YMMV / Community

• Adorkable:
  • Gillian Jacobs describes Britta (and herself) with this exact word in one of the Season 3 commentaries.
  • Annie: A neurotic, compulsive over-achiever whose innocence, cuteness and naivete nevertheless make her adorable.
  • As Troy becomes less of a jock, he turns into this, with his endearing child-like behavior and his appreciation of the geek culture like the in-universe series Inspector Spacetime slowly being developed thanks to his close friendship with Abed.
  • Chang is somewhat endearing in his Kevin persona and his less psychotic moments in Seasons 5 and 6. Any other time? Not really.
  • Frankie is comically awkward when flustered and has a remarkable tendency to put her foot in her mouth for somebody so composed. There's also her attempts at playing the steel drums in "Advanced Safety Features", which have to be seen to be believed.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The characters themselves go back-and-forth over whether Pierce is an inherent, fundamental and completely irredeemable Jerkass or whether he's just a lonely but socially inept old man who just wants to make friends but has no clue how, and merely ends up lashing out whenever his overtures are rejected.
  • Abed; Lovable Nerd Woobie with numerous psychological and emotional problems who uses pop culture as a way of trying to connect to people, or manipulative sociopath who enjoys pulling strings to get people into trouble that resembles his favorite movies and TV shows?
  • In Season 3, is Evil Abed really trying to crossover into the Prime Timeline, or is he just a figment of Abed's imagination?
  • Do Troy and Abed merely have a cute, Ho Yay filled Heterosexual Life-Partners friendship that they get a bit too fixated on at times, or are they in fact alarmingly co-dependent on each other?
  • Do the students and faculty of Greendale treat things like paintball and pillow fights as Serious Business, or do they all (like Jeff most of the time) just want an excuse to get away from class/work?
  • Britta's parents. The episode in which we meet them suggests that they spent Britta's childhood dominating and stifling her, only to eventually do a Heel–Face Turn and want to rebuild bridges with her after she grew up and ran away. However, because in the episode they're so laid-back, friendly and easy-going, an alternative interpretation has arisen that suggests that they've always been like that and were happy to let Britta believe they were overly-oppressive bad guys when she began to lash out rather than confront her about it.
    • On a related note, while a lot of their actions are described as being incredibly cruel, it's pointed out In-Universe that it could just be both Britta and her parents remembering the same events very differently, and Britta is ascribing motivations to events (like her cat running away) that were never actually there because of how upset she was and looking for someone to blame due to emotional distress.
  • Andre, Shirley's ex-husband, whom she divorced because he cheated on her; is he a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing or a well-meaning but flawed man that dealt with the stress of his stereo business failing in an unhealthy fashion? And no, the backstory isn't Unreliable Expositor: Andre confirms that he did cheat on Shirley in season two and why he doesn't blame her for sleeping with Chang during the Halloween Episode. Not helping matters is he promises to be a better husband through the next two seasons, but divorces her (again) and takes the kids when her sandwich shop visit fails.
• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • Season 4.
    • Characters underwent Flanderization by being defined solely by a single joke: Abed is quirky to the point of a mental disorder! The Dean is a Wholesome Crossdresser! Meanwhile, Troy reached near-Satellite Character levels while Pierce was increasingly Demoted to Extra and barely played a major role in any given episode^note Pierce's decreasing screentime was partially a case of Real Life Writes the Plot: Chevy Chase was getting increasingly sick of working on the show, and he ultimately left midway through the season after having an outburst where he dropped a racial slur on-set.
    • Troy and Britta's relationship suffered a major Shipping Bed Death as the writers couldn't find anything interesting to do with them; Chang's Faking Amnesia plot was obvious and hackneyed.
    • Earlier jokes and storylines were brought back as Fanservice, with the Inspector Spacetime joke being run into the ground. The finale, which brought back the "worst timeline" and paintball concepts that'd been lampshaded as old and forced an entire season prior, was critically panned with the only good thing about it being the reveal that it was All Just a Dream. A few shots at Season 4 were taken in-universe during Season 5, with reference to the "gas-leak year".
  • Seasons 5 & 6 also apply due to the generally darker tone of the plotlines, the loss of close to half of the main cast and replacement characters, the heavier concentration of high concept "homage" episodes in the shorter, 13 episode seasons, and a general trend in the characters toward more meanspiritedness and aggression towards each other, particularly in season 6.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The show ended up dealing with this from an unusual angle. The basic premise seems simplistic enough, but the implementation defied almost all expectations of the genre. The large main and supporting cast, thickly plotted stories, high levels of continuity and loads of in-joke meta humor made it difficult to jump in to any given episode. The Affectionate Parody episodes that came to define the series only exacerbated the issue, as that meant they were constantly switching style and tone. Very few episodes even bothered with topics such as class projects, tests and grades, despite the fact the main cast is supposed to be a study group. Even the fandom came to admit that the community college setting was mostly a backdrop to everything else. By the time Jeff became a teacher, the writers still did very little with it.
