The Greatest Postmodern Show of All Time

 What happens if you take an ordinary premise for a Television sitcom and you let it completely descend into absurdism and it takes on an entirely new life that somehow makes zero and so much sense at the same time? Well, let me introduce you to perhaps the best (or at least my favorite) TV show of all time, Community (2009). 

Community was originally described as being about a “fast-talking lawyer” who gets disbarred after his firm found out his Bachelor’s degree was fake; in light of this, he is forced to enroll in his local community college. With less-than-savory intentions, he forms a false Spanish study-group that contains a variety of characters from all walks of life. In the adverts that ran on TV to initially promote the show all the way back in 2009, it looks like a generic run of the mill sitcom that wouldn’t last more than a season. Like okay, who cares about some douchey lawyer trying to get with the hot girl in Spanish class? Why would they make a whole show about adults in a community college, that sounds pretty boring.

                                        

However, those original teaser trailers were entirely misleading (read the comments on the video--all more recent--from people who have seen the show, you’ll get a kick out of it). Yeah, maybe the first few episodes were pretty cut and dry in terms of fitting in with the original concept of the show, minus a few more quirky gags here and there. But after those first couple of episodes, this show truly sets off on its descent into chaotic madness- a true masterclass in the postmodern artform.

I can’t even begin to describe my love for this show or give an accurate, truthful synopsis of the whole thing. So I’m not going to. What I am going to do is dive into a few episodes of this show that really stood out to me in terms of their “Postmodern-ness” and show you clips and give you examples as to just how well-crafted this series truly is.

But first, what is postmodernism? Despite having read about it in various different texts and with various examples, the concept of postmodernism is relatively difficult for me to grasp. In the last few posts I made, I used textbook quotes and definitions and examples that pretty well summarized the meanings/general ideas of the theoretical frameworks I was describing, however, I don’t think that these sources very well articulate just what postmodernism is. The texts weren’t describing it in a way that I could understand, so I decided to outsource my definition of postmodernism. 

Forgive me if this is a little unorthodox, but I decided to take a look at Reddit under the Subreddit r/TrueFilm because I had originally planned on discussing a certain film through a postmodern lens, but after reading more about it, I decided maybe it wasn’t as postmodern as I thought, so I’m going to be saving that film for a future blog post (Easter Egg!). Under this post from 12 years ago, I saw a comment pretty high up on the thread that gave a very long, yet concise bullet-pointed definition of postmodernism and what it contains. The comment says that this list comes from a professor at USC, Drew Casper, so I decided that this source was probably reputable enough for me to get a decent definition from. I’m going to be sharing with you a few of the stand out points from this list that I used as the backing for my outline on this post, and I will also link to you the full post, so that you can read the full list (as commented by u/Cinephile1) and the other comments, if it suits your fancy.

     What is Postmodernism?

        1.  Disregard for reality, Disregard for truth:

• Instead of dancing with a cane, he danced with a vacuum cleaner 

        2. Pop-culture

• Took distinguishing characteristics between cultures and combined them into one

• Cater to everyone

        3. Pastiche

• Creating commodity by sampling from pre-existing artifacts

• Imitation of style and of content

• Creates the idea that this film is like others

• Not a parody nor plagiarism though

• Wants you to remember other movies while watching the ‘new’ one

• People responded to the old stuff 

        4. Pay homage

• Representation of representations

• Because of pastiche no more individual makers

• Everything has been done idea

        6. Schizophrenic

• Misshapen messes

• no wholeness

• a bit of this, a bit of that

• a bunch of different genres

Additionally, and forgive me for not remembering from where I sourced this definition (it was probably Wikipedia or some other easily accessible site at the top of the Google search page), I also extracted this definition with these 3 points as well.

Some of the goals of postmodernist film are to subvert the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization, and to test the audience's suspension of disbelief.

• Homage

• Meta

• Contradiction 

Okay, now that we understand what exactly postmodernism is, now we can do the fun thing, which is talk about Community!

