Community Season 4 and Why It's A Show Worth Celebrating

There's almost nothing more irritating than having someone describe to you why a television show is great. It's so obnoxious, so presumptive. Television is an intensely personal thing €“ you don't just swan in to a movie theatre for two hours and then swish back out into the daylight, ready to return to your life.* Television shows are something you live with week to week, sometimes for years. You get invested in them, the ups and downs of the narrative, the rise and dips in quality. They are relationships that an audience undertakes with a text. They can make you soar imaginatively and emotionally; and you can go through bad patches with a beloved television show, you can see them make mistakes, go in bad directions, but still hold on to the hopes that they can pull it all back together and be as great as they once were. You believe because you know them so well. So having someone tell you why they love a particular show, and why therefore you should too can be incredibly invasive and off-putting. Worse than that, it can make actually getting around to watching the show itself feel like homework rather than escapist fun: 'Urgh, that show is on... That show everyone has been insisting is so great, so important, so 'clever'. But I don't want to have to learn a whole bunch of new characters and situations all at once. I don't want to have to scramble to catch up with all the episodes that have lead up to this one. And who are those people to know what I like?' All good points; all completely understandable. Someone would have to be a ridiculous, self-righteous, pompous ass to still insist, after everything that you just thought/said, that they have any right to assign you viewing homework, to tell you what you should be doing with your free television time. What a jerk that guy would be. ...So here's your homework. Go on. Go get a pen. I'll wait. And sit up straight. Over the past few months, with its third season drawing to a close, the fate of the dearly beloved, but criminally under-viewed comedy Community has hung precariously in the balance. NBC, the show's broadcaster, had benched the sitcom halfway through the season, temporarily postponing screening the second half (almost always the first sign of an imminent axing) due to less than stellar ratings; behind the scenes a fractious relationship between Chevy Chase and creator/executive producer Dan Harmon had made for disquiet on set and had started spilling out into showbiz gossip; and finally, most alarmingly, there was the shock axing of Harmon, who had been the show's primary guiding voice for the entirety of its production, in May. This past weekend, at the 2012 San Diego Comic Con, the newly installed executive producers and show runners for the upcoming truncated season 4 (only 13 episodes, yet another bad sign for the show continuing), appeared with members of the cast to try and assuage the concerns of fans (who range from academically intrigued to fearfully traumatised) over the loss of Harmon and the potential shift in tone of the beloved show. But why do people care? What does it matter? Isn't it just another one of those quick-talking, postmodern shows where characters shoot cultural references at each other? Don't we already have enough of those? Am I just asking a bunch of perfunctory rhetorical questions so that I can obnoxiously flip them on their head as this article goes on? Am I really that transparent? Yes. Now shut up. Yes, Community is clever. Yes, it's alert and responsive to the cultural pulse. Yes, it is capable of the most ingenious and knowing genre parodies currently operating now that The Simpsons have slid into a decade long funk. But at the heart of all the seeming pop culture, self-aware hilarity, most importantly it's about characters. Fractured human beings who need each other to survive, who better each other in order to grow. A character like Abed speaks of Pretty In Pink, Back To The Future, and Cougar Town, not because he is ticking off some mass culture Bingo card, but because these texts are his window into a world he struggles to comprehend, and can help rationalise through film and television. Pierce ham-fistedly references facts from the 'Wie-kie-poh-dia' and 'the facebooks', because he's a muddled baby-boomer struggling to act young. Jeff Winger looses himself in imported beauty products, faux-soccer fandom, and pretentious scotch drinking, because his narcissistic materialism clouds a fear of self-worth. In the past I have tried to convince people to watch (to love) Community. I have had some successes, far too many failures, but the reaction that really surprises me is those who sort of shrug and say, 'Yeah, it's clever, but I wouldn't need to watch it again.' youwouldawha? You wouldn't need to drop in on this beautiful band of misfits again? You wouldn't need to see how they're going? Where they're headed? How their magnificently fractured minds intersect? How they offer a salve for the damaged parts of each other? How, by accepting each other as they are, they become the best that they can, or have ever, been? You wouldn't need, wouldn't cry out to the universe in longing, for that?! For me, Community is all about that imaginative act that allows for all manners of play. I think a lot of people see the show sliding into the beats of genre and they think it's an elongated piss-take with a rather too self-aware winking-at-the-audience-style satire of form over substance; but what those naysayers miss is that unlike the Family Guys and Scary Movies of the world, Community is not cynically tearing down these structures, poking holes in them. It is rather using them as playgrounds in which to best articulate their characters' journeys, manifesting the experience of people who have themselves been born into and raised by such culturally dense tropes. The onlyway that Community gets away with their genre swaps €“ a paintball game pastiche of every action film ever made; a Law and Order style investigation of a murdered yam; a stop-motion Christmas Special; a tale played out in the 8-bit graphics of a videogame €“ is because the characters (and thereby the audience) invest in the scenario with which they are presented. It's a love note to imagination; to the unspoken collective accord of belief in one another that makes the notion of 'community' possible at all. The characters, like we the audience, like society at large, decide to believe in something together. And by believing in it, by feeding into that act of imagination, we make it real. We become a community. Part of what is most extraordinary about the show is that up until now it has seemed to go out of its way to baffle its audience's expectations. It offers us faith in the possibilities of storytelling, because it has repeatedly made effortless what any other fiction would attempt to do only to crash and burn. So many times over the course of its three year run we have heard of an upcoming premise (the return to the paintball game as a Western; the multiple dimensions story; the story set entirely in the Imaginarium) and thought: Oh God, no. No, no one can do that... No matter how good they've been up until now they can't pull that off...' And yet... Every. Damned. Time. It's streets ahead. In its first three miraculous seasons, Community has proved itself to be one of the most precious shows ever put to air. No doubt the show's fans €“ amongst whom clearly I number myself €“ will be praying that it doesn't get screwed up this coming season in the wake of all the ugly behind the scenes nonsense. Even his detractors would have to admit, Dan Harmon's voice is going to be almost impossible to emulate, and personally, I'm not sure I hold much hope for the replacement show-runners. ...however, Community has always flaunted my dire expectations, all the moments that I thought it couldn't go on. So I hope to be joyfully disproved again in the months to come. * With all the 'swanning' and 'swishing' I seem to be imagining audiences everywhere wearing capes now €“ sorry about that. But you do all look quite fetching. Just sayin'.