A great travesty is being wrought upon the viewing public. The show Community has been taken off the air.
NBC says that this is just a mid-season hiatus, and that the rest of Season 3 will be resumed, and completed, in the near future. I don’t trust NBC, but I hope that they’re telling the truth. Community is one of the most charming, intelligent, inventive sitcoms I’ve ever seen. It tells the story of seven adults attending a place called Greendale Community College, where the mascot is the Human Being, and the most important lessons are learned outside of class. For example:
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How to bounce on trampolines.
· How to tell if you’re trapped in an evil timeline.
· How to survive paintball wars.
· How to save Christmas.
The show centers around the exploits of Jeff Winger, “the liar”, a former lawyer who actually faked his Bachelor’s degree. Joining him in each episode are Annie “the day-planner”, Britta “the needlessly defiant”, Troy “the obtuse”, Abed “the undiagnosable”, Shirley “the cloying”, and Pierce (Chevy Chase) “the dickish”, also known as “grandpa flatulent.” Or so the characters are described in the Dungeons & Dragons episode—when they must make heroic battle for a fellow classmate’s self-esteem.
All of the characters are likeable: even Chevy Chase, playing a rich old racist who just wants to be loved. Abed, furthermore, has Asperger’s syndrome and a movie-obsession: which translates to the fact that the show can, through his perspective, suddenly become a mafia flick, a batman satire, or stop-motion animated.
Joining the main characters for most episodes are the Dean of Greendale, a “pan-sexual imp” whose greatest hunger is to have Greendale be regarded as a normal school, and Chang, the group’s Spanish teacher-turned-psychotic-groupie-turned-security-guard. One of the best moments with Chang (and there are quite a few), is when we find out that he’s living in a storage closet and pretending a dismembered mannequin leg is his wife.
Oh the times, the times I’ve had—vicariously—at Greendale! The movie parodies! The paintball fights! The pillow forts! The KFC-brand rocket simulators! It will be a sad day if Community is cancelled (and not just for the monkey that lives in the college's air ducts).
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I asked Greg to describe his favorite clip from the show, and this was his response:
Several characters are creeping through the school’s basement, trying to escape zombies (a.k.a. their classmates, after consuming infected taco sauce). Suddenly, the scene is split by a blood-curdling shriek.
“Oh,” Jeff Winger gasps in relief, “it’s just a cat.”
The cat yowls again and leaps at them. They duck. “It’s just that cat again, guys,” Jeff says, trying to calm everyone down.
The cat launches itself at the humans a third time, claws and fangs bared. Jeff’s forehead breaks into a cold sweat. “Hurry!” he yells. “There’s a crazy cat down here!”
“The reason I like it,” Greg explained later, “is that it captures in one scene how this show takes the clichés of other shows and turns them upside down. The writers of Community just seem to have so much creative freedom.”
Here’s another typical exchange (made during the final battle of an epic, Star Wars-themed paintball game).
Jeff Winger looks to the left of the camera, a noble gleam in his eye. “No matter what happens, we’re going to meet in a better place, people. It’s called Denny's.”
“I don’t know how to get to Denny's!”
Jeff snaps his gaze down at the recalcitrant soldier. “Then I guess we’ll meet in hell, Leonard.”
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The first episode that I saw of Community included the information that the Dean was writing a novel called “Time Desk”, which featured (obviously) a time-traveling dean. My favorite line in the whole series is later in that same episode, when, having committed an irreparable wrong, the Dean takes off his hat and moans, “Oh, that this beanie were a time beanie!”
Even the last episode aired, the 3rd season Christmas special, was amazing. Quick rundown of the plot: the group is almost brainwashed, through carefully-targeted song-and-dance routines, into being the new Greendale Glee club. Luckily, Britta is an awful singer, and breaks the trance right before the group is convinced to make Glee their way of life. It also comes to light that the advisor of the Glee Club, a man who smiles way too often, killed his last group of vocalists with a bus.
Troy and Abed (the most nerdly of the main characters) spend their time watching movies like “Kick-Puncher” and “Inspector Spacetime” (a blatant pastiche of Dr. Who), and then reenacting them for fun. Annie (the hyper multi-tasker) and Britta (the former anarchist) get up to all sorts of school-related shenanigans. Shirley tries to convert everyone in the group to Christianity, while Pierce explains the rituals of his faux-Buddhist cult. Jeff (played by The Soup’s Joel McHale) spends almost every episode trying to A) preserve his good-looks, or B) manipulate everyone into doing his work—and ultimately (every episode) learns something new about the meaning of friendship.
No mere blog can capture the geeky brilliance of Community. So let’s rally, everyone, and save Greendale! Go Human Beings!
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