Once it finally clicked for me what postmodernism really encapsulated, several episodes of Community entered my mind: Season 2 Episode 8, Season 3 Episode 17, and Season 4 Episode 9. But as I looked over each episode’s synopsis on IMDB, a lot of others came to mind, including Season 2 Episode 19, Season 2 Episode 21, Season 3 Episode 8, Season 3 Episode 19, and Season 3 Episode 20. As much as I would love to sit here and talk about every episode of this beloved show, I’m going to show some restraint and only talk about the 2 that I took the most amount of notes for, as I found those to be the strongest contenders to hammer in my point about Community being a postmodern masterpiece.

“Curriculum Unavailable” is the 19th episode of Community season 3, in which the “Greendale 7” (the in-universe nickname for the study group a.k.a out main ensemble) are dealing with the emotional effects of their expulsion from Greendale Community College 2 months prior. I would love to give you more context, but I think it would be literally impossible to understand without watching the entire show up until this point. What I can tell you is that the episode centers around one of our main characters, Abed, who is autistic and his special interest is TV/Cinema. He often serves as the meta voice of the show because his character is only able to grasp and cope with reality by comparing it to the tropes of what he knows from the media (kinda like me *ahem*). Abed is convinced that the Dean of their school has been replaced by an evil clone and that’s the reason they got expelled. Because of this, he keeps going back to campus to try to look for evidence to support this idea. This sounds crazy, right? But, if you had seen the episode prior, you would know that this is actually the exact scenario that happened. Dean Pelton really did get kidnapped and replaced by a clone (not evil on his own volition, but is being controlled by an evil professor-turned-student-turned-squatter-turned-security-guard). The Fake Dean signs off on an order saying that Abed has to see a psychiatrist because he keeps going back to Greendale and it’s either that or he faces legal trouble. The rest of the episode by and large takes place at this therapy appointment, until the secret agenda is finally confirmed to the G7.

How is this postmodern? It’s all in the execution. Firstly, the plot is just extremely absurd. There are so many moments in the episode that are meta within the context of the show’s plot and within the show as an entity in itself. Some examples of this come within the first few minutes of this show. 

Abed gets brought home by a cop from the campus because he was found going through the dumpster at school. Abed, dressed up oddly, makes an odd remark, to which Annie replies, “It’s okay, officer. He’s just playing a character from TV.” And, yes, she’s right. In-universe, Abed is dressed as a character from his favorite show, Inspector Spacetime, but it’s also a cheeky nod to the fact that Danny Pudi, Abed’s actor, is just playing a TV character. As an isolated incident within the context of solely this episode, this isn’t really all that meta because you could simply chalk this up to a reference to Abed playing dress-up, but, this whole series is full of Abed making remarks and comparisons from their “real life” to TV shows--which is obviously meta because it is a TV show and not reality. Next, the cop says that the “Dean” will not be pressing charges so long as Abed goes to a psychiatrist. The G7 are outraged by this and Troy says, “What? No! Abed’s not crazy! Where does the Dean get off?” Abed remains insistent that the Dean is an impostor, saying “He’s not the real Dean. He’s been replaced by an identical life-form for some nefarious purpose.” If we were to take this show at face-value, this would make no sense. All of the characters should be deeply concerned for their friend who is clearly exhibiting signs of a mental breakdown after the traumatic events that transpired over the last couple months. But that’s not what Community does. We had seen in the previous episodes that this is literally what happened. Abed, the neurodivergent character who doesn’t have the tightest grip on reality due to his obsession with TV shows, is actually the only one who is able to see things for what they are. This type of situation would never occur in reality. But Abed knows that they’re not living in reality, they’re living in a show and his character serves to cheekily let the audience in on the fact that the show knows it's a show and not real. 

This actually occurs in many other episodes of the show, in which Abed refers to 

days or moments that the group is enduring as “episodes.”

