By Erin Jackson
The third season of Community,
to borrow from the excellent episode "Remedial Chaos Theory" explored
what has been "the darkest timeline yet." And every week it seemed
life imitated art. There was the Chevy Chase incident, the mid-season split,
creator and showrunner Dan Harmon's public post-breakup breakdown and,
ultimately, his firing that added fuel to the constant cancellation rumors. And
on the show there was Pierce's dad's death, the war between Troy and Abed, the
murder of a yam, Glee club.... it was ugly.
I am a fan of Dan
Harmon. He has an uncanny ability to pry out emotions from us, one reference or
parody at a time.
But, Devil's advocate
time: Dan Harmon is kinda hard to work with. He has the social skills of Abed
with the sardonic self-interest of Jeff Winger. Not someone I'd particularly
say was suited for leadership. In an interview with G4, Harmon stated that he
was "farting around" creatively once he could see NBC becoming
cancellation-happy. Which is far from charming for the higher-ups who seemed
earnest in trying to bring in more viewers.
It's kind of hard for
me, however, to take a network seriously after they say this: “Shows like Whitney
and Up All Night were steps in the right direction and that’s why they’re
back.” That was NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt defending the
switch up. Ew. Especially since NBC's retooling of Up All Night seems
misguided and an affront to what made it refreshing and worth renewing. And
Harmon's been, well, Harmon, for years and has been turning out one of the best
loved TV shows in recent memory. When cancellation rumors became more and more
frequent and foreboding, fans donned goatees, twittered and flashmobbed outside
NBC. And the fans loyalty is due in large part because of the core message of
the show, which Harmon has said to be "People are Good and Systems are
Bad. To elaborate, that Even Bad People Can be turned Good by People Whereas
Nobody's Ever Been Turned Anything but Bad by a System." Harmon may not
have set out to make TV studios into villains, but, when the fans who were so
drawn to this message, this idea that someone made something that made me feel
like an okay person even though I'm a weirdo, and now something is trying to
take away this thing. And it got ugly. Because, despite this idea of the innate
goodness of people, Harmon often states that he is a broken, crappy person and
as such did not see fit to just gloss over all this crappiness and messiness.
If I may put on my
Britta glasses and play Psych major here, many of the season's episodes
mirrored what was going on behind the scenes. In "Virtual Systems
Analysis" Annie re-configures Abed's
Dreamatorium engine so that he considers other people
before himself. In this new configuration, which bears a striking resemblance
to
Grey's Anatomy, Abed has been filtered out. This is Abed's idea of
what others would like, but Annie is disturbed and wants things to be like they
were before. There have been other episodes that dealt with the Dreamatorium
and how it brings out the worst in Abed, to the extent that in the final
episode he disassembled it, reconstructing it in a refrigerator box. There's
only room for himself. This is neither a victory nor a defeat. So it's
interesting that Dan Harmon said that scene represented his departure from the
show. "I didn't know for sure I was going to [leave]," he went on
"but I had a feeling I might have to." In this same AMA, he said of
his firing "...I feel good bad. I feel terrible awesome. I feel proud
ashamed. I feel engorged on my own starvation, I feel like the biggest con
artist and sucker in the history of monsters and heroes."
The final episode was
heartwarming and heartbreaking, the kind of episode I imagine Harmon would have
felt comfortable calling a series finale. And, it could well be that it is its
spiritual finale. I, like Harmon, sure hope that it isn't:
Don't
underestimate the power of those actors playing those characters, and as I've
said, we've got a lot of great writers over there. I think they were incredibly
stupid to let me go but that's not the same as saying the show can't be good
without me. Fingers crossed, goatees in the drawer, gun barrels out of mouths.
Maybe it's the timeline where everybody wins. Regardless, don't weep for me.
All that money they're going to make...a big pile of it is mine.
This third season is
probably my favorite, and as Dan Harmon said "TV in all its ugliness can
be a beautiful thing." I gave my TV a standing ovation after "Basic
Lupine Urology" (aka the Law and Order episode) and giggled non-stop
during the Ken Burns style episode. Despite all the things working against it,
Community managed to be true not only to itself- its style, its humor, its
character development, but also to life. It seemed that, like Abed stated in
"Documentary Filmmaking: Redux", Dan Harmon's philosophy was
thus:
Will
your story be yet another sad one of yet another man who just wanted to be
happy or will your story acknowledge the very nature of stories and that
sharing the sad ones can sometimes make them happy?
Community will
continue to explore the latter in its broken, ugly, transcendental way, for
three more seasons and a movie. (If not, my whole brain will be crying and I
will need recs of long running British TV series—stat).
Erin Floyd Jackson has been BFFs with TV since she was a wee one when she would play TV Network Executive. She went to school to learn about how and why TV is the way it is and hopes to someday tear someone's creative vision down and re-edit it to her liking. In the meantime, she and her husband live in Huntsville, Alabama and they occasionally "blog" here (http://inappropriateapplause.tumblr.com/) when they are not geeking out over all the SCIENCE! in the Rocket City.
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