• Award Snub: In spite of achieving a rabid following and a lot of praise from critics, the show only snagged a handful of Emmy Award nominations during its entire run. The sole writing nomination was for Chris McKenna for "Remedial Chaos Theory".
• Awesome Music: Has a sub-page.
• Badass Decay: In the first paintball episode, Chang is The Dragon and brings his own weapons. In the second, he's an incompetent moron who continually betrays the groups he latches on to. Of course, the entire second season was largely dedicated to giving Chang a near-constant Humiliation Conga, so this is perhaps understandable. And also, it's worth pointing out that he didn't actually do anything in the first Paintball episode, except take out Britta while getting taken out by her.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Out of the main cast, Shirley is probably the most divisive. Depending on who you ask she's either a realistically flawed woman among a cast of flawed people who nonetheless has plenty of great scenes and heartwarming moments, or an annoying, shrill fundamentalist and secretly the biggest Jerkass in the group. Then there's a third camp who think she's fine enough, but wish she had more screentime and plotlines to her name.
  • Pierce easily comes second place in terms of divisiveness. Part of the fandom thinks he's a bigoted, utterly irredeemable Jerkass who more than earned his lousy departure. Others think he's a lovable buffoon who simply has a tendency to act out and become abrasive when he's ignored or made fun of for too long. The behind-the-scenes drama involving Chevy Chase and his immensely vitriolic relationship with the series doesn't help any matters.
    • Amongst Pierce's fans, there's also a divide between those who prefer his more grandfatherly, Innocent Bigot, dopey but ultimately well meaning characterization from Season 1 and parts of Season 3, and those who prefer his more straightforwardly insecure and nasty characterization from Season 2. Fans of the former characterization tend to blame the latter characterization on the aforementioned drama between Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase, further complicating matters.
  • Chang. While fans generally love Ken Jeong, opinions are divided on the handling of the character after Season 1, especially since he went through a great deal of Flanderization and the show clearly struggled to find reasons to keep him around once he stopped being the group's Spanish teacher.
  • A relatively small but still noticeable one has begun to spring up around Abed and rather his antics make him unsympathetic. Put simply, depending on who you ask, Abed is either an Adorkable Lovable Nerd whose meta humor and dynamic with Troy is the source of some of the show's best jokes, or he's a manipulative vaguely sociopathic Karma Houdini who regularly gets the group into quite serious trouble for the sake of his own amusement.
• Bizarro Episode: While Community has a number of episodes which would fall under this for any other show, it still has those that qualify as a Bizarro Episode even by Community's standards.
  • "Epidemiology" — A Zombie Apocalypse takes place at the school's Halloween party. Unlike other genre-parody episodes where sci-fi tropes are explained as dreams or hallucinations, the zombie epidemic in this episode is very real and (via Chang and Shirley's hookup) has an impact on the plot of the series going forward.
  • "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" - A stop-motion animated Christmas episode taking place in Abed's mind.
  • "Regional Holiday Music — A Glee parody with elements of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in with characters constantly bursting into song.
  • "App Development and Condiments" — a 70's sci-fi movie-esque dystopia caused by an app beta test.
  • "G.I. Jeff" — An episode taking place inside Jeff's mind, where Jeff and his friends are rogue G.I. Joes who slowly become aware of the fact that their life is a cartoon.
  • "Basic RV Repair and Palmistry" — a Road Trip Episode that deconstructs How We Got Here and Flashbacks and ends with an aggressively dark Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
• Broken Base:
  • The biggest split is on the Harmon-less Season 4 (which was either pretty good or the worst thing on television, depending on who you ask), but many smaller ones exist among the fandom, ranging from whether or not Season 3's second half was too bizarre, if Season 1 was the best or worst of the Harmon years, if Harmon's return in Season 5 revitalized the show back to its glory days or if it was simply too little too late, and whether Troy was utilized well in his final season or not.
  • Britta's devolution into a Dumb Blonde. Some people think it's Flanderization gone too far or even insulting and mean-spirited (particularly since Britta's character was apparently inspired by an ex-girlfriend of Harmon's during his time in college); others say it suits Gillian Jacobs' flair for physical comedy better than Britta's original characterization and actually gave her more of a personality beyond the "cool girl" archetype she started off as. And then there's a third party who don't mind the change but think the show goes too far in making her the Butt-Monkey and being treated harshly by the narrative even when she makes a surprisingly good point.