In fact, the other characters in the show are even aware of this. In any other show that follows the typical structuralist form, Abed would just be seen as the “crazy, kooky, neurodivergent guy with no concept of reality.” But because Community is postmodern, this trope gets subverted and it is canon within the show that Abed is the sanest one of them all. Later in the episode, the whole gang is at the appointment with Abed (which is absurd in and of itself) and Jeff says verbatim that Abed is more sane than any of them. This moment in itself is also meta (pastiche) because it is a reference to one of the show’s Halloween episodes that happened earlier that season in Episode 5 where Britta (a psych major) runs tests on the group and the results come out that one of them is secretly insane. It is later revealed that she ran the tests through the machine upside down and that they’re actually all  clinically insane with the exception of one of them: that, of course, being Abed.

As the episode goes on, we are shown a series of flashbacks in the form of a clip show sequence, despite none of these being actual clips from the show, and were, instead, all filmed specifically for this episode. This is another meta reference (pastiche) to an earlier episode of the show, Season 2 Episode 21, which in itself was extremely postmodern in the sense that it was a fake clip show episode and the characters are semi-aware of it. 

The psychiatrist, upon hearing the stories from the group, insists that Abed “be committed,” to which Jeff replies, “Committed to his character work, right? Because he already is. Show him your Don Draper.” Abed simply replies with a single hand gesture and the word, “Cigarettes,” said with a cool inflection to his voice. This is a reference to and essentially a parody of the TV show Mad Men which was popular at the time of this episode. The entire group laughs hard and the psych replies, “No, I mean an institution.”

Later on, the G7 reminisce about great memories of Greendale, all of which involve the Dean. This leads the characters to all collectively come to an agreement that Abed was right and the Dean was replaced by an impostor. The psychiatrist, then tries convincing them that Greendale doesn’t actually exist, or at least not as a community college, and is instead a psych ward they’ve all been locked in for the past few years and that the concept of Greendale being a CC and not a Ward was a shared hallucination caused by their mass psychosis. Britta questions this and says if they were gonna be hallucinating something, why would it be a community college. The psychiatrist says, “Ah, yes, this fantastical community college where everything that happens is unbelievably ridiculous and it all revolves around you as a group.” This is another meta reference to the masses, as critics of this show are always going on about how unrealistic it is because all of these crazy things would never happen at a real CC and that it wouldn’t all be happening to the same group of people, again, displaying a self-awareness that the show has of itself. It is unrealistic and crazy things do happen there. Earlier in the episode, we were shown a cut away scene of Pierce in the bathroom flushing a toilet and then a bunch of people pop out with confetti, balloons, and a banner to celebrate the toilet’s 10,000th flush. We were shown the Dean making announcements over the loudspeaker about students’ birthdays, but then completely switching away from that because ‘no one cares about them’ (the audience doesn’t care about the nobodies) and then goes on to sing a song over the speaker about our beloved G7. Of course none of these things are realistic, and the show knows that, which is why these clips were shown right before the psychiatrist says this line. They even make a reference to the fact that most CCs end after 2 years and each of the characters have already been there for at least 3 (if not, more in Pierce’s case) years, to which Jeff says, “Everyone is always saying that!” Everyone, in this case, being the audience and the show’s critics.

A final moment I need to highlight is the last cut away clip sequence, after the psychiatrist tries to convince the gang that they’ve been in the ward for all these years. In this sequence, we see re-shot versions of plot-lines we know from actual episodes of this show, but this time we’re seeing it as the G7 being “crazy” in the ward. They reference the season 2 episode in which Troy and Jeff find a secret magical trampoline, the various paintball episodes they've done in seasons 1 & 2, the Glee Club episode from earlier in season 3, and the “bottle” episode and “clip show” episode (both of which Abed was aware of in the meta, especially the bottle episode). This is, again, an example of pastiche, that is work that is referential to a previous work, and in the case of this sequence, it is referencing its own self.

There are several other postmodern moments that occur in this episode, but for the sake of length, I decided to not talk about them here. Instead, I implore you to watch the episode for yourself (it’s streaming on a lot of different services, I’m sure you’re subscribed to at least one of them), and come up with your own list of postmodern moments in “Curriculum Unavailable.”

