Community Finally Fulfills Its Destiny

When asked, I generally say "I love movies, I like television" when someone asks me to differentiate the two, but that's not entirely the case.  Movies are always fun for me, even when I hate them, because they are always a complete story, a single experience, a captured moment in the light.  Television, though, can feel disposable.  So much of it is about making a profit of extending, pulling, contracting a story so it doesn't feel complete.  A movie, as a rule, I know that I'll get the full sentence-television can end mid-paragraph, or it can become a run-on sentence that never really ends (kind of like, this one...moving on).

But there are a few shows that I genuinely love & think of in the same breath as my favorite movies.  I have talked about Lost so often on this blog you'd think I'd exhausted things to say about it (but you'd be wrong-we'll be doing a revisit of Lost at some point in early 2023 though I haven't picked the exact angle this rewatch of the series will be handled from).  Lost is my favorite thing, period-about the only thing that remotely comes close to it in my world is Harry Potter, and even then I'd rather go to the island than Hogwarts (both I love so much that I start crying before I start to rewatch them out of sheer, unabashed joy).  But other shows like Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Bob's Burgers, The Office, Desperate Housewives, & Pushing Daisies can be said in the same breath in my universe as the very best of movies.  These are all shows that I love, that I cannot get enough of & will revisit regularly.

When I first saw it, I didn't think Community was in this same league.  I started watching Community about halfway through its second season.  I was just out of college, and was addicted to the rest of the Thursday night lineup on NBC.  You could make a sincere argument that from 2007-15 was my single favorite time in television history (all of the shows I listed above ran during this time frame), but at the time if you looked at my favorite shows lists, Community would've been at best an asterisk, something "else" I was watching along with The Office and 30 Rock on Thursday nights.  But as the series grew, and I caught up on back episodes, I fell for the series.  I thought its quirky characters were enjoyable, and as the cast changes continued, it became one of my favorite parts of Thursday nights.  When NBC inexplicably got it renewed for a fifth season, I remember doing a happy dance in my kitchen, watching the shocked cast members flummoxed they'd pulled it off on social media.  A sixth season on the now-defunct Yahoo TV meant that half of the show's prophecy "Six Seasons and a Movie" would be fulfilled.

But it was in reruns, quite honestly, where I fell for the show.  As you get older, occasionally you realize that while you can never be "young" again, you can feel young again, and one of the ways that I achieve that is through watching TV shows that I watched live.  Not shows I binged (the nostalgia & chemistry doesn't quite work the same way for those), but shows I watched every week, thought about, planned my dinners around...Community was one of those shows.  But as I have revisited it (and I have done that a lot since it went off the air), I came to realize how well-constructed it was, how much it had to say about youth & joy & unexpected love.

The characters in Community are not coworkers or a group of friends.  They are classmates, from all walks of life, some older, some younger, but all sort of lost.  They're also, in many ways like Lost (which is regularly referenced on the show, to the point where Josh Holloway has a memorable cameo in the series), broken, and not in a cynical way-you see these people have been chewed up by life.  Shirley, Pierce, & Jeff, especially...their time has passed when they got to go to college and have the world be a place where everything was possible.  But in this show, they get to have that happen.  As you get older, you understand how rare it is to find not just romantic partners, but friends.  Unless you're very lucky, making friends, real friends that you love in the way you fiercely did in your youth, as an adult is a unicorn situation.  The idea of getting to find a new family like this in Community, where you were once unloved but finally, against odds (and your own expectations) you get to have a place in the world, is beautiful.

And Community doesn't shy away from this as the series continues.  It doesn't pretend that even the people you love the most & brightest don't become background players in your universe, even if you don't want them to do so.  Pierce dies.  Shirley & Troy leave.  The original series ended with a bereft Jeff having to bid Annie & Abed adieu, knowing that while he is okay & cared about in a way he wasn't when this series began, the "best" time of his life is about to be over-the "good old days" are done.  In life, that happens eventually-it's not always as clean as a series finale, but you do eventually realize that "the happiest time of my life" is a sentence from the past.  Community, a show that started as a silly sitcom about seven strangers trying to get through college, understood that better than any show I've ever seen except, well, Lost, and it exhibited that in all of its melancholy glory...and it showed that it was okay to be sad about that even if you also knew you had to move forward, you had to let go.

So, am I excited about the movie?  Hell's yes.  I was scared when Pierce left, but it worked.  I was scared when Troy left, but it mostly worked.  And I was scared when Shirley left, but while it wasn't the same, they were smart enough to make that the point.  Dan Harmon's treasure trove of a show expanded & had something to say, and I'm confident with a movie that it'll find one last sentence to put on these lost souls.  But while this fulfills Abed's prophecy, it didn't need it.  Community was about as perfect as a show could get even with just #SixSeasons.