  • Inspector Spacetime is either a cute Affectionate Parody or an Overly Long Gag that was run into the ground almost immediately after it was introduced.
  • "G.I. Jeff" has a significant split in opinion, some people love it, a lot of people think it is one of the worst episodes the show ever made. Other people find it boring, often as a result of the Whole-Plot Reference being an American cartoon that a lot of viewers weren't really familiar with, or even knew existed, which makes the references to the references just blank, unfunny bits that don't work.
  • As the online fandom has reduced in size to revolve mostly around Reddit and Facebook groups where long term fans mix with newcomers doing an Archive Binge, there has been an increasing split between Jeff/Annie shippers who dominated the fandom when the show was airing and newer viewers who generally dislike the ship who join forces with the few shippers of other pairings who never liked Jeff/Annie in the first place.
  • The "Chang takes over the school" arc in Sesaon 3. A wild, ambitious story that defied convention, broke with the show's formula and raised its comic imagination to new heights, or an over-the-top, improbable tall tale that stretched the credulity of the audience while turning Chang into a Hate Sink?
  • The removal of the otherwise well received Advance Dungeons And Dragons from Netflix and Hulu. Was taking it out from their platforms appropriate and respectable in light of heightened concerns and awareness of racism, or was it an overreaction, considering the execution of the scene and how tame it is compared to some other scenes and jokes the show has? The history of dark elves in real life Dungeons and Dragons, who have been accused of initially being based on racial stereotypes, doesn't help matters. Yvette Nicole Brown thinks highly of the episode, and laments the controversy it caused overshadowing the acting of Charley Koontz in his one featured episode. The controversy is only for Netflix and Hulu since Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, and the season two DVD release still have the episode.
• Catharsis Factor: While it's a Break the Cutie moment for Britta, to the point that Professor Duncan refuses to take advantage of her vulnerable state to sleep with her, there is something kind of satisfying about how her anarchist friends in Season 5 pointing out that yes they may have sold out by buying a movie theater and going into real estate, but it means they have responsibilities and obligations and can actually do good with what they have. Britta just wants to do destructive vandalism in the name of self-righteousness. This forces her to finally confront her Soapbox Sadie tendencies, as well as perhaps why people have been calling her "the worst".
  • A more played straight example is after the climax of Season 1's "Modern Warfare," where Jeff fires Chang's automatic paintball gun in the Dean's office and then shoots the panicked and helpless Dean in the head with paint. Considering everything the Dean had put the campus through, it is more than satisfying to watch.
• Character Rerailment: "Repilot" returns most of the characters back to their Season 2-era characterizations after the intense Flanderization that was Season 4. Especially notable is Chang, who immediately drops his unpopular "Kevin" schtick and returns to being a Sadist Teacher like he was in the first season.
• Continuity Lockout: More of a meta-version; in later seasons particularly, Dan Harmon tended to use the show as an airing board for his grievances with the network which, coupled with his fondness for obscure meta-humor, tended to result in a lot of jokes about Community's behind-the-scenes issues that would completely fly over the heads over anyone unaware of or uninterested in the details of how the suits at NBC had pissed Harmon off this week. While many of the devoted fans — being media-savvy types who tended to follow along with news about their favorite shows in the first place — responded well to these kinds of jokes, it arguably didn't really help with the show's persistent troubles in attracting a broader audience — which, in addition to consistently leaving the show in danger of cancellation, ironically also left the show stuck in a position where it was in constant risk of the kind of Executive Meddling that annoyed Harmon in the first place.
• Crazy Is Cool: "Digital Estate Planning" has Abed deciding to stay with Hilda and finding out he can have children with her, who he can command to do anything. Hilarity Ensues. And then there's the final battle with Pierce's father, which involves shooting Abed's children at a giant rock monster's legs so they can pickaxe it to death, Troy and Abed shooting lava at it out of golden mechs, Shirley piloting a helicopter against it, and Pierce riding an atomic bomb.
• Critical Backlash: Given a major portion of the fanbase is very vocal about their hatred on Season 4 and would commonly treat it as the absolutely worst thing on television, is quite common for newer fans that finally check it to find it So Okay, It's Average and even admit to enjoy or even love some of the episodes.
• Critical Dissonance: While critical reviews for Seasons 5 were extremely positive, fandom reaction was slightly more mixed, ranging from Season 5 being the best since the the first two seasons to feeling that by this point the show had run out of steam, even with Dan Harmon back as showrunner.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • An excerpt from "Environmental Science" that was used standalone to promote the show. It's too long to present in its entirety here: see the Quotes page.
