A Eulogy for Community

So, in case you haven't heard the news yet for some reason, Community was cancelled last Friday. When I first heard the news, I didn't really have a huge reaction. Community had been on the bubble for so long, and this most recent season was a little too hit or miss for me to feel indignant about the cancellation. And with Donald Glover departing anyway, it kinda felt like it was time. And yet, when I sat down to write a post about the news today, it dawned on me that I was gonna have to write about this show in the past tense. Aaaaaaand that's when the feelings happened.

My basic reaction.

Community wasn't always perfect, especially in recent years, but at its best, it was everything I want in a TV comedy. Its writing was consistently surprising and inventive, its acting was engaging and memorable, and the show's creative staff, led by Dan Harmon, was always always always willing to push the envelope. And even at its worst, the show still had an utterly admirable core message: that everyone, no matter how jaded or discouraged or weird they are, can still find a place to call their own, and a community where they belong. I have never seen a show commit to that idea as thoroughly or even try to pull it off as realistically as Community did, and now that I have to think of it in the past tense, I'm remembering how special it was.

In case you haven't guessed the core theme of this post yet.

I got nostalgic yesterday, so I went back and rewatched the pilot. It's told mostly from Jeff's perspective as he accidentally creates the study group while trying to get into Britta's pants. It may not have the funniest lines or the flashiest premise in the show's history, but it does a great job of setting up each of the characters and the show's core theme: community. Each character begins the pilot on the defensive in some way. Troy's trying way too hard to be a man, Abed's disengaged with the world, and Annie's preemptively indignant about the way people treat her, for example. They all have something that's causing them pain, that makes them feel wounded or broken in some way, and as a result wind up lashing out at each other. Ironically it's Jeff, who'd been in pain for so long he had turned it into a way of life, who convinces them that they're worth something, but they can only get better if they drop their defenses and try and help one another. They don't exactly become a surrogate family on the spot, but in Jeff's own words: "You've just stopped being a study group, you have become something unstoppable. I hereby pronounce you a community."

The man knows how to cry.

There have been a lot of TV comedies over the years that deal with the concept of community, or constructed family. 30 Rock and Parks and Rec come to mind right away, but there's also Futurama, Friends, Cheers and like twenty five others. Still, there are two unique things about Community that set it apart from all the others for me: just how real the study group's constructed family feels, and how unique and multidimensional the characters are (even Pierce). Even though they all sort of decided to become a community in the pilot, it took a long time and a lot of pain for many of them to discover what that actually means. Troy begins his friendship with Abed by playing mean jokes on him and trying to avoid helping him with their science project (How did I forget about this episode?!), Jeff is constantly faced with the decision of whether to do the selfish thing or help his friends, and Pierce can often barely talk without being selfish and cruel. Constructing a family out of the study group is a long and hard process, and involves as many steps backward as forward, which on the one hand is actually realistic and on the other is more fulfilling. When the study group finally gets its act together and becomes a family, I certainly believed it more and felt a lot better for them because of how hard they worked to earn it.

I can do this all day.

And even once they got a handle on this whole "family" thing, around the end of season 3, they're still not perfect people. They're still flawed, but with the help of their friends, they've embraced their flaws and stopped thinking of them as damage, and that's what community offers: not healing but acceptance. I think too often in modern cinema and TV, finding a home or a family is equated with being healed. It's an easy association, and one a lot of us tend to lean towards in our everyday lives. But finding acceptance and support didn't make Abed less socially inept, it didn't end Jeff's bitterness, and it didn't remove Annie's confidence problem. That's not how people work in real life, and it's not how Community worked. In Community, acceptance and support gave the main characters the safe space they needed to explore their "flaws" and separate the bad from the unique. Like in real life, it's not about changing yourself or making yourself better, it's about being comfortable in your own skin, and finding people who are comfortable with you. It's a much more realistic and emotionally honest model for personal growth than I've seen elsewhere on television. It's that honesty that made the characters so real, so funny and so utterly relatable.

Submitted without comment.

I have more respect for a couple of shows on television right now than I ever did for Community, even during its best years, but I don't have nearly as much gratitude for anything else. As someone who became an adult during Community's five season run, I can honestly say I'm a better person for having watched it. It showed me what emotional health really looks like and how you get there. It showed me what it does and does not mean to be an adult, a man and a (Greendale) Human Being, and judging by the number of upset people I talked to on Friday, it did something similar for a hell of a lot of people. And now that I've realized that Community is actually over, I've started remembering just how much I owe that little show about an implausibly awesome, utterly human group of friends. I'm thankful for that, but I'm also sad I have to write about all of it in the past tense. It's cool, though: I'll clone up soon.

(Two editor's note: sorry if there are any tense issues: I actually wrote the whole post in the present tense and went back and switched it to the past tense afterwards. Because that was easier.

And if you're feeling a Dan Harmon sized hole in your life, his podcast Harmontown is pretty funny and he now works on a cartoon called Rick and Morty, which I've been describing as "Dan Harmon writes Adventure Time. Enjoy!)