4 out of 5

Created by: Dan Harmon

I knew about Community.  I mean, I knew about creator Dan Harmon, whose name I plucked from his Scud: The Disposable Assassin assists to follow on Channel 101, and who I was wildly excited had made the jump to a bigger screen with the movie Monster House.  But Community puzzled me: Harmon was an absurdist outsider; Monster House had an acerbic edge to it that synced with that, but a big ol’ NBC show that seemed of the same ilk as other big ol’ popular shows like Arrested Development or The Office felt… I dunno, watered down.

Really, I was likely just suffering from indie asshole “you took my so-and-so and made it popular” disease yet again, and the slew of people proclaiming the show’s genius did not help.

Get a clue, past me: the acclaiming responses were pretty damn accurate.

Yes, the setup is pretty cookie cutter: a group of ne’er-do-wells (each ne’er doing well in their own particular archetype variation) with seemingly little in relation to one another find themselves at the same community college, convening a study group… and six seasons of Breakfast Club buddy comedy are born.  But in the same way that the core of Rick and Morty, Harmon’s followup co-created show, is a story about dysfunctional family, but all of the many, many extras make it something very much beyond that, Dan’s well-known ownership of Community had a similar effect.  It takes a season for its relationships to prove that out, with season one being quirky, whereas the subsequent seasons (fourth season excepted…) are an amazing fusion of character, contemplative and complicated setups, and a wondrously loosey-goosey take on reality that nonetheless maintains a firm fourth wall.  The show’s organically arrived at brilliance – a fusion of excellent casting (and leaning into the casting when it might’ve caused butting heads behind the scenes aka Chevy chase) and writing that balanced self-aware in-joking with rewarding, building-on-one-another, bite-sized storylines – is easy to take for granted, until you switch to other similarly-styled “kooky” shows and realize that there’s just some connective threads there, and some type of respect for its audience, that those shows are often missing.  For better or worse, look no further than Community’s fourth season, when Harmon was let go in favor of different show-runners: the characters and general flavor remains the same, but the magic very much dissipates during the course of that season, favoring strangeness and camera-winking uber alles and losing uniqueness as a result.

Thankfully, cues were taken, and Harmon returned for a final two seasons.

The cast, as alluded above, is uniformly excellent, or at least inhabit their roles perfectly.  The show dips into “types” of episodes on occasion, but Harmon maintains a keen sense of when it’s too much.

A great sitcom, with too many hilarious episodes in its prime years to mention, and providing perhaps the most necessary trait of a quality show: its dang easy to rewatch and binge.