  • Pierce, frequently. One example is he's Playing Pictionary and draws a swastika to convey a windmill, saying that Rabbi Chang should know what it is. ^note  Apparently this is just one of thousands of swastika-windmill Pictionary incidents.
• Cult Classic: It's hardly mainstream, but the fanbase is dedicated enough and big enough to campaign for its renewal and success.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Abed speaks in a flat affect, seems to understand and obsess over certain movies and shows more than the average enthusiast, has a hard time dealing with change, mentions he is "not good with faces" (facial expressions) and struggles at times with emotional regulation and staying calm. All are extremely common symptoms of autism, or autism spectrum disorder, which many viewers believe Abed has.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Several recurring Greendale students are extremely popular among fans, most notably Magnitude ("POP POP!"), Star-Burns (his name is Alex), and Garrett, The Comically Serious Large Ham ("CRISIS ALERT!").
  • Many wish Professor Duncan would have been able to stick around as a main character as was originally intended, thanks in no small part to John Oliver's hilarious performance. Suffice to say, fans were overjoyed to see him come back for a recurring role in Season 5 and for him to gain a decent amount of character depth in the process.
  • Drama Professor Sean Garrity, due to Kevin Corrigan's incredibly over-the-top portrayal.
  • Sgt. Nunez for being a Reasonable Authority Figure and competent Foil to Chang, and for being smart enough to go Screw This, I'm Outta Here when Chang's insanity becomes too much for him to handle.
  • Rachel, the cute and endearing coat check girl played by Brie Larson, from "Herstory of Dance" is widely considered one of the best parts of Season 4, by Dan Harmon himself and much of the fanbase.
  • Officer Cackowski, for his great comedic chemistry with the study group, being rather kooky even by the standards of this series, and being essentially made of memorable lines.
  • Koogler, the Manchild Frat Bro played by Mitch Hurwitz in "App Development and Condiments".
  • Custodian Lapari, largely in part due to him being played by the hysterical Kumail Nanjiani and being a surprising invocation of Evil Is Cool in "Modern Espionage".
  • Both Season 6 regulars Frankie and Elroy manage to avert Replacement Scrappy by way of being adored by fans, thanks to being a great Straight Man in a cast of increasingly wacky characters for Frankie, and an excellent performance by Keith David and lots of funny and endearing lines for Elroy. It's not uncommon to see fans online wishing that they were both around for longer than just one season.
• Estrogen Brigade: The show is mostly aimed at male fans, but still has a large group of vocal female fans due to the good-looking male actors. The most notable examples are Danny Pudi, Joel McHale (who is constantly losing his shirt), and Donald Glover, all of whom female fans are still constantly rewatching the show for to this day.
• Even Better Sequel: Some episodes that revisit earlier episode concepts are regarded as just as good, if not better than the original, most notably the second Mockumentary episode "Documentary Filmmaking Redux" and the second Clip Show episode "Curriculum Unavailable".
• Fandom Rivalry: Both of which are exceptionally one-sided. Generally speaking, most Community fans hate both The Big Bang Theory and Glee due to both series having been timeslot rivals for Community along with Community being seen by its fans as "doing everything better" than what those two shows were doing. In contrast, most fans of The Big Bang Theory and/or Glee seem to be surprised to learn that Community even exists, much less that there's a rivalry between the fandoms.
  • In the case of The Big Bang Theory, the animosity seems to be due to how there's the feeling among the Community fandom that the former puts nerds and nerd culture up to ridicule, whereas Community is a show "for nerds by nerds."
  • This was thought by many to be referenced in the show, and for a while got it a lot of hate online. In one episode, Jeff goes on and on about how much he hates the Barenaked Ladies, not understanding why everyone likes them so much. This was seen by many as a cheap shot at The Big Bang Theory, whom Barenaked Ladies sing the theme song for. Dan Harmon himself had to come out and clarify that no, the episode had nothing to do with The Big Bang Theory, that it was a reference to the fact that he, like Jeff, knows a lot of fans of the band who are very passionate, and he just doesn’t get it.
• Fan Myopia: While the show most certainly has a devoted fanbase, its ratings were ever-declining throughout its run. It doesn't help that a Vocal Minority of the show's fans have a tendency to repeatedly put down competing sitcoms as inferior in their frustration with its poor ratings, which did nothing but make fans of the competing sitcoms less likely to watch Community. Some have speculated that this toxicity in the fandom instead had a negative impact on the show, which couldn't afford to lose viewers. This is in large part due to The Law of Fan Jackassery; the fandom is essentially right at the middle. The show is far too popular for the Vocal Minority to just be kicked out, but doesn't have nearly enough mainstream recognition for them to just be ignored.
