by Luke Sisson
Created by Dan Harmon
Starring Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, Ken Jeong, Jim Rash, and Chevy Chase
Six seasons (no movie) on NBC and Yahoo! Screen, 2009-2015
Where to watch: Seasons 1-5 available on Hulu Plus, season 6 available on Yahoo! Screen.
The Setup: Unscrupulous prosecutor Jeff Winger (McHale) gets found out as having a fake law degree, forcing him to enroll in a Colorado community college, Greendale Community College, to get a real degree. In an attempt to get into fellow Spanish student and misguided activist Britta Perry’s (Jacobs) pants, he ends up starting a study group made up of lovable misfits: Annie Edison (Brie), who had an Adderall-induced nervous breakdown in high school; Troy Barnes (Glover), former high school star quarterback; Pierce Hawthorne (Chase), heir to the Hawthorne Wipes moist towelette empire and noted racist; Shirley Bennett (Brown), divorced mother of two with some poorly suppressed rage issues; and Abed Nadir (Pudi), a half-Palestinian, half-Polish oddity with encyclopedic pop-culture knowledge and…shall we say, limited social skills.
[If you’re pressed for time and just want to get straight to the list, click here.]
First, an admission: I was late to the Community party. I knew it was the kind of show I should have liked: an alternative to the usual sitcom fare, filled clever humor and sardonic dismissal of its lowbrow competitors. But for some reason, I never watched. I think it was timing, mostly: it was my freshman year of college, and I didn’t have a TV and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu were still novelties.
In the interim between my first two unsuccessful college years and my transferring to a new school, I finally had access to a TV again. Community was finishing its third season, and I caught a stray episode here and there. It was funny, to be certain, but it never quite drew me in. Plus, pop culture commentators the Internet over had seen the writing on the wall: they moved it to mid-season, Chevy Chase and Dan Harmon weren’t getting along, Dan Harmon and NBC weren’t getting along, Chevy Chase used the N-word on set, the ratings weren’t great, all that stuff. Community would just have to be another one of those great shows that I missed out on.
The show recently finished its sixth (and probably final) season on Yahoo! Screen, Yahoo’s streaming service. A few weeks after the season started, I decided I would finally give the series a try. I’ve graduated now, so I have plenty of time on my hands. So I bought the first three seasons on DVD and emerged a week later a changed man. That is not hyperbole. Community may have changed my life.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to invest myself heavily in the lives of TV characters. Especially sitcom characters. For some reason that wasn’t the case with Community. I started to really invest myself in their stories. I guess that’s just a testament to the quality of the show, and it’s something that is often missed by the casual viewer: Community is seriously emotional at times, despite its many layers of irony and meta-commentary. And not in a hacky way, either. It looks right into the mess of human lives and doesn’t always offer the usual episodic easy solutions. So I got involved with the lives of the study group. Maybe a little too involved. Who knows.
Anyway.
What is Community? Well, it’s a sitcom, for one, but it’s not like other sitcoms. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. Generally sitcoms follow their pre-baked formulas, which, I feel, is probably why they often have those samey episode titles (a la Friends) or regular gimmicks like Zach Braff’s Scrubs voiceovers (Side note: I really don’t like Scrubs). Community often throws the rulebook out the window and gives you something unexpected: one week the episode is like a Ken Burns documentary, one week they’re having a fake clipshow, one week it’s stop-motion.
But despite all that, it has a solid emotional core that few other shows, not even serious dramatic shows, have. And it gets at real emotions, unlike a lot of shows that try to switch back and forth between comedy and drama (I’m looking at you, Scrubs). Some people seem to think that Community is always winking at you, winking at itself, winking at the world, and that the emotional catharses are all part of that, as if it was poking fun at sitcoms that tried to make you feel. I would argue that that isn’t true. Community is smarter than that. A lot of sitcoms are ultimately very broad, so when Zach Braff starts his little voiceover at the end of every episode, it seems like the equivalent of Curly telling Moe and Larry that he has cancer. It can be jarring, out of place, and it often feels forced. But with Community, you get the sense that there’s something deeper, and it often uses its ironic wink-and-nod style of humor to mask deeper emotions, and the moments where it gets darker are the ones that stand out the most. Yes, they’re occasionally accompanied by sappy music (though Ludwig Gorensson’s score is the best of the best), and yes, occasionally things wrap up a little too neatly. But still, even after Abed’s intertextuality and Troy’s wackiness and Pierce’s outlandish racism, you care about the characters. You grow with them. You remember that it’s possible to be ironically detached and emotionally involved. And you remember that that applies to the real world, too.
Okay. Sorry about that. I just really like this show. Let’s get started.
Should you watch the pilot?
Yes. A lot of shows, especially comedies, have bad pilots. Ones where the timing isn’t quite right, the actors are still not quite comfortable in their roles, where the personalities of the characters are poorly defined. Community, however, is not one of those shows. The pilot isn’t just something you watch on the DVD after you’ve seen all the others to see how odd things were when the series first started, but it’s a full-fledged solid episode.
But don’t take the pilot as an indicator of what other episodes will be like. Character relationships are still working themselves out, and it seems like they didn’t quite know what to do with some of them at first, namely Troy and Britta. But it does offer a fairly accurate read on what the show will be like, at least in its sensibilities.
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Essential Episodes 
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