The television landscape today often seems divided into camps. “Smart” shows versus “dumb” shows. Shows for the common folk versus shows for those “in the know.” Quantity versus quality.
In the Seventies, intellectuals would sometimes proclaim, “I don’t watch television. Oh, I sometimes watch PBS…” Today, those people sound out of it. Things like symphonies and experimental theater and live jazz are practically dying arts today. Now, you proclaim, “I don’t watch television. Oh, I watch Mad Men, of course…”
This division is crazy, because television has simultaneously widened and narrowed. Almost everybody watches it; thanks to cable TV (Confession: I work in the industry), a wide array of programming is broadly available. At the same time, a highly-acclaimed show can be watched by a small set of people.
All of this is to establish the point that dividing up and labelling television programs can be a hazardous thing. Online forums can be dangerous places, thanks to the leveling of the Internet. Anyone can be a TV critic; there are some terrific “amateur” writers doing good work. The comments sections can be wild places, full of insightful observations and idiotic remarks.
A lot of this is driven by two things: 1) There are now a number of television shows that are creatively ambitious; 2) The Internet serves to create the “sense” of a relationship between viewers and creators.
All of which brings us to Community.
Community is part of NBC’s Thursday night comedy line-up, which includes such shows as The Office, Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock. All of these shows, to one degree or another, typically aim to do more than just deliver jokes. (Okay, 30 Rock is usually content to settle for that alone, but it sometimes reaches for more, like with the recent reality TV parody episode “Queen of Jordan” and the [in my opinion, unsuccessful] stab at feminist critique of “TGS Hates Women.”)
I’m not a regular watcher of these shows (It’s a joint viewing situation in my living room), but I watch them off-and-on, and I’ve struggled with why Community doesn’t hit me like it does other people. I think Ryan McGee captured a lot of my ambivalence in this recent analysis.
That said, I really like last week’s episode, “Critical Film Studies.” It was billed as a pastiche of Pulp Fiction, but actually turned out to be largely based on the film My Dinner with Andre. To some extent, I like the episode because so much of it was based on extended conversation. I’m a huge fan of setting two characters down and making them talk.
I can’t stand Family Guy, but I loved the episode “Brian & Stewie,” in which a talking dog and a profane infant are locked in a bank vault and just talk for 28 minutes. At some point, if you just make two characters hold a conversation for that long, you have to reveal something; you can’t tap dance forever.
Jeffrey Sconce did not like “Critical Film Studies.” He initially thought the episode was criticizing itself and the show’s fervent fans.
Depending on one’s perspective, this episode either consolidated the program’s worst habits or, perhaps more provocatively, suggested the writers are themselves getting tired of the fan-flattering hall-of-mirrors they themselves have created.
This feeling grew for him as the episode progressed:
Wait, I thought, could Community at last be calling out its own core audience of pop literati, the ones who actually believe that using social media like Facebook, twitter, blogs, etc. somehow make them a part of show business? The people who are convinced that producers, writers, and the newest Gods of the entertainment universe, show-runners, actually pay close attention to fan sites, message boards, and hashtags so as to collaborate with fans in the creative process?
Eventually, it turns out that the Andre tribute is deliberately staged by the pop culture-obsessed character Abed. So, in Sconce’s interpretation, the producers back off of their critique and the show is “quickly subsumed by yet more of the very same intertextual shenanigans that reward the ‘skill set’ [part of the episode] had just critiqued.”
That’s not the way I see it. As I understand it, the show’s creator, Dan Harmon, is trying to do several things with Community; one of them is to celebrate television and other pop culture: to acknowledge the role it plays (for good and ill) in our lives, to send up the conventions of the form, to make a TV show that can simultaneously comment on its own existence as a TV show.
I admire this intention. I love that Charlie Kaufman’s script for Adaptation is all about the creative process of writing the script for the movie you’re watching. I’m not sure that approach works for 22 episodes each season, but it’s an interesting idea.
So, if the show doesn’t work for Sconce, I think it’s valid to say so. But what he does is say that Community is “…like The Andy Griffith Show for hipsters.”
Community is a show about something; as I’ve written on this blog, I think that is a worthy goal. Any good television show is about something.
Some TV shows reach for more; some do not. People might not necessarily want to be pandered to, but most people don’t want their entertainment to challenge them.
I choose to believe that TV viewers are not abstractions. They’re human beings who watch television shows because of the emotional response they engender. Who would subject themselves to a program every week just to feel “smarter” or to trick yourself into thinking you’re better than other people?
To argue that Community is pretentious hipster-bait – to claim that the producers have challenged their deluded fans, who are too stupid to realize they’ve been attacked – seems to commit the very sin that one is accusing others of.
Do some fans of some shows think they’re better than other people? Yes. (Although do fans of The Mentalist and NCIS: Los Angeles look down on the fans of Law & Order: LA and Private Practice?)
But you can’t control the fan response. You make the show you want to make. You hope people watch. Maybe you engage with the fans online; maybe you respond within the show itself.
But what kind of lunatic thinks, “The fans of my TV show aren’t responding correctly. What a bunch of losers they are. I will expose their ignorance!”
In the end, it’s all TV. Anyone with a TV set can watch it. How obscure can it be?
When a show is lazy or repetitive or too often goes back to the well to feed its devotees exactly what they want, that can be hacky. But where does “hipster” enter into it?
Those fans are awful. They like that thing too much! Why can’t they be good TV fans? Like me!
TRUE CONFESSION: I am a regular viewer of Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory. Those shows are often criticized in the online TV community. They make me laugh. There are other sit-coms that are not held in high regard; I don’t like them either. I could throw around the names of a bunch of highbrow TV fare, but why bother? Read the blog if you want to know how I view TV. I view all pop culture on a level playing field.