• Fanon:
  • Given his nicer-than-nice attitude concealing an apparently very screwed-up mindset resulting from maternal abuse, a common fan-interpretation is that Rich is secretly some kind of Serial Killer.
  • Annie being the Ass Crack Bandit in Season 5. The Ass Crack Bandit's identity is strongly implied to have been her in the Series Finale, but it's also still left as a Riddle for the Ages.
  • Britta's first name is frequently thought to be short for Brittany.
  • Abed is never officially stated In-Universe to have autism aside from Jeff in the pilot, but it's pretty much treated as fact by everyone due to frequent mentions out-of-universe by the cast and crew regarding Abed being written as somewhere on the autism spectrum.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • On the extreme side of things, there are some fans who only prefer the first season when the show was still somewhat grounded and had yet to go Denser and Wackier, refusing to acknowledge the existence of any season that came after.
  • Season 4 (the only season without Dan Harmon and the first without most of the writers of Seasons 1-3) has been declared this by some fans, with some even hoping to erase the season from canon by having Abed walk out of the Dreamatorium shortly after the end of Season 3, and reveal it was all just him running simulations. It wasn't, but its Seasonal Rot was heavily lampshaded throughout the fifth season, poking fun at some of its more questionable plot developments. Characters even refer to it in-universe as 'the gas leak year.'
  • There's some fans who don't disown Season 4 (or at least, don't particularly disown it) but prefer to ignore the latter two seasons where the cast members started to leave the show, feeling it became less enjoyable without the original study group dynamic. It's divided in three groups: those who ignore everything after Season 4 (when Chevy Chase left), those who ignore everything after "Geothermal Escapism" (when Donald Glover left) and those who solely ignore Season 6 (when Yvette Nicole Brown and to a lesser degree Jonathan Banks and John Oliver left).
  • Among the side of the fanbase who likes Pierce, many aren't fond of the reveal he died from dehydration from filling up the cylinders he gave the Study Group in "Cooperative Polygraphy" with his sperm , out of finding it to be nothing but a cheap shot towards Chevy Chase by giving his character an undignified death. These fans prefer to believe he either died in a less squicky way or that he didn't die at all .
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • Despite Troy and Abed having canon love interests in the form of Britta and Rachel, respectively, most fans ship the two together instead, due to the massive amounts of Ho Yay between them and their great chemistry, with Troy/Abed having the most fics for the show on AO3 and still being popular years after the show ended.
  • Jeff and Annie despite Jeff/Britta originally being meant to endgame. How much do some fans prefer this couple you may ask? Enough to vote them TV's Top Couples 2011 despite the fact they are not a canon couple.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • A lot of the criticisms of the "weaker seasons" (read: Seasons 4-6) — i.e., Britta being Flanderized into a Dumb Blonde Cosmic Plaything, Troy becoming increasingly defined solely by his friendship with Abed along with becoming an idiot, Abed serving largely as a Manchild Meta Guy with a quirky way of thinking, Shirley and Pierce and Greendale itself all being left Out of Focus, an increasing emphasis on surrealism and Leaning on the Fourth Wall seemingly for the sake of themselves, Call Backs and Continuity Nods all becoming so prevalent as to result in Continuity Lockout, and the ever-increasing levels of cynicism — all have their roots in the more beloved Seasons 1-3. At the time, people were accepting of these elements since such developments were novelties, and also helped to develop characters in a way that a regular sitcom wouldn't have the luxury of doing. By the time of Season 4 though, it was clear that the show was focusing entirely on its bizarre nature at the expense of developing the main protagonists, which made people far more frustrated with the show's flanderization and increasingly wacky plots.
  • The show in the first half of the first season was more of a standard ensemble comedy, but fell backwards into finding out the cast and crew were really good at one shot Parody Episodes, starting with "Contemporary American Poultry" and Casino but really catching critics and audiences attention with "Modern Warfare" being a Paintball Episode lampooning action films like Die Hard. This created a push to keep doing these types of episodes but unfortunately the cast and setting was never intended to be that flexible and the characters would often get swept into playing a particular role without regard for who they really are. So this made the show gather a passionate fanbase who adored the meta humor, but the radically different tone from episode to episode made it difficult to grow an audience, remaining fairly stagnant in viewership for the remainder of the series. The parody episodes also saw some diminishing returns, as a follow up "A Fistful of Paintballs"/"For a Few Paintballs More" two-part Paintball Episode in the second season got a much cooler reception.
