A Sense of Community
What NBC’s “Community” taught me about storytelling
Hey, I’m Alex! Sometimes I blog, other times I rap. Feel free to check out my NoiseTrade Page if you get bored. You can download free music, and sign up for more #FreconFriday episodes.
I finished the last episode of Community this week. That was a big deal for me. Big. I started watching it when it first came out in 2009. I only made it through the first two seasons before life kicked in, but I remember thinking to myself, I’ve never seen anything like this before. This is awesome.
So, the time came when I decided to catch up. Seasons 3, 4 and 5 in 2 ½ weeks. Without going into too much detail, I binged. #America.
Why Did I like Community?
Community was awesome because it didn’t really care what you thought about it. It didn’t care if you understood the jokes, if you liked the characters or if you wanted to watch more. It was entertaining, but not because it tried to make you laugh, but because it found itself funny. Basically, a kind of “Honestly? I’m having fun, so watch or don’t watch.” If there’s any way to grab my attention, it’s by telling me you don’t care if you have it. Community did that in a playful way.
Generally speaking, the show succeeded in bringing you to a familiar setting (college) in an unfamiliar way. Whether it was the intricacies of a character on a TV show who was convinced that life was actually a TV show, or a self-proclaimed playboy who was just self-aware and philosophical enough to be empathetic, the narrative was full of instances that made you say “that’s funny, because that’s true” or “that’s funny because I never thought of it like that.” It wasn’t stereotypical at all. If it was, it was because it was being ironic. I’ve always thought that the best humor has a lot of truth. Truth is like salt. You can put that shit on anything. Even wounds.
After I finished, I was left with a very strong impression. I tried to figure out what that impression was, and I was left with the question – What has this show taught you, Alex?
What this show taught me was that it’s okay to look at things rationally. In television, life tends to serve up very dramatic problems with very dramatic answers. Why? Because drama sells. This show however, did the opposite. It would take a very dramatic situation and solve it in a very rational, empathetic manner. Life can be dramatic, sure, but Community was great at pointing out that after all is said and done, the dust can settle and everything can still make sense. More importantly, it made the effort to teach you something. It made the effort to teach you something about yourself that might be otherwise too simple for you to acknowledge. More often than not, being human and being vulnerable yielded the best results. That’s a powerful message.
So I started thinking some more and I realized:
STORYTELLING IS COOL.
Storytelling is cool because it gives you a place to go when you’re bored. It gives you a place to go when you’re afraid and it gives you a place to go when you need to feel apart of something. More importantly, it gives you the opportunity to deal with things about life that confuse you. Familiar problems in a foreign setting are often just what we need to adopt a different perspective.
Because when you think about it, a lot about life is scary and confusing. Sometimes we get so caught up in ourselves that we’re physically and mentally incapable of approaching a problem from a different angle. But when we’re given the opportunity to dive into these worlds, it gives us new life. It gives us the freedom to approach an old problem from a new perspective. Whether its from the characters themselves, or our own ideation of how we might fit in that world, this new “creation” of ourselves has the opportunity to answer some old questions. “How do I handle this?” becomes “How would Community Alex handle this?’ That’s some powerful stuff.
However, when the story finishes, it leaves you with this odd feeling. It’s like the feeling you get after you wake up from a pleasant dream. You’re left feeling like you know a little bit more about yourself, but still with an acute sense of loss. Loss because you know that it was just a dream, even though it felt so real.
But it’s not all bad, I suppose. Community might have been canceled, but it doesn’t die. Because that’s another cool thing about stories, they never truly end. Once something is built in your imagination, you can access it whenever you like. In that sense, Greendale Community College will always exist for anyone who’s ever watched the show. That world will always be there. You can always dive back into it when you’re bored. You can always dream new parts up. When I get bored now, I can ask myself, “What would Jeff Winger be doing right now? How about Abed? God, Alison Brie is hot.”
The world needs more storytellers. The world needs more people who are willing to create a new world for people to play in. Was I sad to see Community come to an end? Yes. I was. But ultimately, what I respect so much about this show is that it was able to face its end with the same deft, rational storytelling that it faced its life, and that’s with a little bit of feels, and a whole lotta lulz. I am better for having experienced all of it.
