Community hit Netflix 20 days ago. Globally. Finally.

Finally millions of viewers are getting to experience what has been for me the best comedy to come out of TV in the last decade1.

Finally, they get to see what all the fuss was about.

Because even though us Community fans have always been a small segment of TV viewers (a minority, if you will) we’ve always been a very vocal one. Sort of like the vegans of TV world: how do you recognize a Community fan? You don’t have to; as soon as the topic of TV comes around, we’ll let you know.



Community needed us as much as we needed them, truth be told. They had to compete with rating juggernauts such as The Big Bang Theory, or against terrible studio management, so their only hope was that their audience were loyal. And we damn were. We stayed together, holding each other’s hands through thick and thin, watching our relationship become closer, more meaningful, and weirder the longer it went. We made a pact, in the early second season ten years ago. We were told through the holiest of character in the show, The Messiah Abed, we’d be together for “six seasons and a movie”. The movie part was always the most farfetched of ideas, but we damn well were going to get those six seasons. We were promised as much. It was a bumpy road, but we got there.



Six incredible seasons. Some of the finest, or darkest, or campiest, but always the best comedy TV ever. I mean, most of this stuff is usually quite subjetive, but I think that maybe some will agree with me. I’m just going to go straight to the point: a comedy isn’t just jokes. Jokes are funny, but a comedy isn’t just funny. A great comedy has great jokes, sure, but it also needs a great story. It needs heart. And Community has nothing but heart to offer: an endearing setting; a plethora of lovable and despicable characters; and a whole sense of closeness that you get via all the referencing of pop culture and the meta commentary. It makes the whole show seemed like it’s really grounded in the real world, in spite of its at times excessive campiness. The stories are ridiculous, but the characters, weirdly enough, are not, because they are either highly relatable or extremely committed. Every character is played and written masterfully in this crazy rollercoaster of adventures. Some may have issues with certain characters and relationships that didn’t make sense, but the fact that we can actually think back to that fourth season and go “gas leak year” and make everything OK is actually a testament to the resilience Community fans possess and the cheeky relationship the show developed with us.

Community starts off as a light hearted sit-com set in a Community College, where a guy starts a study group to pick up a chick. The premise alone is great. And that first episode is the best pilot ever. You know enough to get hooked, yet there is so much room to grow. After meeting those delicious characters, we follow them, the Greendale Seven, through four years at Greendale Community College, where every year things get crazier and crazier. At first Greendale is a modest if not a bit incompetent educational establishment, but it quickly devolves into a minefield of crazier and crazier people: mentally unstable asian Spanish teachers, British psychology perverts, professional paintball assassins, people with star-shaped burns, flamboyant Deans, racist gardeners, racist billionaires, evil corporations, evil schools, and even evil board members!

The last two seasons, though, are very particular. The show had been pretty damaged by then: it had almost been cancelled twice, the creator/show runner had been fired and then recovered, and the show had lost a lot of rating battles. We were pretty beaten. Add to that the fact that Gambino’s career was on the rise, and with a perfectly excusable reason, he left the show. He gave us a few episodes in season five to ease the transition, but from that moment on the show wasn’t the same. That was Community’s darkest time. The show matured into a different style, it became bolder, less apologetic, and more profound. Like the Community I knew and loved, but with a melancholic filter sitting on top of it. Every character grew towards this sadness, like a final evolution. We all knew the end was coming soon, that this was borrowed time. And we still fought for those six season, because the greatness that were those perfect seasons two and three demanded that promise be kept. We got them, even if the last two seasons were shorter, and without Pierce, then Troy, and then Shirley. We got one of the most satisfying endings in TV history. We got character growth, we got story, and we got resolution.

But before the end we got hundreds of references, homages, internal jokes, callbacks, Easter eggs and cameos; we got action-adventure, drama, thrillers, a zombie apocalypse, horror, detective investigations, trials, debates, competitions, songs, dances, visual humor, all kinds of animation, and all the social commentary you can imagine. This show, and Dan Harmon, really pulled no punches.

It has felt so good being a Community fan all these years, because time after time we have been the talent behind this show get the recognition they deserve. The remarkably versatile mega star Donald Glover, the incredible dramatic-actor Alison Brie, the pre-MCU Russo Brothers, Dan Harmon, today of Rick And Morty fame, Academy-Award winner Jim Rash, HBO’s John Oliver… well, the list goes on and on.

And today, here we all are, waiting now for the rest of the world to catch up with us, so we can discuss alternative time-lines, conspiracy theories, build a blanket fort around our table in Study Room H, and dream about what it’ll be like when we finally get #sixseasonsandamovie.

Manuel Bocchia.

1 Tecnhically, the show debuted in 2009.