Up until late last week, it wasn't certain whether or not NBC's cult sitcom, Community, would see a fifth season.
The show was in a tough spot as is, with NBC/Sony firing series creator and showrunner Dan Harmon at the conclusion of the third season. This left a skeleton crew of writers and new showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port in the unenviable position of maintaining a series that had become synonymous with Harmon's vision.
The results were mixed. The show was still capable of being blisteringly funny, but the characters seemed to regress (a problem that began at the tail end of Harmon's tenure) and the show's trademark "meta-ness" was exploited to exhaustion.
At times, the writers showed an awareness of this. In an episode set in Pierce's ostensibly haunted mansion, Abed finds his way into a security booth and begins an on-the-nose deconstruction of both sitcom tropes and Community's own tendency to subvert them in an attempt at cleverness that often ended up seeming just as forced and tired as the warmed-over turds that they were lampooning.
If the show had maintained this level of lampshading, it may have been more interesting. Instead, the creative team took an easier route and just barreled through the season, allowing each character to hit his or her requisite shallow emotional benchmarks while being placed in front of a revolving set of contrived, high concept backgrounds.
This all came to a head in last week's season finale, which was widely and appropriately panned as a jumbled, incoherent mess.
Writer Megan Ganz, a very capable and talented holdover from the Harmon regime, did her best to provide a satisfying resolution to the character arcs that was faithful to the show's vision and that would hold up as a series' finale or a transition between the fourth and fifth seasons.
Unfortunately, not only was the finale bad, it was embarrassing - downright cringe-inducing at times. In her attempt to recapture Community's whimsical spark, Ganz instead bastardized it and turned the show into the same self-important, unfunny mess that critics had often labeled it.
Community is a show that I love and deeply respect, but I've never been attached to it on an emotional level the way that I was with something like Scrubs. In its attempts to avoid being fake, the show prevented itself from ever being genuinely sincere. You can't expect the audience to cry along with the characters if, in between sobs, they're shooting winks at the camera.
However, I can't blame Community's failures on the showrunners, at least not directly. The blame for Community's slide rests, instead, on the fans.
Any show that's remotely weird, but manages to scrounge up a fanbase (Archer, Arrested Development, Dr. Who) is going to generate stupidly obsessive online discourse. This is actually good, because it's better for people to think about what they watch and why they watch it rather than for them to just blithely consume. The problems begin when these same cultish fanbases mistake their enthusiasm for intelligence. Community may very well be a smart show (I believe that it is), but watching and enjoying it doesn't make you smart. Winning online fan favorite polls doesn't generate the kind of martyrific pop culture cred that many of the fans feel it does. It only serves to create an insular, alienating echo chamber that's incapable of having a discussion that goes beyond either "This is the smartest show evar!" or "This show sucks without Harmon!" It's a circlejerk of the most insufferable kind.
The echo chamber only intensifies when the creator steps down from his authorial pedestal to interact with the fans.
I'm always interested in hearing what a creator has to say about their piece of art, and I put a lot of faith in authorial intent. (This is actually a somewhat antiquated view of criticism.) What I'm not interested in, is telling the the creator what I think his or her art should be - I don't believe that that's the role of the audience, particularly not when the work being discussed is of ostensible importance.
Unfortunately, through the wonders of the digital age, audiences have access to creators to the point of intrusion. If an artist has a Twitter account, he or she is going to be inundated with suggestions, critiques, paeans, etc. Because artists are human beings too, there's no way that they are immune to the deluge of admiration.
There's nothing wrong with people wanting to interact with their fans and vice-versa, but issues arise when the fans begin to influence (either directly or indirectly) the creative process. Very rarely is it a good idea for showrunners to kowtow to fans' expectations. I think we all remember Nikki and Paolo.
The problem is exacerbated when the artist is someone like Dan Harmon, who Alex Pappademas points out in his piece, is, in many ways, an overt narcissist with an enormous ego. He also appears to struggle with severe self-doubt.
That's not to cast aspersions at Harmon. It's impossible to create anything of value without first believing your thoughts to be valuable.
This paradoxical pride/shame personality will naturally gravitate toward flattery. In the early days of Community, Harmon was very active on Twitter and Tumblr. Later in the shows run, he started doing a weekly show, Harmontown, at Meltdown Comics - the conceit of which was that Dan and other Harmonites were fed up with the world and intended to form a new human colony, possibly on the moon. In essence, people would pay $10 to listen to Harmon and sidekick Jeff Davis riff on Harmon's thoughts and feelings for the week.
I've been to a show and it was a fun, sometimes bizarrely emotional and unflinchingly honest* time. Harmontown also features a large degree of audience interactivity. Harmon frequently calls out to repeat attendees from the stage and has long conversations and improv sessions. Through Harmontown, it's clear that Harmon doesn't only get off on making himself the center of attention, but he gets off on providing the audience with a chance to show what they can do.
