The date was Sept. 30, 2022. After two years of speculation as to why the Instagram account for NBC’s “Community” — @communitytv — returned after five years of radio silence, it finally happened. One symbol, nine letters, three words: The textpost gave one of the cultiest cult classic fanbases hope again with the phrase #andamovie. Seeing this, I was filled with unspeakable excitement suffused with an unidentifiable sense of dread.
The Instagram account in question is the official promoter for one of my favorite TV shows “Community,” which ended seven years ago. It’s a sitcom about a community college that couldn’t have survived without its online fanbase. The show had quite the online impact as well, launching the career of internet darlings like Donald Glover’s musical alter ego Childish Gambino, the creator of “Rick and Morty” Dan Harmon and Avengers directors the Russo Bros. Aside from in-jokes like the phrase “streets ahead,” the show’s impact extends to the wider internet through a universal language: memes.
Ever heard one of Chang’s (Ken Jeong, “Adventures in Wonder Park”) most iconic lines immortalized in the bygone rage comic format, seen Troy (Donald Glover, “Atlanta”) walk through a door with pizza only to see the room flooded with fiery chaos or described the past few years as “the darkest timeline?” You have “Community” to thank for that. The iconic line is also the title of Joel McHale’s (“Stargirl”) and Jeong’s pandemic-baby podcast, which, along with the show’s addition to the Netflix library, caused a resurgence in its popularity. This renewed interest in the show by the cast and its expanding community is what led to the resurgence of another now-eponymous in-joke: “Six seasons and a movie.”
“Six seasons and a movie” was a phrase first uttered by one of the protagonists, Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi, “Mythic Quest”), in reference to NBC’s “The Cape.” Abed himself is a standout in the show’s cast — the half-Polish, half-Arabic film and TV buff is a source of refreshing representation for brown audiences (yay me) and nerds (double yay) everywhere (even beyond 2009’s standards). Abed finds himself unable to understand people at face value so he relates to the world around him through the various tropes and conventions of his favored audiovisual works, which sets the stage for one of the most unique and perhaps defining aspects of “Community” — homages. Nearly every episode offers a sardonic take on an aspect of modern culture or commits full-force to a genre either through the designs of the showrunners or, in some cases, with Abed himself wanting to recreate life as he saw it through film camera lenses.
The phrase “six seasons and a movie” was not just representative of Abed’s expert opinion on the perfect length of a TV show — it also became a meta representation of the plan of the creators of “Community.” When cancellation loomed, the catchphrase was used by the show’s fanbase as a rallying cry. By the end of season three, #sixseasonsandamovie was its official anthem to tell its full story. It made it all the way to six seasons in 2015 before ending its series finale — “Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television” — with a black screen that read #andamovie. For the next seven years, fans held out hope as their favorite show’s cult community grew. This brings us to now, with Netflix and an online cast reunion bringing back interest in the show. NBC’s streaming service Peacock has greenlit the movie, so if you have the time to catch up before the release, “Community” is on nearly every other streaming service now. I’d love to welcome you to the community.
The end.
Except, that’s not exactly the end. Why was the show constantly on the verge of being canceled? Did I mention I dreaded the movie announcement? Let’s address the first question. Despite being highly acclaimed by both its cult following and critics, “Community” always got disproportionately low ratings and viewership. One of the reasons for this was showrunner Dan Harmon’s “story circle” — a three-act storytelling structure based on the “Hero’s Journey” he used to subvert the sitcom formula. In short, the episodes’ oft-insane external conflicts would always resolve themselves by the end to maintain the status quo, while precise emotional beats followed to slightly further the development of multiple characters. This was how it managed to balance and develop so many protagonists over six seasons — a compromise between character-driven storytelling and the creative freedom of a sitcom. They had their classic homage cake and developed it too.
Of course, when I first binged the show on Netflix, I actually didn’t understand a lot of the references it made. I myself wasn’t raised on the “classics” — my parents preferred Bollywood movies, although my dad showed me a couple of his Western favorites like “Jurassic Park.” We also didn’t have cable growing up, so the only shows I did end up watching in full were part of Netflix’s catalog, and of course, the wide world of YouTube. I feel this story could ring true for a lot of kids growing up in the Digital Age, so why is “Community” still holding relevance with us? Why is it one of my favorites? Let’s consider that Netflix factor.
