The Dreamatorium. Troy And Abed In The Morning. The Darkest Timeline. All of these are key aspects of Community's mythology, though if you asked a casual viewer of the show to explain any of those they might have a hard time giving you a coherent answer. The show's rich, inventive world is one of its biggest strengths, and one of the main reasons its fandom is as huge and vocal as it is. Nothing brings people together quite like a weird in-joke. Unfortunately, one major downside of this world-building is that audience members who aren't die-hard fans can feel left out by the mountain of references and callbacks that they don't get because they haven't seen a certain set of episodes that would make a story point crystal clear. With sitcoms, serialisation isn't what a network wants; they want every episode to be able to stand alone and relate to as many audience members as possible so someone stumbling onto their product for the first time isn't confused into changing the channel. While Community doesn't quite manage Breaking Bad-levels of serialised narrative, there are several threads that are carried over episodes and even seasons, and while many wouldn't consider that a bad thing, the series does tend to put off some just looking for a quick escape.
