Like every sane sitcom snob, I was sad to hear the news about NBC’s “Community.” According to the network, the show has been pulled from its Thursday night slot, and replaced, for now, by “30 Rock.”
“Community” fans, as well as some writers for the show, tweeted and re-tweeted their prickly despair. “This…is by far the darkest timeline,” wrote the staff writer Megan Ganz, a reference to the show’s excellent multiple-timeline episode, which you should go watch immediately if you haven’t already.
I want the show to survive the season. (It still might: this isn’t a cancellation, yet.) But I also know that even among low-rated shows, “Community” was an underachiever. That’s not an outrage, it makes sense. The showrunner Dan Harmon’s unapologetically experimental network comedy—a series so geeked-out and self-referential that it practically turned the notion of the sitcom inside-out—was never designed for a mass audience. Like a lot of ambitious TV, it has been a magnet for a small, oddball cadre of viewers, the ones who analyze comic beats in the manner of Talmudic scholars, wear T-shirts with slogans that only the elect will understand, and criticize tiny flaws in a thread that goes a thousand comments deep. The show succeeded. It found us. There just weren’t a lot of us.
That’s the Catch-22 of network television: it’s a big shiny stage made of money, which means every show must attract a billion eyeballs. It’s a bad model if you’re a viewer interested in anything idiosyncratic. And yet, somehow, despite this awful system, the networks have sponsored what amounts to a modern sitcom renaissance. While cable has all the ambitious dramas, with a few notable exceptions (“Louie,” “Bored To Death,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”), it’s the networks that make the best, funniest, and often the most original half-hour comedies—a category that includes not merely the unimpeachable top dogs (“30 Rock” and “Parks & Recreation”), but also many skilled and lively second-tier options, including the warm and hilarious “Happy Endings,” “Raising Hope,” “Modern Family,” the unheralded but excellent “The Middle,” the appealing new “Up All Night,” “The Office” (currently on the upswing), “How I Met Your Mother” (on the downswing, but with a solid history), and “Cougar Town” (which is also on hiatus, but I’m in denial about that).
None of these shows are “Community”—“Community” is its own thing, the brainchild of Dan Harmon, an auteurist weirdo so obsessive (and admittedly self-destructive) that his commentaries on the second season posted on the AV Club are as engaging as the show itself. I want Harmon to get to keep making his show, but I’ll be grateful whether he does or not. Because if I can get three (or even 2.75) seasons on DVD of a show that never spoiled, or went sour-panicky, or phony-warm, I’ll be entirely satisfied. Let’s not get greedy. If TV fanhood is a gamble, that’s still a jackpot.