  • Britta's Flanderization into a Soapbox Sadie Dumb Blonde in Season 3 is often cited by her fans as a reason for why the show began to decay as time went on. Even in Season 1 though, Britta was shown that she wasn't nearly as well-informed or sympathetic towards the causes she was interested in, with a few characters pointing out how she sometimes went on about various political causes for the sake of acting superior towards others. This aspect of her character was a lot more tolerable when it was mostly used to round out her more positive traits (such as her kindness towards her Study Group members, her charisma, and her willingness to call Jeff on his bullshit), and was still smart and independent overall. It's only later on that the negative aspects of Britta's character became irritating for fans when she Took a Level in Dumbass to the point where she's wrong about absolutely everything, and seemingly existed for the sake of screwing things up and being hated by every single character around her, Study Group or not.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Let's just say that Inspector Spacetime was very well received by both Community fans and Doctor Who fans (at least when it was introduced, opinions are divided on how well it was handled throughout the season). Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are huge fans of Community and even expressed interest in appearing in the show.
  • The fandoms of fellow intensely-quotable Cult Classics Arrested Development and (to a lesser extent) Firefly tend to overlap with Community's. It helps that The Russo Brothers were involved in Arrested Development before becoming directors on this show, and several actors on Arrested Development make cameo appearances here.
  • While not as pronounced as other examples, there's also a not-insignificant overlap of Community fans with NBC's other main sitcoms - Namely, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock.
  • And, of course, considering they're both made (in part, at least) by the same creator, there's a clear overlap between fans of Rick and Morty and Community, with many even becoming fans of the latter through the former and Harmon's association.
  • Also with the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to the shared involvement of the Russo Brothers as well as several Community cast members having roles in the films. This is made particularly amusing in how the Series Finale to Community ended with Jeff and Annie giving several Take Thats towards the franchise.
• Genius Bonus:
  • In "Basic Lupine Urology", Colonel Archwood's final question to Todd shows that Archwood takes legal ethics seriously, as Todd probably told him he accidentally did it, but he couldn't ask the question directly because it would either give away the case or make Todd perjure himself. The bluster when asking is an attempt to hide this distinction.
  • In "Geography of Global Conflict", the flyer for Greendale's Model UN club is (appropriately) decorated with the flags of various countries. But several of them are the flags of non-sovereign states (including Hong Kong, Greenland, the Isle of Man, and the British Indian Ocean Territory), which aren't actually UN members—suggesting that Annie Kim isn't as knowledgeable about global politics as she pretends to be.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Series creator Dan Harmon is well aware of Community's surprising popularity in the Philippines.
• Gotta Ship 'Em All: The end of "Romantic Expressionism" played with this when they acknowledged that, essentially, nothing was truly off limits and there would always be some degree of tension between unrelated characters. It then went around the table, pairing everyone with everyone else. Sometimes to the characters' interest, sometimes to their surprised interest, sometimes to their disgust and shock.
• Growing the Beard: "Debate 109" is generally agreed to be the episode where the show first grew some stubble. Full growth was achieved with "Contemporary American Poultry" and then solidified with "Modern Warfare", which is generally considered one of the series' signature episodes.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Has it's own page
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • "The Art of Discourse" ends with a Where Are They Now style scrawl showing what happened to the characters after the episode. Britta's reads "Britta Perry, proud owner, used iPod Nano, 2014." Season 5, set in 2014, shows us that she got that iPod from Pierce, who after he died filled it with "music to take life less seriously by" because, as his will reads, her passion inspired him and he felt she hated herself far more than she should.
  • The Season 2 episode "Mixology Certification" came out long before Dan Harmon's struggles with alcoholism became public knowledge. While this admittedly makes some of its moments (like the revelation of Shirley's past drinking problems) considerably more sad and somber, it also makes it all the more heartwarming when Troy ends the episode by choosing not to take a drink at midnight, instead leaving his drink on the bar while he exits the bar with his friends.
  • Abed for his birthday recreates My Dinner with Andre with Jeff in Season 2's "Critical Film Studies", saying he wishes the two of them spent more time together. Jeff reassures him they have each other's back and won't stop being friends. In Season 6, Jeff coaxes a great B-movie out of a despairing Abed from 5 minutes of Chang footage, and Abed later comforts Jeff that his life won't be a waste if he's stuck at Greendale (even if he lacks Chris Pratt's CGI abs).
  • "Remedial Chaos Theory" shows one timeline where Troy and Britta develop sparks after commiserating about Jeff being judgmental. The Season 4 finale shows that in that timeline, Troy and Britta are Happily Married and report that they are starting a family. It's so sweet that both Evil Abed and Evil Troy legitimately congratulate them.
