Monday, February 28, 2011
Community and The New Audience
As we've all picked up recently, television has been changing in tone a lot recently. The style of shows has shifted and become increasingly more and more cinematic rather than videographic. This trend can be seen in the new sitcoms that have been appearing on television such as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Curb Your Enthusiasm. While these shows are being filmed in the more cinematic single-camera style, they follow many of the conceits of traditional sitcoms like All in the Family and Sanford and Son. Basing each episode on a general conceit, the action happens between the players on the show which leads to a resolution at the end.
Community is not really any different from any of these programs. The difference between this show and the aforementioned ones is the way in which the action plays out. Rather than being purely self-contained, Community situates itself as an open comedic text, making clear its commentaries and pointing to its references and itself in both subtle and heavy-handed ways. This new approach to the sitcom suggests appeals to a new self-aware, postmodern* audience that has been raised on the teat of popular culture.
To quickly situate the show, Community follows the lives of seven students at the fictional Greendale Community College, which is located in Greendale, CO. Much like in any sitcom, the characters have very distinct personalities. There is Annie Edison, former Adderall addict and overachiever; Troy Barnes, lovable but mentally slow former HS football quarterback; Pierce Hawthorne, cantankerous divorcee and moist towlette magnate; Shirley Bennett, Christian single mother and former alcoholic; Abed Nadir, popular culture dictionary and socially awkward chick magnet; Britta Perry, a feminist lacking in self-confidence; and Jeff Winger, a disbarred lawyer with an overabundance of self-confidence.
Each week, the characters negotiate the insanity that is their day-to-day existence at Greendale. They must deal with the overly involved (and not-so-secretly gay) Dean Pelton, loose cannon Senor Chang, and the ever bewildering Star Burns amongst others. So far, nothing is really all that different. It's just like every other sitcom any of us has ever watched in terms of premise. The difference comes in terms of how the show is executed.
More than any other sitcom on television right now and especially more than any other single-camera sitcom, Community completely shatters the fourth wall and our continual understandings of how a sitcom should operate. To be clear, other shows also break the fourth wall and suggest that they are engaged in an act of artifice. The Seth MacFarlane shows revel in their ability to break this border and talk actively to the audience. A recent example comes from Family Guy when they made a joke about the Bronte sisters. Before the action resumed on the episode, Peter and Brian had a side banter about the fact that they just made a "period period joke" before moving back into the narrative of Brian giving Peter his kidney ("New Kidney in Town"). Other episodes where this technique is used include "Three Kings" where Peter introduces three vignettes based on Stephen King novels and "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1" in which Brian and Stewie introduce short stories submitted by regular viewers.
Community is not really any different from any of these programs. The difference between this show and the aforementioned ones is the way in which the action plays out. Rather than being purely self-contained, Community situates itself as an open comedic text, making clear its commentaries and pointing to its references and itself in both subtle and heavy-handed ways. This new approach to the sitcom suggests appeals to a new self-aware, postmodern* audience that has been raised on the teat of popular culture.
To quickly situate the show, Community follows the lives of seven students at the fictional Greendale Community College, which is located in Greendale, CO. Much like in any sitcom, the characters have very distinct personalities. There is Annie Edison, former Adderall addict and overachiever; Troy Barnes, lovable but mentally slow former HS football quarterback; Pierce Hawthorne, cantankerous divorcee and moist towlette magnate; Shirley Bennett, Christian single mother and former alcoholic; Abed Nadir, popular culture dictionary and socially awkward chick magnet; Britta Perry, a feminist lacking in self-confidence; and Jeff Winger, a disbarred lawyer with an overabundance of self-confidence.
Each week, the characters negotiate the insanity that is their day-to-day existence at Greendale. They must deal with the overly involved (and not-so-secretly gay) Dean Pelton, loose cannon Senor Chang, and the ever bewildering Star Burns amongst others. So far, nothing is really all that different. It's just like every other sitcom any of us has ever watched in terms of premise. The difference comes in terms of how the show is executed.
More than any other sitcom on television right now and especially more than any other single-camera sitcom, Community completely shatters the fourth wall and our continual understandings of how a sitcom should operate. To be clear, other shows also break the fourth wall and suggest that they are engaged in an act of artifice. The Seth MacFarlane shows revel in their ability to break this border and talk actively to the audience. A recent example comes from Family Guy when they made a joke about the Bronte sisters. Before the action resumed on the episode, Peter and Brian had a side banter about the fact that they just made a "period period joke" before moving back into the narrative of Brian giving Peter his kidney ("New Kidney in Town"). Other episodes where this technique is used include "Three Kings" where Peter introduces three vignettes based on Stephen King novels and "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1" in which Brian and Stewie introduce short stories submitted by regular viewers.
