Community was (and is still) a breeze of personality and innovation in Sitcoms.

One of the projects that I think are the most difficult to get ahead and make something remarkable is the sitcoms, making good comedy requires precision with both the script and the direction to get the message across to the audience, many of the sitcoms of the mid-2000s, although they knew how to reach their audience over the years, began to lower their quality, the formula of shows like The Office or Parks and Recreation began to feel repetitive and opened the way to other sitcoms in which some like How I Met Your Mother gave a twist to the classic way of watching the sitcoms of the 90s while others like It's Always Sunny On Philadelphia redefined concepts of series that were still on the air.

But undoubtedly one of the comedies that has lasted the longest in the minds of its fans and that completely changed the rules of how to make a sitcom would arrive in 2009 with Community, a series aware that it had many of the heavyweights of comedy in those days and that it would face them knowing its flaws but constantly innovating itself with each episode.

Community begins and ends having an amazing cast of characters, each one with their well-defined personalities and with a chemistry between its actors that many shows would like, but I think the main mark of this series is how it approaches its episodes with an angle focused on the parody of many other film genres or other television shows, in this way we can find episodes that drink from works like Law and Order or other films such as Leone or fake documentaries, all with a unique humor making references to the same series and being self-conscious of the show in many cases, they put us in chaotic and irreverent situations that with the chemistry of all its actors never feel uncomfortable or forced and the situations in which they put us contribute to make the series have a unique energy that the direction and the script are responsible for enhancing in each chapter.

The heart in chaos

Although the series does not have a defined central character, we can focus on the fact that most of the students in the study group have different characteristics, but for the convenience of this analysis we will focus on Jeff, who is a former lawyer who is forced to study again at the university in order to revalidate his degree, Jeff is what we could recognize as a manipulator and basically an idiot since he has no problem in discarding others to get what he wants.

Even creating a study group to sleep with one of her classmates, we are now introduced to Britta, who would come to be a social fighter, feminist and environmentalist and everything you would expect from an environmentalist, but this is where the series works its magic, as the episodes go by we move further and further away from those initial characteristics of all the characters (Jeff, Britta, Shirley, Abed, Troy and Pierce) to explore why they are the way they are, deciphering the characters and using the resource of parody to develop them so that we can understand them much better.

A few days ago I rewatched some episodes of the second and third season and it became clear to me a pattern of how the episodes develop and we could classify them in two main themes, the episodes where they offer us a comfortable environment with almost no changes but with a great character development or a chaotic episode where most of the time they do not take themselves seriously and work to make parody of other film genres, this category is where my favorite episodes are and it is not simply because of the high level of production, the actors and the atmosphere, but also because they can develop themes that help us understand the characters without sacrificing the parodic essence of the episode, likewise we have for example Chaos Remedy Theory which is one of my favorite episodes and goes into the realms of science fiction with a simple proposal based on looking for pizza, from there we are taught the relationships that each of the characters have with each other and giving us a perspective of what would happen if one of them goes to "get the pizza", it is such a simple concept and at the same time plays with science fiction in a pure way and with a unique style that this series has.

It is true that the series from the fourth season had a downturn in its production values and also by the departure of Troy, one of its main characters as well as its mastermind and creator: Dan Harmon but I think it kept a more than outstanding balance even though it has always been on the verge of cancellation due to the low ratings that the series has had (product also of competing with several of the series with more audience of those years as The Office or 30ROCK, however I want to emphasize that Community has remained in time thanks to a legion of fans impressed with the originality of the proposal of Dan Harmon and that even in these days is eagerly awaited a film that would mean the end of the prophecy of Abed: 6 seasons and a movie.

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