  • Doubling with Hilarious in Hindsight: In "Ladders", Abed is the only member of the Study Group to actually sympathize with Frankie after the rest of the group turn their backs on her for just trying to bring a semblance of normality to Greendale. She in turn becomes a Parental Substitute, accepting his weirdness wholeheartedly and sometimes going Mama Bear on his behalf. Come 2018, Danny Pudi and Paget Brewster would voice Huey and Della Duck in the DuckTales reboot as son and mother, respectively.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Joel McHale is mostly known for his work as a comedian, but in the Season 4 Thanksgiving episode, he portrays a horrifying, heartbreaking scene with impressive sincerity. Jeff tells his father that he faked appendicitis as a kid. When a girl wanted to see the scar, he cut himself with scissors to show her the evidence. Jeff still keeps the get-well cards because it's proof that someone once cared about him when even his own father didn't. He then shows his father and brother the scar, barely keeping it together. It's a real Gut Punch, sold completely by McHale's acting.
  • On a similar note, Gillian Jacobs does an amazing job showing Britta's heartbreaking existential crisis in Season 5's "Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality". Notably, John Oliver even indirectly lampshaded this when he later appeared on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, commenting that during the scene with Professor Duncan driving Britta home, his character being seemingly disturbed and uncomfortable was actually genuine on his part as he was internally freaking out over how good Jacobs was and he was terrified about not being able to match her skill in the scene.
• He's Just Hiding: Pierce. Understandable, considering his fake heart attacks and pretending he was dying to toy with the study group. Not to mention that he actually did successfully fake his death in the Darkest Timeline, only to reveal that he was still alive after all. Many fans are holding out hope that he'll turn up again in the movie, if only for a cameo.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Has it's own page
• Hollywood Homely:
  • There are a few jokes based around Britta not aging the best. In one episode, after telling Annie that a bar won't check Annie's fake ID because pretty girls are good for business, Britta gets her legitimate ID scoured and double-checked after Annie is waved through without incident. Professor Duncan also tells Jeff that he's attracted to Britta because she's slightly past her prime and realizes that she's going to have to settle. The show also occasionally nitpicks her appearance, such as one joke that lampoons her "vacuous mannequin eyes." Of course, Gillian Jacobs is exceptionally attractive.
  • Zig-zagged with Annie, who was originally written to be somewhat plain in spite of being played by the attractive Alison Brie. In the first couple of episodes, she's dressed very primly, and there are a few jokes revolving around the idea that she's not particularly good looking; the fourth episode, for example, has Professor Duncan giving her a Backhanded Compliment by rating her an "American 8, which is a British 10". The idea of her being unattractive is quickly abandoned, her look changes to emphasize her attractiveness, and her personality changes to be more sweet and adorable. By the end of Season 1 she's widely regarded as one of the most attractive women at Greendale.
• Ho Yay: Has its own page.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: "Indyshipping" for Annie/Abed, based on the Indiana Jones-themed gift Annie got for Abed in "Intro to Psychology".
• I Knew It!:
  • Jeff returning to Greendale as a teacher in Season 5.
  • Pierce suffering from a Bus Crash after Chevy Chase left the show.
  • Troy being given Pierce's fortune and it being his reason for leaving Greendale.
• Informed Wrongness:
  • Jeff. Rightly asserting that Pierce is a bigoted manchild, whose horrible behavior makes the group exclude him, and anyone else would have kicked him out ages ago? He's wrong because Pierce's insecurities are an excuse to be a prick. Calling out Britta on once again wilfully making a fool of herself in a farcical effort to save face? Discouraging poor decisions is being a bad friend. He wants to spend the odd occasion not cleaning up the groups mistakes? He's a selfish jerk. Despite going out of his way to be a great friend to every single member of the group countless times. The show is however smart enough to occasionally use this to comedic effect.
  • The show also frequently makes the point that the problem isn't necessarily that Jeff's (supposedly) wrong as much as it is him frequently going about being right in the most obnoxious way possible. To take the first example, while he definitely has a valid point about Pierce's Jerkass nature, Jeff's righteousness over Pierce would probably carry a bit more weight if Jeff himself didn't take plenty of opportunities to pick on and humiliate Pierce, thus encouraging his resentment. In the second example, Jeff doesn't just discourage Britta's poor decisions but actively takes smug and malicious pleasure in the prospect of Britta failing once again, and Pierce makes the entirely fair point that while Britta might indeed be in a mess of her own making, the fact that Jeff frequently and snidely belittles her to the point of using her name as a synonym for screwing up and failure hardly helps matters. And as for the third example, while Jeff definitely does help clean up the messes left by the study group, he's also caused plenty of trouble and misery for the group as well.