The other extremely postmodern episode of Community that I wanted to discuss comes in season 4. It is the 9th episode that takes place during the “gas leak year” (season 4 saw an entire new team of writers, as well as the exit of the show’s creator, so it is recognized as being the worst season of the show because the characters have all been Flanderized. Later on in the series, it is written into the show that there was a gas leak in the school that year that explains why everyone was acting out of character. This in itself is another great example of the meta required of the postmodern condition), entitled, “Intro to Felt Surrogacy.” In this episode, the Dean walks into the study room to find an unusually silent Greendale 7. We find out that they went on an adventure together that was so traumatic that they can’t talk about it, or anything at all, and they can hardly even look at one another. The Dean is determined to fix this, so he decides to get the group to try out “puppet therapy,” in which they use puppets to try to work through their difficult feelings and traumas, which Britta knows as a psych major (but actually because she saw it on Law & Order--we know she’s a terrible student and not that smart, so it makes sense she only knows of its popularity in the “psych world” from seeing it on that show. This is also not the first time this show has made a Law & Order reference--in fact, 3x17 is an entire Law & Order parody, which I considered writing about in this blog). The Dean, who has an obsession with the G7, already has puppets of the group made and with him (because he likes them for “personal use” reasons). 

Dean Pelton says that he knows firsthand that puppet therapy works, and this is where we get our first major postmodern moment of the show. In walks Chang, who at this time is going by “Kevin” because after turning evil in season 3, he allegedly suffered from an injury that resulted in amnesia, or as he calls it “Changnesia.” At first, he really does believe his name is Kevin, not Ben, and that “Changnesia” is real, but then we find out that the amnesia wore off a while back and Ben is still pretending to be Kevin because he is working with Greendale’s rival school, City College, in order to take down Greendale, since he wasn’t able to fully take it over and destroy it back at the end of last season. Anyways, so “Kevin” has on his hand “Puppet Kevin,” whom Chang is acting like is a sentient being. As he’s walking out the door, “Puppet Kevin” turns and faces both the audience and the G7+Dean and quickly shouts, “He’s not what he seems!” This is a direct reference to the overarching season 4 “Changnesia”/evil traitor Chang plotline because Chang isn’t what he seems: he doesn’t have “Changnesia” and is not innocent. He is actively plotting against them. This split-second quip is a meta reference to the entire plot of the season, and lets the characters in on the big reveal without them even knowing or acknowledging it.

Half of this episode is executed in the live-action puppet medium. This goes to serve 2 purposes in terms of postmodernism. The first- the situations that we see play out a little later in the episode, are things that could only happen in a non-human form (like an animation or a puppet show). By having the action sequences performed by puppets and not the actors, the show is acknowledging the absurdity of the situation at hand and how that could never happen in real life (at least not without grave physical consequences). The second- this another example of pastiche. All the way back in season 2, Abed was going through a mental health crisis that caused him to believe/see everything as a stop-motion animation. This episode is one of the more beloved of the series, so the show decided to attempt another iteration of this, only this time with felt puppets and not figurines that were stop-motion animated. We even get a subtle acknowledgement in the episode at hand. Abed says, “Yeah, and I don’t need a puppet to express myself, I already say whatever I want. But, I am a fan of the medium, so…” This is a direct reference to the fact that Abed likes the medium of using toy versions of oneself in order to express their difficult feelings.

