Gray bunny

Just need to put some words down about Community

Preface: I hate that this matters to me this much.

It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about Joss Whedon’s obsession with body invasion- his knowledge that someone still walking around but being a completely different person is infinitely more painful than that person just being gone. It can be a metaphor for death, but more so it’s a metaphor for a breakup - there’s that person you love, except they’re acting in a way and looking at you in a way that you’ve never seen, they might as well be someone completely different walking around with a face they’ve stolen from the person most important to you. Joss is great at finding how infinitely painful that is: with Angelus in Buffy and Fred’s transformation to that god-thing in Angel, as well as The First taking on the forms of dead loved ones in Buffy’s last season. It found its way into The Avengers as well, though in a much smaller way, and I even thought of it during Cabin in the Woods here and there.

All this is a hugely overblown way of saying that it’s going to be more painful to have Community lumbering around my television like a zombie, looking like the show that had taken up residence in my head but spouting something completely different, than it would be had Thursday’s episodes been its last. I feel bad for the creative team on the show that’s still there, knowing it will be a different show from the one they’ve worked so hard on, but you don’t leave a job in Hollywood unless you already have something else lined up, especially a network sitcom. There’s no reason for any of them to leave (though Chris McKenna actually has- ballsy, and presumably he has something else to go to). I’m sure the people who are still there and those that have been hired can make a great show- it just won’t be the show I know.

I have no doubt Dan Harmon is a total crazy person and incredibly difficult to work with, but I’m also pretty sure he can open my brain and poke different parts of it with the ease of peeling an orange. He’s lodged in my mind, he’s made me question everything from my friendships to how honest I am with myself, and he’s done that with a voice of a network comedy. I’ve loved what he and his writers have given me and can’t wait to see what he does next. Now I just have to decide whether or not to even try to watch the show that I used to know instantly become someone else this fall.