My ultimate comfort show
Community is probably in my top three TV series of all time.
I first watched it about six years ago, and since then I must have watched the whole thing another three or four times. It’s the ultimate comfort show for me. I suppose Friends is that show for a lot of people, but for my taste Community has much better writing and far more interesting ideas.
It’s not just a sitcom where funny people sit around making jokes. It’s a show that keeps finding new ways to tell a story, sometimes in ways you wouldn’t expect from a half-hour comedy.
And I think a lot of that comes down to Dan Harmon. You can see little hints of the kind of writing he’d later bring to Rick and Morty, especially in how the show plays with its own format and takes ridiculous ideas surprisingly seriously.
The moment I realised this was different
Season one takes a little time to find its feet. For me, it really started to click somewhere around its tenth or twelfth episode.
There’s a scene in Environmental Science (season 1, episode 10) where Troy and Abed start singing “Somewhere Out There”. I still remember the feeling I had when the episode brought its separate storylines together through that one musical ending.
It was one of those moments where I thought, wait, this isn’t like the other sitcoms I’ve watched.
From there the show just kept getting better, and I think it reached its peak in season three.
The writing is packed with great dialogue, one-liners, background jokes and little gags that make rewatching it worthwhile. Sometimes it’s just a single line that gets stuck in my head.
One of my favourites is “Explanation isn’t the issue.”
Watch the “Explanation isn’t the issue” clip on TikTok.
When the show started to feel different
I remember getting to season four and feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
The episodes were still funny, but the plots didn’t seem to have the same weight. There was something missing in the way the stories came together, even though I couldn’t really explain it at the time.
It was only later that I found out Dan Harmon hadn’t been involved in that season. Suddenly the difference I’d felt while watching it made sense.
But even then, I have to say that the weakest season of Community is still better than the best seasons of plenty of average TV comedies.
Seasons five and six picked up the pace again. By the final season, several of the original main cast members were gone, and you could really feel the changes to the group. Yet the writers still managed to tell some wonderful stories and give the show an emotional but satisfying ending.
It’s hard to pull that off after losing so many characters people had grown attached to.
The characters and the weird episodes
The whole ensemble works brilliantly, but Troy, Abed, Chang and Annie are probably my favourites.
Troy and Abed have one of the best friendships I’ve seen in a comedy. Chang is completely ridiculous in the best way, and Annie brings something different to the group. Even smaller recurring characters, like Star-Burns, are so memorable.
Then there are the episodes that take a strange concept and fully commit to it.
The paintball episodes, Remedial Chaos Theory with its different timelines, and the pixelated video-game episode, Digital Estate Planning, are just a few examples. On paper some of these ideas sound like they shouldn’t work at all.
But in Community, they somehow do. And they’re not just gimmicks either. A lot of the time, the strange concept ends up telling you something about the characters.
The music deserves its own mention
This is another reason the show has stayed with me for so long.
The song choices are fantastic. There were so many songs in Community that I’d never heard before, but after hearing them in the show I was immediately hooked. Quite a few have stayed in my playlists ever since.
My favourite might be Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose”. I can’t hear that song now without thinking about Community.
Then there is “Somewhere Out There”, ABBA’s “Fernando”, and the songs from the Christmas episodes.
Music in most sitcoms is just something playing in the background. In Community, it feels like part of the storytelling and part of what makes the moments memorable.
Nothing else has quite replaced it
I’ve tried getting into other sitcoms since, but the problem is that I keep comparing them to Community.
The writing, the cast, the high-concept episodes, the songs, even the little background jokes — it all seems perfectly suited to my taste.
A.P. Bio is probably one of the closer replacements I’ve found. It has some of the same school setting and a similar kind of humour, and I enjoy it. But for me it still isn’t in the same league.
Worth keeping?
Without a doubt. It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever watched, not just one of my favourite sitcoms.
Few shows can make me laugh, surprise me with an episode’s structure, introduce me to songs I end up loving, and still feel this comforting after four or five watches.
Community somehow manages all of that. And I have a feeling I’ll keep going back to Greendale for years.
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