Community has never been afraid to admit that they reuse similar tactics in its episodes, such as acknowledging on multiple occasions the “Jeff Winger speech to keep the group from breaking up” or Abed using TV/Movies as a coping mechanism to get a grip on reality. They acknowledge this idea in this episode. Now in a flashback sequence (shown in puppet-form), Troy & Abed are playing what they call “Study Group Bingo.” When asked what that means, Abed says, “We’ve been best friends for 4 years, so we’ve fallen into a comfortable, repetitive pattern; like humorous misunderstandings on Three’s Company, or girls gossiping on Gossip Girl, so to liven things up, Troy and I made a bingo chart of the predictable things we say.” This not only acknowledges the rut that long-running TV shows tend to fall into with the overt predictability of their characters, but it also embraces and pokes fun at it all at the same time. This also falls in line with Abed’s characterization of likening everything to TV tropes, while simultaneously making fun of the fact that the show always does this. Immediately following this, each of the characters takes turns inadvertently saying the most “in-character” predictable thing that they could say in response to this, which again both does the thing and makes fun of the thing. Jeff then says, “Abed’s right. We’ve had the same conversation a million times […] How did we get so predictable?” Immediately walks in the Dean who is taking prospective students on a tour. He then goes on to introduce the G7 and says that they really typify the type of diversity they have at Greendale (which is the original premise of the show) and then goes on to literally give each character’s basic overarching archetype. This is, again, simultaneously doing and making fun of the thing. Then, a little later, but still in the same scene, after coming to a group agreement that they need to do something random and spontaneous together, Abed says, “Yeah, our Ferris Bueller needs a Day Off. Hey, who’s dad has a vintage Ferrari?” Annie replies to this saying, “Abed, a pop culture reference is more of the same.” This all works as being postmodern because of the pop culture references and the overall meta of the whole sequence.

Next, the puppet-ified Greendale 7 start singing, as a means of propelling the plot forward. They’re singing their dialogue canonically within the show and the characters are aware of this. We know that the characters are aware of their singing because their balloon guide, who was singing with them literally says, “From now on, no more singing in the balloon” (the characters are taking a hot air balloon ride). This works within the medium of puppetry (they sing on Sesame Street), as I mentioned earlier, but it also pushes to test the audience’s suspension of their disbelief. If we, the audience, are being overtly shown that these characters are aware that they’re singing, how are we supposed to take any of this seriously? But, because Community has gone through great lengths by this point in the series to show us a variety of extremely absurd scenarios that make literally no sense, they’ve essentially eliminated the limits on what they can get away with that the audience will still eat up. 

The gang sets off in the balloon, accidentally leaving behind their balloon guide, so they get kinda lost and travel up too high. Not knowing how to navigate the balloon, they eventually start rapidly falling to the ground. In the midst of their descent, the balloon suddenly slows way down just for Troy to randomly say, “Has anyone else noticed Professor Duncan hasn’t been around for a long time,” before instantly speeding way back up again as it continues to fall. This is another meta reference to the show itself. Professor Duncan was a recurring character featured prominently in the first 2 seasons of the show, then just randomly disappeared for all of seasons 3 and 4. His disappearance wasn’t addressed in the show until this point. I am not certain of what the talk was amongst fans at the time, but I can only assume they were all wondering what happened and where he went, and this is certainly the show’s way of directly addressing the audience, without providing any explanation (Professor Duncan later returns for about half of season 5, in which he made his final appearance of the series).

A little later, we cut back to the present day, and Dean Pelton starts to jump to the next stage of delivering his puppet therapy, but gets cut off by Abed who tells him that the story isn’t over. The Dean says “Hey, well, excuse [me] for reacting to the natural lull in your story.” Again, this is a cheeky nod to the audience, who would likely be assuming that this was the end of the flashback as there was an actual (scripted) lull in the story. It’s nothing major, but just another meta acknowledgement.

Back in the puppet-ified flashback, the gang has crashed into the middle of the woods and then Abed makes a reference to Lost, which is acknowledged in the show by the other characters and then Pierce makes a reference (in my opinion, it’s not confirmed) to the Stanford Prison Experiment (which was a real thing, obviously, that was later adapted into a film a few years after this episode aired). Then, the group gets discovered by a man who emerges from the woods and Jeff snarkily says, “And I thought my hair looked fake.” This is both an in-universe and out-of-universe meta reference. In-universe, it is an obvious joke/reference to the fact that Jeff is a puppet, thus having fake hair. Out-of-universe, this is likely a reference to the fact that Jeff’s actor, Joel McHale got a very obvious (yet very good-looking) hair transplant during his run on Community (1 of 4 in his lifetime!), thus acknowledging that literally all of Jeff’s hair is fake.

