven” heist to rescue the Dean from captivity, and ended with a spoof on a movie courtroom scene, and an epic boss battle fought between two men in an air-conditioning repair school. The last note of the season is a montage that shows a tremendous amount of character development, while each character manages to hold onto their fatal flaw. It was the most brilliant finale since the last “real” episode of Scrubs (more on that in a second).
Community is a show that rewards its viewers for having a childhood in which they consumed the same media that the writers did. Thus, Community is your favorite show, so long as you are in on the joke. Unfortunately, not everyone is in on the joke, and it is much easier to watch television shows that don’t force viewers to think as critically as community viewers have to. The 8-bit episode, which I’ve already re-watched twice, is probably the best example of this.
Community is a show you need a DVR for, and that’s probably the biggest reason (save the god-awful 8:00pm Thursday timeslot) that the ratings struggle so much. The absurdities of these scenes provide most of the laughs, but the storytelling has always been what drives the vehicle. This rarely achieved television combination has left the show with one of the most remarkable cult-like fan followings in recent television history.
But Thursday night wasn’t just great because it featured three great episodes. It was great because Community had their 1993 Scottie Pippen moment. When these episodes were shot, Community had been taken off television and put on a “hiatus.” The cast, writers, and show creator Dan Harmon all thought the show was going to be cancelled. Therefore, they wrote and shot the season’s final episodes as if they were going to be the series’ final episodes.
Because of the hiatus, NBC’s only option for ending the Community season was tossing three episodes on in one night. So on Thursday, Community was thrust onto center stage, playing the featured role on NBC’s Thursday night lineup for the first time ever. It was a great time to hit a grand slam.
Now, we have to go over the weird part. Two weeks ago, NBC renewed Community for one more (abbreviated) season, and has moved the show to Friday nights at 8:00pm. Fans are already concerned that Community will die a slow and painful death in its fourth season because NBC doesn’t appear to have much invested in it, and it has been moved to the worst primetime slot on television.
The strength of the season finale combined with the gloomy picture already painted by the NBC’s plan to handle the fourth season has led me to wonder whether or not Community should really strive for #sixseasonsandamovie.
Because of the heavy-handed finality with which Thursday’s one-hour season finale was written, it’s hard to imagine the show moving in a better direction after this. I can’t be the person that says “DON’T BRING COMMUNITY BACK,” because I realize that puts hundreds of people out of work. But I have the same concern for Community that I had for Scrubs, another great show that did a series finale, only to find out that it wouldn’t actually be the series finale, and subsequently get cancelled the next year.
Like I did with Scrubs, I will still make time to watch every new episode of Community, and I will still be enthusiastic about the characters and the writing. But I almost think it will be impossible for Dan Harmon and company to top what they did on Thursday.
Community will never be everyone’s favorite show, because there aren’t enough people that watch television for shows like Community; just like there aren’t enough people that watch basketball for guys like Scottie Pippen. But I speak for the community (pun absolutely intended, so there!) of people that watch television shows like Community when I say that after Thursday night, this show has unquestionably entered my favorite category.
(Troy and Abed handshake)
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