Introduction to Community Blog Writing

By Kellie Churchman

The pilot for Dan Harmon's Community had a simple plot. It involves seven “losers” who attend community college since they have nowhere else to go. The first season is mainly about Jeff Winger’s, one of the main characters, struggles to get his bachelor's, and to get out of Greendale, the community college that he attends, as soon as possible. During this time, the show focused on the characters relations to each other, and how they interacted with the craziness Greendale had to offer. The first real break in this format was the Contemporary American Poultry episode. This episode was the first to center the plot and format around a genre convention. From the second season on, there has been an influx of episodes that critiques television conventions. Although other shows do the same thing, such as, Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, many of them turn the story world upside to do it. What sets Community apart from other parody shows is its ability to critique television conventions while maintaining strong characters and logical consistency in the story world.

An example of parody in Community comes from the episode Epidemiology. The entire episode is a parody of zombie movies, and includes element commonly seen in this genre. During the show, the main characters are at Greendale’s Halloween dance. Here, Pierce becomes a zombie, after eating dangerous meat from the army surplus store, and starts biting the other students, which causes them to get infect. After the main characters realizes no one else survived the zombie outbreak, they band together. From there, the group keeps getting smaller as the zombies start to take them out one by one. Troy is the only person to make it out alive, but he soon goes back to turn down the thermostat, which stopped the zombie disease from killing everyone. Except for the part where everyone was saved, the rest of the plot follow almost every zombie movie ever made.

Beyond the plot, there were several scenes that poked fun at different tropes used by zombie movies. Toward the end of the episode, Troy and Abed (both persons of color) are the only group members left. In order to escape the zombies, Troy and Abed must climb out an open window. By the time they reach the window, too many zombies were coming after them. This meant only one of them could escape. Abed told Troy he wanted him to go because he wanted Troy to “be the first black guy to make it to the end” (Harmon, 2010). This scene mocks the Black Dude Dies First trope that is prevalent in many movies. This is a critique of television and films for it shows that any character with quick wit and courage has a chance to survive. Although luck does factor into whether you survive or not (as with the case for Annie and Britta), sometimes the stupid decisions you make can lead to your demise (as with the case for Shirley and Jeff). The point is all the characters had an equal chance of falling victim. It was the character’s personalities that help determine who was more likely to succeed rather than their age, race, or gender.

Even though the show is formatted completely around a zombie movie theme, the characters still experience personal problems. At the beginning of the episode, Troy and Abed dressed as characters that are deemed to be “nerdy.” After the duo are unsuccessful at picking up girls, Jeff tells Troy his dorky costume “reminds girls of taking their younger brother to Comic-Con” (Harmon, 2010). After hearing this, Troy decides to ditch his nerdy side and dress as “a cool, sexy Dracula” who “makes love to ladies, and survives” (Harmon, 2010). Even with the tension in his relationship with Troy, in the end Abed sacrifices himself to save his best friend. After this scene “Troy has to make a choice: Does he embrace what he's becoming - a nerd - or go back to the cool guy he was?” (VanDerWerff, 2010). This scene is an example of the brilliant writing Community has to offer “for as silly as this episode is, it's grounded in Troy's journey” (VanDerWerff, 2010). Beyond critiquing the zombie genre, the show is able to get its viewers to reflect on his or her relationship with other people, and reflect on two conflicting interests he or she has through the characters of Troy and Abed. This shows that, not only is Community able to critique television, but the writers are able to engage the audience in the lives of the characters, thereby allowing them to reflect on their own lives.

Beyond parody, another tactic Community employs to critique television is satire. An example of this can be seen in the episode Digital Exploration of Interior Design. During this episode, Greendale built a new Subway to replace the burnt down sandwich shop that was there before. But since fifty-one percent of the store has to be own by a Greendale student, Subway enrolled a student who waved his birth name to become a physical human representation of the collective humanity of Subway’s business holders. And, in 1984 homage, Britta and Subway start to fall for each other, even though they could never be together. The two do start a relationship but it ended after headquarters fired Subway for having a very R rated fun time with Britta.

On the surface it may seem Community is only poking fun at corporate America; however, Britta’s relationship with Subway can be seen as television’s relationship with product placement. At first Britta is against Subway because she believes big corporations are evil and have no place at educational institutions. This mirrored how people felt about advertising in television programing. Although television commercials have accompanied programs since television’s inception, it was looked down upon when shows tried to promote brands during the program, because people believed that was not the place to do it. However, times change, and Britta begins “to go with her heart and not her political self-image in falling for this person representing ‘the collective humanity’ of a corporation” (Sepinwall, March 29, 2012). Britta looks beyond Subway as a corporate figure and sees him as a genuine human being. This began to happen in television as well. Many television programs are looking beyond product placement as simply “We talked about and included twenty different shots of the product. Can we have our money now?” Instead, more and more shows are exploring the concept of revolving the B or C plot around the product. This helps to keep people entertained in the show than awkwardly stopping to shove the product into the audiences’ faces. So in the end, Britta realized Subway, the man and the corporation, were actually not that bad. Just as the television industry realized product placement was actually not that bad.

When doing a very satirical piece, most shows have to introduce a completely new element or plot that is not typical for the program. However, Community is able introduce satires and parodies while maintaining a logical consistency in the story world. In the episodes before Digital Exploration of Interior Design, Change burnt down the existing sandwich shop in Greendale’s cafeteria. Because there was open real estate, Shirley and Pierce proposed their own sandwich shop to Dean Pelton. The punch line of this episode is that the dean already sold the spot to Subway. Had the show simply changed the existing shop into Subway overnight, the whole point of the satire would have been wasted. If Subway had just popped up, then the story would have felt more pushed rather than happening natural. Having this progression of events happen before Subway opened helps to justify how it got on campus and why Pierce and Shirley care about it so much. Moreover, when the audience is watching these events unfold it does not feel like the show is setting something up. The beauty of Community is to make each build-up event its own storyline, you never feel that “wait for it... wait for it... and now is the punch line” that you sometimes get with other shows. Community very rarely has to throw in a random element to make a satire or parody episode feel justify in the plot, which is a rather hard thing to do.

Community is not like most shows. It is rare to have a show that critique television conventions, never mind one does it while maintaining strong characters and logical consistency in the story world. Even though there are shows that parody television, like Saturday Night Live and The Simpson, these shows are more widespread. Because of this they have to be appealing to a wide range of audiences. The jokes have to be simple enough that the casual viewer can understand it and laugh along. Community is not that type of show and “while Community itself is perfectly capable of telling straightforward stories that don't lean on pop culture references or meta commentary on the show itself, trying to single out any kind of Community episode as a ‘normal’ one is missing the point” (Sepinwall, March 15, 2012). This is why Community is a show worth studying. Its parodies and satire of television conventions are made for the heavy television viewer. The episodes are not made for everyone to understand. This could be why the show has such a tiny, but very cult, following. Community is made for those who have a deep appreciation of the television art, and really no one else.

Works Cited

Harmon, Dan, Karey Dornetto, and Dino Stamatopoulos. "Epidemiology." Community. NBC. 28 Oct. 2010. Television.

Sepinwall, Alan. "Review: 'Community' - 'Digital Exploration of Interior Design': The Spy Who Loved Subway." HitFix. HitFix, 29 Mar. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

Sepinwall, Alan. "Review: 'Community' Tries to Be 'normal' in Its Return from Hiatus." HitFix. HitFix, 15 Mar. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

VanDerWerff, Todd. "Community: "Epidemiology"" The A.V. Club. Onion Inc., 28 Oct. 2010. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.