Community (TV series)

Fandom
Name:	Community
Abbreviation(s):	none
Creator:	Dan Harmon
Date(s):	September 17, 2009 – June 2, 2015
Medium:	television
Country of Origin:	United States
External Links:	IMDB, Official series page on NBC Wikipedia
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Community is a US comedy about a group of lovable misfits who are students at a community college.

Canon Summary

Community is an NBC sitcom about a group of diverse students at the fictional Greendale Community College who form a study group which eventually becomes a surrogate family for its members. The show centers on Jeff Winger, a lawyer who enrolls in Greendale after being disbarred for faking his undergraduate degree.

In the pilot episode, Jeff accidentally founds a study group while attempting to seduce Britta Perry, a cute girl in his Spanish 101 class. After Jeff lies to Britta about being a “certified Spanish tutor”, she shares that information with Abed Nadir who invites several other students to join the group. These students are Annie Edison, Troy Barnes, Shirley Bennett, and Pierce Hawthorne. Following the pilot, the group quickly becomes friends and the series is built around their many zany adventures.

Breaking the Fourth Wall and Fandom Shout-Outs

Community, its stars, and its creator are known for frequently breaking the fourth wall and making references to fan activities and media tropes.

Dan Harmon, the creator, uses his twitter account to interact with fans and makes no secret about his knowledge of fannish works. A major shout-out was to the vid Gravity (Jeff/Annie). Dan Harmon said it was "great editing" in a tweet. The specific vid was then parodied in an episode. The parody is controversial among fandom, but has come to be broadly accepted. This is because Dan Harmon stated in the DVD commentary that he spent $30,000 of his own money getting the rights to use the same song used by veritas724 (Gravity by Sara Bareilles), which he claimed he would not have done if he did not love his fans. Dan Harmon also stated that the scene was a "homage" and "sincere thank-you note," an explanation veritas724 accepted.

Another example proves that he is familiar with other aspects of fandom genre:

@danharmon: Learning so much lingo. Hey, Abed/Troy shippers, here's some slash: Once upon a time, Abed did it in the butt with Troy. The end!

His Twitter feed is also the source of at least one joke that appeared in the show. After Community won a fan favorite poll on Hulu, beating Modern Family and Glee in successive tournament rounds, Harmon received the following text:

@amyfairycakes both Modern Family and Glee are streets ahead of your meta bullshit

Harmon found the phrase “streets ahead” very amusing, believing it to be a neologism invented by @amyfairycakes, and proceeded to reference it frequently on his own account. He even went so far as to create a public service announcement documenting the rising popularity of the phrase. A few weeks later, Pierce was seen on the show trying to coin the phrase (“streets ahead is verbal wildfire”) while the other characters discussed its origin and meaning.

The characters of Community also have Twitter accounts, which are active and referenced in the show. Even Troy’s pet monkey, Annie’s Boobs, has a twitter account. Prior to the season two premier, fans could follow a twitter exchange between the characters which set the stage for the upcoming episode.

Common Media Tropes

The show references and often parodies common media tropes, including buddy cop shows, zombie movies, post-apocalyptic stories, westerns, Star Wars, and mafia movies.

Connections with Cougar Town

The character Abed is usually responsible for these references, as he is shown to have a fannish background (he runs a Cougar Town fan community). Abed has canonically referenced the episodic nature of Community, including commenting on the characters' involvement in a "bottle episode".

Community has a special relationship with the US sitcom Cougar Town, referencing it in several episodes during the first few seasons as a show Abed enjoys. Cougar Town reciprocated when a character on that show mentioned his love for the Season One Community DVDs. The mutual love affair between the series got serious in the season two episode of Community Critical Film Studies, during which Abed mentions his involvement with the Cougar Town fandom and how it led to an invitation for him to be an extra in an episode. Several weeks later, Danny Pudi (the actor who plays Abed) was indeed an extra on an episode of Cougar Town. Two actors from Cougar Town later had cameos in the season two finale of Community. In the season three opener, Abed laments the fact that Cougar Town has been moved to midseason, but quickly becomes fascinated with Cougarton Abbey, the British predecessor of the American Cougar Town.

Abed also enjoys another British show, Inspector Spacetime, which is an obvious spoof of Doctor Who, and which has developed its own fandom.