*(It's almost impossible to say that anything that happens on a stage is legitimately honest. Regardless of how true to the real Dan Harmon the Harmontown persona is, it's still just a facsimile. Performed honesty generates sympathy and admiration. The audience views the performer's admissions of misdeeds, fears, etc. as a form of courage. No performer is unaware of this relationship**, which means that a stage provides an opportunity for "honest" discussion that doesn't lead to the sometimes necessary chastisement and alteration of behavior that true honesty engenders. When you're honest on stage, you can dismiss certain things as being part of a performance. When you're honest in real life, that's when you can really hurt people.)
**(The application of this to preaching is interesting to consider.)
That level of interaction is all well and good in a space like Harmontown, it's not as effective when trying to produce a network sitcom. One of the early strengths of Community was its adaptability - when certain characters weren't working, the creators either abandoned their annoying traits or caricatured them. I think the online fandom may have conflated the showrunners' awareness that these characters weren't working with their own perceived expectations of what the characters should be. From that point forward, Twitter and Reddit began shipping characters left and right.
Things escalated when they show stopped being your typical wacky sitcom and started engaging with the genre in subversive ways. The first inclination of this came in the ninth episode of the first season, when amateur filmmaker Abed shows the study group a series of shorts that he made that appeared to predict the future of the group by analyzing its previous behavior, but the show didn't really become Community until the 21st episode of that season, "Contemporary American Poultry." It was the first episode to fully commit to a high concept send up (this one to mob films). Two episodes later, the first paintball episode aired and we saw what Community was capable of.
On the groundwork laid in season one, season two built a progressively more ridiculous and openly genre breaking show - it was probably the high point, creatively, of Community - it's also where the fandom really took off. Every Friday, the Internet was flooded with memes and lazy deconstructions.
Harmon and Co. seemed to take this in stride, even mocking a popular YouTube video of clips of Jeff and Annie exchanging glances while sappy music played in the background. An episode featured a very similarly edited video, except pairing a bunch of characters together who clearly had no romantic interest. This should have a been a clever and gentle chastisement of overzealous fans. Instead, it served as evidence that Community's creators were not only aware of the show's obsessive base, but were influenced by it enough to actually address it within an episode.
The show hit its zenith with the third season episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory," an incredibly well-plotted 22 minutes that played with alternate timelines. From there, things began to fall apart. For every great episode, there was another that just wallowed in meta-ness and reference humor. Harmon's much publicized troubles with NBC/Sony came to a head and it was clear that he probably wouldn't be returning to the show, on the off chance that it was actually renewed. Under pressure from the studio and with declining ratings, the show turned progressively more insular. Any pretense at being a broad comedy was abandoned and it became clear that Community was being produced explicitly for the enjoyment of its existing fanbase.
There's a certain creative freedom to this. When you don't care about pleasing everybody, you can work very hard to please a dedicated few, but it can also be creatively stifling. When people feel that you are making something expressly for them, then criticism is going to be infrequent at best. Even lazy, tired episodes of Community were praised and fed through the Internet's many gif mills. The high-concept buffoonery also served as a distraction from the fact that the show had all but abandoned any meaningful character development. I honestly don't ask for much of that in most sitcoms. Everyone on Arrested Development is essentially static. But, if you're going to bill yourself as a "smart" alternative to something like The Big Bang Theory, you at some point have to demonstrate some emotional intelligence - not just cleverness with form.
With Harmon gone, there was no one to anchor the show emotionally in the fourth season. The new showrunners did their best (and I give them more credit than most), but ultimately produced a watered-down version of Harmon's vision. In their desperation to appeal to the show's insane base (which was always going to hate a Harmon-less version anyway) they recycled the same tired fanservice that had brought down season three.
Looking at the final episode, it had everything that hardcore fans would have wanted - the darkest timeline, shipping and paintball - but it was almost unwatchable. The worst part is that Community fans seem utterly unaware that they are almost entirely to blame for the downfall of their favorite show. By celebrating every single callback and reference, they stripped them of whatever narrative power they may have once had. It was a cult of personality built around Harmon that was ultimately untenable. In some sort of weird irony, a show that was built around tearing down lazy cliches ended up become one itself.
In short, the Community fans are the AT&T of fans.
The show was renewed for a fifth season last week, and I'm hoping that the distance from Harmon and the fact that there's basically no way it'll get a sixth will produce some story lines that hearken back to the show's early days. Whoever ends up taking over for this season has the perfect storm of creative freedom - a limited run, very little oversight and a show that has established itself to be capable of extreme creativity. If they want to, they actually can break the genre.
