It’s funny.
I watch a shitload of TV.
I have ALWAYS watched a shitload of TV. Mostly American.
Oh all right. ALL American.
Sadly, this is a permanent fixture of my life. It’s the lifelong habit I know I’ll never break. I’m hooked on their production values. Immersed in their story arcs. Awash with their humor. Compelled by their drama. Infatuated by their women.
I love American TV. So, if you wanted to try to think of something I’m good at, it’s being a fully paid up member of the non-studio non-voting audience.
Yes, I watch a shitload of TV.
Yet weirdly, living in Europe, I have to say that even though I read the Blogs and watched the torrent streams and subscribed to the mailing lists I never realized exactly HOW MUCH TV there was in the States. I thought I was up to date. I thought that whatever happened, I would inevitably find all the really good stuff or that it would find me. That I had a system that worked.
I was wrong.
Cause I TOTALLY missed Community.
Okay. Let’s get this going.
Community is a show about an ex-lawyer called Jeff Winger, a cool good-looking womanising scoundrel who’s always managed to coast by on his handsomeness, loquaciousness and awesomeness, or at least until the Bar association found out that he didn’t actually have an bachelor’s degree of any kind. So, in order to get his license to practice law and get back to the life of money, women and money that he loves so much, he’s enrolled in a local Community college.
Now, the important thing to know is that Community colleges in America are, according to the show, a kind of sinkhole for people who either couldn’t get into a decent college or are too marginal to know what a decent college actually is. They’re one step above insane asylums and one step below working as an assistant manager at a Dennies. You get people too poor, too crazy or too stupid to get into an actual college that might get you some respect. You get old people desperately trying to learn something about the world they no longer understand while they circle the drain. You get weirdos and psychos and freakos.
And comedy.
By God, you also get comedy.
So, the basic plot of the show is that Jeff is trying to get through his 4 years at Greendale Community College so he can get back to his life as a bloodsucking lawyer, something he wanted to do with a minimum of fuss or of muss. Unfortunately however, in the pilot he managed to try to use his habitual devilish wit and charm to pick up a girl in his Spanish class called Britta. But Britta saw through Jeff, she thought he was a vacuous self-aggrandizing manwhore. But being who he was, Jeff wouldn’t take no for an answer so order to facilitate his plan, he set up a fake study group. The best fake study group of all time.
The people who came to join this study group, and would become his anarchic family of friends who constantly need Jeff’s help and look up to him as a dad of cool, are some of the best written characters since Arrested Development, and in my mind even surpass that. The show basically centers around Jeff being sucked into the lives of some of the most hilariously well written and intensely weird situations ever seen by a TV audience.
You have Britta, the superhot semi-hipster chick who’s the ethical center that Jeff lacks and wants, but is also a kind of cute lame faux-moral-outraging, cause-jumping-on buzzkill.
You have Shirley, the recently divorced African-American Christian housewife who delivers a crazy combination of insane niceness, gossipmongery and shame induction.
You have Pierce, the megalomaniacal old man who owned a successful wet wipes company and who views the group as a chance to finally force some genuinely good people to like him enough to ignore his continued racism, homophobia and overall sliminess.
You have Annie, the incredibly highly strung super-cute princess who had a nervous breakdown in school and who just wants everyone to be lovely and nice and not freak her out while also following all of the rules all of the time.
You have Troy, the former high-school quarterback turned super-nice slightly dimwitted awesome dude of childish best friendedness to:
Abed. Oh Abed.
Abed may be the best written character in the history of sitcoms. He is consistently a joy to watch. He is the perfect character. The most basic description of Abed is that he is a Pakistani with Asberger’s who puts everything in the world in terms of the TV series’ that he knows everything about. It’s Abed that takes this show from the level of Arrested Development, with the odd great situation and brilliant moment of writing genius to being so good. So fucking good that you will literally lose your shit laughing at least once an episode. And also lose your shit at the tiny awesome little bits of amazing Abedness about a hundred times.
Abed might be a robot. He might ACTUALLY be a robot. I am not saying that it would be impossible for the writers to decide to make it so that it turns out that Abed is some kind of futuristic android that the government has sent into learn how to interact with humans. The show is THAT batshit crazy that even if they did that, it would be a minor plot point, but completely supported by a billion small occurrences throughout the series.
The thing that’s amazing about Abed is that other than his quirky uniqueness he pulls everything together for the viewer. He summarizes things, shapes jokes, enhances situations, provides homages, contextualises by occasionally breaking the fourth wall and speaks the language of television fluently. For someone who watches a lot of TV like me, Abed is meta. Oh god, he’s so fucking MetAbed.
And I swear to god, in a show full of cute girls, and I mean like the CUTEST girls, the cutest thing in the show is actually the relationship between Abed and Troy. Looking at them, it’s as if they are two adult men who never stopped playing, they still like just sit around and play. Except they use their adult brains to come up with AWESOME ideas for playing. Jesus. I want a friend like the way Abed and Troy are friends. They are the TEXTBOOK for awesome friends in the same way Calvin and Hobbes are. There are many, many amazing Troy and Abed moments, but this was the one that I keep coming back to:
So, if anyone has actually read this far, you can rest assured that I could literally have written about five times as long as I have about this. I could talk about how Annie may be the girl of my dreams, how she makes my heart ACHE and how it’s so brilliant that they managed to bring Chevy Chase back into our lives, he fucking DOMINATES as Pierce, about how watching these people become a bunch of dysfunctional friends makes me want MORE FRIENDS NOW. I could talk about how I’m totally in love with this show.
But instead, I’m just gonna watch another episode. I think you should too.