Connections with the MCU

Allusions and connections with the Marvel Cinematic Universe began when the Russo Brothers, which were notable directors & executive producers of Community, directed Captain America: The Winter Soldier (and later CA: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War & Avengers: Endgame). Danny Pudi appears as a Shield agent Moore. Jim Rash appeared in Civil War as the M.I.T. liaison and Donald Glover appears as Aaron Davis in Spider-Man: Homecoming. In Avengers: Endgame had many cameos, including Joe Russo (guy in Cap's support group), Ken Jeong (security guard who helps Scott Lang), and Yvette Nicole Brown (administrative employee who catches on to Tony & Cap). Other cameos appear within the MCU as well even when not produced/directed by the Russos, usually from other actors/actresses from Community that are not the main cast including Randall Park as FBI Agent Jimmy Woo and Walton Goggins as Sonny Burch (Ant-Man and the Wasp), Aaron Himelstein as Shield Agent Klein (CA:TWS/AOU), D.C. Pierson (CA:TWS), Johnny Pemberton (Ant-Man), Steve Agee and Brian Posehn (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2), Martin Starr as Roger Harrington (Spider-Man: Homecoming/Spider-Man: Far From Home and The Incredible Hulk), Patton Oswalt as The Koenigs (Agents of Shield), Enver Gjokaj as Agent Daniel Sousa (Agent Carter) and Brie Larson as Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel/Avengers Infinity). A few episodes of Community paid homage to Captain America: The Winter Soldier: season 5 episode "Basic Sandwich" and season 6 episode “Modern Espionage”.

Fandom Activity

The pilot episode of Community aired in the US on September 17, 2009. One day later, the first LiveJournal community, Community TV, was created (and it continues to be one of the main hubs of fannish activity, with 3510 members). Since that time, Community has developed into a small but active fandom.

Community has a vast number of active communities on LiveJournal, dedicated to everything from individual characters and specific pairings to icon-making, fanfiction, challenges, and graphics. The Community fandom has its own Kink Meme, a Spanish-speaking community, and will complete its first Big Bang in Summer 2012.

As of January 2012, there are 494 stories in the Community archive on fanfiction.net, and 276 on AO3. Community has been small enough to qualify for Yuletide every year since it began airing, but has been among the most popular small fandoms included in the exchange. In 2009, the first time Community was eligible for Yuletide, 11 stories were written for the exchange. The following year the number jumped to 20, and the next year 26 Community stories were written for Yuletide 2011 (making it the fandom with the 3rd highest number of fics that year). Two Community stories were among the top 20 most popular stories in the collection that year, and Community was one of only 6 fandoms to have 10 or more stories in the Yuletide collection in 2010 and 2011.

The Community fandom also has a strong presence on Tumblr, where it has its own TVTropes blog and several blogs dedicated to clips from (and news about) the show.

It's tumblr and fandom presence grew in 2020 due to an increase of new fans discovering the show via Netflix, which made the series available to stream as of April 1, 2020. As of May 1, 2020, there are 1.7K fanfiction at FFN and 2.1k works at AO3. A few Community related discord groups popped up as well.

Pairings

Community is a multishipper's dream. The cast is overwhelmingly attractive, and the episodes often touch on the romantic possibilities of various character combinations. As Jeff puts it in an early episode, "unlike a real family, there's nothing to stop any one of us from looking at any of the others as a sexual prospect". There is obviously nothing to stop fans from exploring those sexual prospects as well, which has resulted in fan communities celebrating nearly every possible permutation of couple.

The m/m fandom for this show is primarily Abed/Troy, aided by the show's Xena-style subtext in its treatment of their bromance. The m/f fandom is less OTP-oriented, but is heavily Jeff/Annie, a pairing around which canon dances. There is a very small f/f fandom, heavily oriented around Britta/Annie. Minor pairings include Abed/Annie, Jeff/Britta, Jeff/Shirley, Troy/Britta, Troy/Annie, Abed/Britta, and the OT3 of Abed/Annie/Troy (which has gained a lot of popularity since the three characters began sharing an apartment in the third season).

	Jeff	Britta	Annie	Abed	Troy	Shirley
Jeff		Britta/Jeff	Annie/Jeff	Abed/Jeff	Troy/Jeff	Shirley/Jeff
Britta	Jeff/Britta		Annie/Britta	Abed/Britta	Troy/Britta	Shirley/Britta
Annie	Jeff/Annie	Britta/Annie		Abed/Annie	Troy/Annie	Shirley/Annie
Abed	Jeff/Abed	Britta/Abed	Annie/Abed		Troy/Abed	Shirley/Abed
Troy	Jeff/Troy	Britta/Troy	Annie/Troy	Abed/Troy		Shirley/Troy
Shirley	Jeff/Shirley	Britta/Shirley	Annie/Shirley	Abed/Shirley	Troy/Shirley

Tropes and Fanon

There are many common themes and tropes running throughout the works produced by Community fans. For example, many fanworks share the naming convention used in canon, wherein titles are meant to sound like the names of college courses. The Community fandom also has a great many fusions and crossovers, carrying on the canon habit of involving the study group in genre homages. Fanworks are often very self-aware and may include meta references to the TV-like experiences of the characters, or to tropes being used within the story. Many fanworks also continue or expand upon recurring 'bits' from canon, for example Troy and Abed's morning show (Troy and Abed in the Morning), or the characters' hatred of the glee club (a reference to Glee).