The “story circle” is made for divided viewership on the weekly airing schedule of “Community.” Casual watchers couldn’t just drop into any episode without feeling like they were missing something, which might have hindered investment in the storytelling because of how slow the development was. Because of this, each season went all-out in its plots because they never knew which season would be their last, ending with the characters as marginally better people after each season showing two semesters of misadventures. The show was canceled twice as crucial cast members left and that final sixth season had to be picked up by Yahoo’s now-defunct streaming service.
But this is part of what made the show ahead of its time — even though its structure may have been less than ideal for broadcast television, it was perfect for binging on streaming services. In addition, I would wager that the drawn-out development of its complicated characters gave modern viewers realistic representations of people — the digital equivalent being those YouTube personas a lot of us grew up on, those we still consume and form parasocial relationships with. Abed comes to mind again: He uses his parasocial relationships with fictional characters and the structures of fiction to understand and enhance his reality. Does that sound like something you empathize with? Have you followed that trend of “romanticizing your life?” Imagined yourself as the “main character” or any other alignment? Congratulations! You’re living like Abed — and that’s not a bad thing.
As much as the internet can isolate us and cloak us in layers of self-awareness and irony, sometimes it also reminds us how alone we aren’t. In Harmon’s words, we’re all nerds like Abed, “people that are experts in something that is, on some level, pointless to someone else,” and the internet connected us in that way, after many of us likely spent our childhoods wondering why we were set so far apart. One of the central themes of “Community” is that there is always a heart underneath all the chaos, and the internet can make that easier to see. And as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, using the stories we grew up with to create new ones and understand our lives isn’t such a bad deal. As much as it pains me, the fanbase of “Community” getting a new chapter feels like being taken to class one last time.
The end. For real this time.
I’m sorry for the second fake-out, but I don’t want to end this article because that means I have to come to a resolution — with this dread and with Abed. I have to admit how much I really empathize with him. But like I said, that isn’t a bad thing. I went through 19 years of my life before ever seeing a protagonist in Western media that even remotely looked like me, that wasn’t some kind of stereotype — like the only Indian boy in my elementary school not knowing if he was isolated for how he behaved or how he looked. I had never seen a character admit so precisely and openly what I usually hide — the difficulty I have understanding people. Just as Abed makes film and TV his tools for understanding people, I use the internet and writing for mine — philosophy, Greek tragedy, psychology, video game lore, sociology. These stories and sciences are how I’ve taught myself to be a person. The more I look, the more I see that there isn’t one true understanding of people. That used to terrify me, but the internet made me feel less alone in the possibility that no one truly understands how to understand each other.
#andamovie fills me with dread because when those six seasons became one of my only warm memories in quarantine, those characters — especially Abed — lived forever in their unfinished story. I held onto the hope that one day I’d get to see them all again. Now that the ending is in sight, it’s terrifying that one of my favorite comfort shows will be finished forever.
It was a good show, finding meaning wherever it could between all its meta-ness. The homages, the structural subversions, the self-aware parodying — always with heart tied to them. A Claymation Christmas episode for a boy who needs to face what’s lost during the holidays in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” a post-apocalyptic parody when someone leaving feels like the end of the world in “Geothermal Escapism,” a series of pitches for the show’s nonexistent “Season 7” to cope with the series ending in “Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television.” Structures and subversion to enhance the heart of your homage — another technique I’ve again been unconsciously emulating.
Sometimes you never know how instrumental a part of your life was until the end looms in sight — or until it’s already over. I don’t think I can truly understand endings either, though I have certainly tried. Loss, endings, grief — these things can only be experienced, not fully understood. I’m also understanding that I can’t truly understand people — I can just experience them. It’s the same way I can sit back and enjoy a comfort show, through both cancellations and streaming service renewals, through all six of its seasons and for its eventual ending in a movie. As Abed says in the series finale: “It’s comfort. It’s a friend you’ve known so well, and for so long… you just let it be with you. And it needs to be okay for it to have a bad day. Or phone in a day. And it needs to be okay for it to (leave) and never come back… because eventually, it all will.” It’s a simple truth — good things never last because part of what makes them good is that they end. I want this article to be one of those good things, even if I have so much more to say, to articulate how much this all means to me. Maybe I’ll get to write about the movie. Regardless, this show and the internet have taught me that I’ll always have a community.
#andamovie
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.