Goodbye Community: I don’t always write text posts…
But when I do, I write novellas, hugely inappropriate for what is largely a men’s fashion photoblog.
But fuck it, let’s go.
Coming home from a long day of work to an empty home, with my roommates all out for various reasons, I was able to relax, sink into the couch a little bit, and watch the final three episodes of one of my favourite shows on television and of all time, Community. As I’ve come to expect from a show of such incredible quality, innovation, originality, I was not disappointed. The show did not hesitate to push the boundaries and toy with the framework of television. In many ways, it toyed within the framework of television. That was part of the magic. It took the formulas, the mechanics, the history and culture, and distorted them, inverted them, and ultimately made fun of them. Meta, meta, meta. The show that was aware that it was a television show, aware that it was a part of a giant quilt of pop culture and gleefully grasped and pulled in the fabric around it.
Now, I’ve learned something that has been repeated a million times. It’s so expected but it has to be said. This is the darkest timeline. For Community has ousted Dan Harmon from Community. Most fans will have read Dan Harmon’s reaction. And the truth: Community is over. How can you run a show without its creator? How can you take a show like Community and expect it to ever be the same without the man who breathed life into it? Finally, we are left with the shell of what was Community. Another sitcom with characters that we are familiar with, and that’s all.
Because Community was Dan Harmon’s vision. And nobody else can replicate what he saw. I used to think Community was Harmon’s baby, but that is a false analogy. It makes it seem like something Harmon just nurtured, raised, pushed it in a certain direction. Something that somebody else could possibly handle if it was necessary, if it came to it. But that’s not true at all. Community wasn’t Harmon’s baby. Community was Harmon.
And suddenly, the big, bad world has destroyed something really beautiful.
So I have to say goodbye to Community. It’s over. There might be some new show, having ripped the face off the thing that we loved to wear it like a mask, but that’s all. The show I loved is finished and I will miss it greatly. I will miss that it will never get the true resolution that we all hoped for - whatever Dan Harmon had in store for us.
The funny thing is, despite all the craziness of Community, and all the ways it consciously manipulated the conventions of the world of sitcom, Harmon always managed to get the conventions just right, too. While everything else was breaking the rules, he knew how to work with the formula, too. Characters that we all loved. Relationships that we became attached to and immersed in. A world that I loved to escape to. It seems so surreal that it is over.
And here we go, back to the real world. Sorry, I guess. I didn’t realise it would be such a heinous crime to try something different than ‘same old, same old’. It appears it was a mistake, ready to be rectified: quashed and replaced with something more homogenous.
And isn’t it cruel that those calling the shots managed to make six seasons and a movie into something I couldn’t be more appauled by?
This is sadder than any actual finale could ever dream of being.