Anti-cancellation Fan Activism

In December 2011, NBC announced that Community would not be on the midseason schedule. Fans were quick to react, using Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook campaigns, as well as gatherings in some major cities, to protest the decision. Hashtags #sixseasonsandamovie (which echoes Abed’s hopes for the duration of the defunct NBC show The Cape), #saveCommunity, and #occupyNBC were soon trending topics on twitter. Fans created posters and other graphics to rally support. A “Save Greendale” PSA featuring Community cast members showed up on CollegeHumor.com. And on December 22, 2011, fans gathered en masse outside NBC studios in New York to “Occupy NBC” while wearing “darkest timeline” felt goatees and singing “O, Christmas Troy”.

Fan criticism

The show constantly skirts the edge of embarrassment squick. Additionally, it skirts the delicate border between showing racism through irony, and that form of ironic racism which is itself racist. Many of the fans who are drawn to a show with a strong ensemble cast that is 3/7 women and 3/7 people of color, including canonical relationships between two people of color and a major character with a probable disability, are the same kind of fans who will notice when ever the show crosses the borders in its representation of women, people of color, queerness, etc.

Notable Fanworks

Fics

• Screenwriting for Dummies, by irisbleufic
• "Troper Tales, by katiemariie".
• "History of Film, by Greensilver". Archived from the original on 2021-01-18.
• "Creative (Non)Fiction, by freneticfloetry". Archived from the original on 2021-01-28.
• "Critical Approaches to Film Noir, by yasaman". Archived from the original on 2022-04-20.
• "Dallased (Intro to Dream Interpretation 101), by lorax". Archived from the original on 2021-01-21.
• "Auteur Theory, by scioscribe". Archived from the original on 2021-01-18.
• #AnniesMove, ^{Archived version} (Troy Barnes/Annie Edison/Abed Nadir) by Katarin

Vids

• "Sex and Reruns, by Greensilver".
• "sweet disposition, by thesamincarnate". Archived from the original on 2012-06-16.

Resources

• Picspam by pyro-manical: 5 Ships on Community (in true Community fashion, includes "everyone/everyone")
• "58 Reasons Why I Love Community". Archived from the original on 2018-05-19.

Communities

Dreamwidth

• "Community 101". Archived from the original on 2015-09-12.

Livejournal

General

• "Community TV". Archived from the original on 2011-04-08.
• "Escuela Comunitaria Greendale". Archived from the original on 2021-07-25.

Fanfiction

• "Greendale100". Archived from the original on 2011-01-02.
• "/greendaleprompt".
• "community_fic". Archived from the original on 2011-02-23.
• "community_land". Archived from the original on 2010-09-24.
• "community_slash".
• "Community Big Bang". Archived from the original on 2013-08-30.

Pairing Specific

• "Abed_Annie".
• "AbedxAnnie". Archived from the original on 2019-06-27.
• "A Giant Cookie (Abed/Troy)". Archived from the original on 2012-03-04.
• "Milady, Milord (Jeff/Annie)". Archived from the original on 2022-01-30.
• "AnnieTroy". Archived from the original on 2010-06-16.
• "BrittaAnnieThon".
• "AnnieBritta".
• "jeff_britta". Archived from the original on 2010-06-14.
• "britta_troy".
• "She's a GDB (Britta-specific)". Archived from the original on 2017-08-11.

Icons and Graphics

• "greendale_daily".
• "community_icons". Archived from the original on 2010-04-06.
• "communitystills".
• "community20in20".

Twitter

• "Greendale101".
• "Meta 101".
• "Milady, Milord". Archived from the original on 2021-04-26.

Tumblr

• "Community TV Tropes Tumblr". Archived from the original on 2020-11-11.
• "Community 101". Archived from the original on 2015-03-24.
• "Community GIFs". Archived from the original on 2022-05-24.
• "Community Things". Archived from the original on 2022-04-22.
• "Community Rarepairs". Archived from the original on 2021-01-12.
• "Greendale's Mightiest Heroes".

Discord

• "R/Community Discord".

Archives

• "FanFiction.net". Archived from the original on 2022-03-01.
• "Archive of Our Own". Archived from the original on 2013-02-08.