The breaking of the fourth wall in Community does not happen in the same way. Community breaks its fourth wall by acknowledging its own artificiality but not through discussion with the audience. To provide an example, the episode "Cooperative Calligraphy" (Season 2, Episode 8) is a bottle episode. Many die-hard television fans would have become aware of this as the narrative moved on, featuring only the study group and none of the other characters who are frequently seen on the show such as Leonard or Magnitude. As the type of episode has a specific narrative arc, we can be certain that the form has been seen in shows prior. Rather than just playing the episode out, Abed, as the show's continual meta commentator, points out that this episode is quickly shaping into a bottle episode due to the fact that there is a central conflict and the only people who could have done it are sitting in the room. Abed's hunch is confirmed when Jeff calls his catch of a date Gwennifer and says (along with other things), "tell your disappointment to suck it. I've gotta do a bottle episode."
This quick line, which preceded a commercial break, breaks down the idea that the show exists as anything else but a show. The characters on the show, while they may have well-developed back stories (in the example being used, Pierce is in full leg casts resulting from him double bouncing on a trampoline in the episode prior. This gag continues for the time it takes Pierce to heal from the accident), frequently acknowledge their character-ness. To provide an example, last week's episode "Intro to Political Science" features an exchange between Troy and Abed where Troy acknowledges that Abed always has his own little stories going off to the side of the main story (this week, the main story was electing a school president for a visit from the folksy hero himself, Vice President Joe Biden. Abed was being trailed by a sexy Secret Service agent who has a thing for him.).
The effect of such maneuvers on the part of the show are twofold. The first is that it allows for the creation of a text that can comment and parody other shows/movies and formats without too much danger. Examples include "Contemporary American Poultry," which was a wholesale ripoff of Goodfellas and The Godfather with explicit references made throughout the episode to both. More importantly, it creates a new relationship with the audience. The show itself presupposes that its viewers watch a lot of television. As is noted in pretty much every critical text that does audience work on the viewer, some of the pleasure of television viewing is recognizing the variety of references that the show is making. By making its own plans known, Community does not strip away the pleasure of watching television. On the contrary, it provides a different sort of pleasure: it allows the audience into its world.
Rather than trying to maintain its artifice, Community makes jokes at its expense. By doing this, the show is physically and psychically there with the audience poking fun at the constructs of the traditional sitcom, as shown through the aforementioned example of "Cooperative Calligraphy," as well as make sustained critiques of other forms of television. To provide an explanation to the latter, "Intro to Political Science" was, at its core, a rather pointed critique of the American political system and its soundbyte, demographic-research-driven mentality. This is reflected in both the breathlessly pointless political commentary work done by Troy and Abed for GCTV, which featured political graphics and a graphic-cluttered screen reminiscent of MSNBC or Fox News, as well as the debate itself which was full of meaningless sloganeering, pointless celebration of folksy nonsense, and discussion without progress.
As one can sense, this show requires a considerable amount of cultural knowledge to be able to access it. While it can be fun to watch on its own level, the satisfaction on the surface level is not as high as it is with a more self-contained show like Two and a Half Men (This show will never survive without Sheen. We all have tiger blood). Full satisfaction can only come with full understanding of the show's intertextuality and self-referentiality because these are put at the surface level of the show. This is what makes the show wildly popular with critical types like myself and those who write for the press: we've been exposed to these things for so long and can make the connections rather easily.
This dense intertextuality is also what has made the show the perpetual bubble show that it is, average about 5 million viewers a week, which is poor for a network show but good for NBC (sick burn?). To provide comparison, the guido juggernaut that is Jersey Shore gets upwards of 8.5-9 million viewers a week. Even the A&E show Beyond Scared Straight which is an hour of troubled teens getting yelled at by hardened criminals averages 3 million viewers. It's important to note that both of these shows are on cable, which makes Community's number just that much sadder.
While mourning may come in the future, Community provides a show to an audience that has become jaded on the recycling of past television tropes but still loves watching television and absorbing popular culture. Community is willing to let the audience say "this is a television show, just a television show," and that is a radical step within itself, I think. I don't expect to see a number of people take up the challenge of liking Community, but for the audience that it does have, it thoroughly respects the way that it both respects and destroys the sitcom week in and week out through its self-reflexivity and intertextuality.
*As Caldwell notes in his book, television has always been postmodern. For the sake of this argument, I intend to use postmodern as a term that implies awareness of artificiality of the viewing experience and the amalgamation of various cultural knowledges.
# posted by A.C. Hawley @ 6:41 PM 
Comments:
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What I like about your argument here is the way that you've taken a conventional interest of the sitcom (at least since the seventies) in political relevance, and shown how that relevance today extends to not only the content of the programming, but the form as well...including the larger political relevance of televisual forms. I love how the show brings behind-the-scenes sitcom writer lingo (like the "bottle episode") to a broader public.
One thing you don;t address though is the broader politics of the pleasures of savviness. At minimum, Community marks out a distinct economic and intellectual audience niche with these techniques: one need not only be familiar with M*A*S*H to get the intertextual references, one also has to enjoy intertextual references. In this way, the series partakes of a broader politics of satire and savvy that require theorization (not just by you, but by all of us!)
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One thing you don;t address though is the broader politics of the pleasures of savviness. At minimum, Community marks out a distinct economic and intellectual audience niche with these techniques: one need not only be familiar with M*A*S*H to get the intertextual references, one also has to enjoy intertextual references. In this way, the series partakes of a broader politics of satire and savvy that require theorization (not just by you, but by all of us!)
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