After chatting with the mountain man, a Greendale alumnus, they all break out into (plot-propelling) song together again. The mountain man gives each of the G7 some magical berries that drug them, and this leads us into what I think is one of the funniest sequences of the show. The song and visuals distort and get wobbly and one of the characters even acknowledges that this is happening in the exact way in which we are seeing it, by saying, “These magical berries put us in a drug sequence,” which, again, is meta. To me, I feel like this scene is the most clear cut example of postmodernism in the whole show, other than maybe the special episodes in which they are doing explicit parodies (such as 3x17, “Basic Lupine Urology,” which is the Law & Order parody I mentioned earlier).

Back in the present day, a character runs into the study room and alerts everyone of a fire that broke out in the cafeteria, but the Dean doesn’t care because he wants to keep hanging out with his favorite study group. This is another reference to the show itself. In the first episode I discussed, “Curriculum Unavailable,” one of the cut away scenes showed the Dean coming into the study room to alert the G7 of a fire that broke out, before he made the announcement to the rest of the school, because he wanted to make sure his favorite students were able to get out safely and soundly.

Back to the puppet sequence, the gang are all laying around a campfire together and Britta is laying on Annie and says, “Ah, your skin is so soft. It’s like…felt,” which is, of course, another meta acknowledgement of the medium. We, the audience, are aware of the fact that these characters are human and not puppets, but we’re seeing them as puppets having this interaction. We are meant to be imagining the human version of Britta is saying that human Annie feels like felt. 

Finally, back in the present day timeline, there are a few other quick bits I’d like to discuss. One of the characters makes a reference to Judge Judy. Annie says something about how she “trail[s] off from time to time,” while trailing off. The confessions that these characters make (the reason why they were all so quiet in the beginning) are almost all directly related to each of their individual character archetypes (Annie with school, Shirley about motherhood, Britta about her performative activism), with the exceptions of Troy and Pierce, though Pierce’s confession was a direct reference to a running bit throughout the show about him having had sex with Eartha Kitt in the past (he confesses that that never really happened, not in the way in which he said). Lastly, in the end credits scene, the study group show up again as puppets and they’re all singing a song called “Daybreak,” which was reused many times throughout the course of the show starting in season 3, because after paying the licensing fee for The Police’s “Roxanne” for the season 3 episode “Remedial Chaos Theory,” the music budget was essentially gone, and they had the rights to use “Daybreak.” The repeated use of “Daybreak” is a running gag in the show that finally gets acknowledged in season 6 episode 11. All of these examples are meta references to the show itself (minus the Judge Judy reference).

These 2 episodes are full of so many examples of Community’s postmodern genius, yet they barely even scratch the surface in terms of how meta and postmodern and absurd each episode is, as well as the show as a whole body of work itself. I remember when I was watching this for the first time with my dad, I kept saying to him “What even is this show anymore? It started off so normal, how did we get here,” and that is the beauty of this whole show. It somehow makes zero and so much sense, just as I said in the opening of this post. I know this one was quite a doozy, but I felt it was necessary to go through great lengths to give an appropriate amount of context to aid in your understanding of each of these references and sequences. Hopefully, this was somewhat easy to follow and was worth the read. And if not, well, it’s not like I spent the greater part of 14 or so hours over the course of 2 days working on research, note taking, and writing this…oh wait, I did. Even if it was all for naught, I really love Community, and I will take any chance I can get to try to turn people onto it. If you’re curious about my thoughts on some of the other episodes of the show, whether it be via a postmodern lens, or just in general, let me know! As much as I can try to summarize and contextualize this show in a 5000+ word blog post, I think the only way to really understand anything you just read about is by watching the show and I strongly implore you to do so. Okay, I’m gonna let you go now. If I was clever, and it weren’t 10pm, I would make some meta joke or niche reference, but I can’t think of one, soooo bye!

P.S. the name of my blog is a line from an episode of Community, in which Abed is describing snacks :)