Community is an American television sitcom created by Dan Harmon. The series ran for 110 episodes over six seasons, from September 2009 to June 2015. Set at a community college in the fictional Colorado town of Greendale, the series stars an ensemble cast including Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, Ken Jeong, Chevy Chase, and Jim Rash.
I came to this series via Alison Brie. I’d just finished watching another U.S. series: GLOW (Glamorous Ladies of Wrestling). Can’t quite remember how I’d gotten to GLOW (a trailer for it, I think), but it was funny and enjoyable (80’s America too!). Alison Brie was one of the leads in GLOW, and that led me to Community.
I was going to do a nice long rambling discourse on how quirky it is, how windswept and interesting it was. But then I thought you’ve either watched it, or never heard of it, so there’s no real point in trying to explain what it is. I enjoyed it at various intensities. Some of it was quite brilliant, most of it was quite funny. It did strike me as quite odd series overall.
Character-wise, there were some doozies. Jim Rash’s gay Dean (Craig Pelton) was a standout character – always interrupting the class for no readily apparent reason, in some costume or other, getting increasingly flamboyant, glitzy and mad as the series continued (always funny, however). Joel McHale’s character (meant to be the lead) wasn’t really a stand-out kind of character. If anything, the character was the plainest of the lot! It did introduce me to Joel McHale though – a very funny chap (now in new series called Animal Control. We’ll see how that goes!). Alison Brie – the entire raison d’etre for watching it in the first place – didn’t really have any major impact on the series as a whole, I thought. Yes, she was there (like the others), but didn’t have any major stuff to do.
Completely glossing over the other characters that did have major (and odd) impacts on the storyline and series (e.g. the Danny Pudi and Gillian Jacobs characters), I’ll end on Chevy Chase. Apparently Chase had a bit of a strained relationship with the writers which culminated in his disinterest in it and ultimately his departure at the end of the fifth series. I didn’t think you could see any of that in his performance as Pierce Hawthorn. In fact, that character was my favourite out of the whole lot. Chase came under some criticism of the character (the character of Pierce Hawthorn was a bigoted politically incorrect millionaire) – but he played it perfectly. There were some brilliant lines that he came out with, but he was always corrected or chastised by the group. And Chevy Chase is a brilliant actor.
So…
So was it worth watching? Yes, I think so. It’s quirky, odd and quite funny in many places. You probably won’t learn any life lessons from it, but if nothing else, you’ll be tickled by the Dean.