  • Ironically enough, Jeff does this to himself. In Season 4, he angsts over graduating and leaving his friends behind, and taking up a profitable lawyer job with his former partner who triples his salary on the spot. Jeff eventually comes to the conclusion that taking up the job would undo his Character Development and decides to start a firm helping out the less-fortunate and being a Hero At Law. Mind that none of his friends are encouraging this decision and instead are throwing a party in his honor. The Season 5 premiere lampshades that this was a foolish decision, especially since Jeff goes broke and takes up a teaching job at Greendale to pay the bills and help out the Dean. Even worse, many lawyers can tell you that being a public defense lawyer with the government is a viable career move for those who want to do good so Jeff really shot himself in the foot.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Jeff and Britta. While a lot of their problems are their own fault, it's made clear they're both incredibly insecure. Jeff has a plethora of Daddy Issues and his narcissism partly stems from being raised by his mother to believe he was the best at everything, only to have his whole world come crashing down once he realizes he's not. Britta's superiority complex and loud flaunting of political causes are revealed to be a front to mask some deep-seated esteem issues and crippling self-hatred, her attempts at becoming a therapist are routinely mocked by her friends, and her name is adopted in-universe as slang to describe making a mistake.
  • Pierce. While he is unquestionably a Jerkass, it's also made quite clear that he's desperately lonely and needy.
  • Chang, in Season 2. Yes, he was a Sadist Teacher in Season 1 and continues to be a weirdo for most of the season, but he only wants to join the study group and is also quite pathetic.
  • The elderly gang of hooligans, the Hipsters, from "Messanic Myths and Filmmaking". After the car stealing incident, no one's family was willing to bail them out of holding. Simply put, no one wants to be near them because they're assholes but they're assholes because no one wants to be around them.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Annie. It's quite telling that even discounting "Romantic Expressionism", Annie has been shipped in-show with every member of the study group except for Pierce (who has explicitly stated that Annie is his favorite) and Shirley. It's canon that Annie had a crush on Troy in high school and for the first half of the first season, Annie and Jeff kiss in "Debate 109" and "Pascal's Triangle Revisited" in addition to all their Ship Tease, Annie and Abed (as Han Solo) kiss in "For a Few Paintballs More", and Annie starts to go in for a kiss with Britta in "Early 21st Century Romanticism". And this for a girl they try not to sexualize too much.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Robert Laybourne is the Vice Dean of Greendale Community College and holds the true power of the school. Witnessing Troy Barnes effortlessly repair an air conditioner, Laybourne tries to get Troy to join his Air Conditioning Repair School, even getting Dean Craig Pelton to help him accomplish his goal. Eventually Laybourne manipulates Troy and his best friend, Abed Nadir, against each other briefly destroying their friendship and creating a war engulfing Greendale. When Troy pleads with Laybourne to help him overthrow Ben Chang, Laybourne complies on the sole condition that Troy leaves his friends and join his annex. Finally successful in recruiting Troy to his school, Laybourne is killed by his second-in-command, Murray, but Laybourne's influence inspires Troy to challenge Murray for the title of the "Truest Repairman", where Troy easily defeats Murray and gets Murray to confess to Laybourne's murder, with Laybourne's ghost appearing to show approval at what Troy has accomplished.
  • Stephen Spreck is the Dean of City College who seeks to destroy Greendale Community College. Convincing Annie to help him steal the Greendale space simulator by promising her a City College admission and when she later has a change of heart, Spreck merely states she is not City College material. He then returns in the two-part season finale, first setting up a fake ice cream company and then convincing the school to trash itself by offering up a $100,000 paintball prize. To ensure no student gets the prize he even sends in a ringer, and when that fails declares war on the school, coming very close to winning. While the study group were defined by their love for Greendale, Spreck was defined by his desire to destroy it.
  • "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design": Professor Sean Garrity is Greendale's charismatic drama teacher, who Dean Pelton approaches when he wants help in teaching Jeff about the dangers of academic fraud. For his part, Garrity creates a false identity, and a fake night school filled with non-existent courses, students and teachers. He then creates a false identity for his false identity, posing as Jeff's "Conspiracy Theories and U.S. History" teacher. After Jeff uncovers his true identity and decides to teach the Dean a lesson, Garrity complies and pretends to have been shot by Annie, resulting in a massive Gambit Pileup where Jeff, Annie, and Pelton think that one of them has really shot someone. After Officer Cackowski shoots him with a prop gun, Garrity reveals that he orchestrated everything to impart the lesson that guns, even prop ones, are not toys.
• Memetic Mutation: Now with its own page.
• Moe:
  • Annie could give Mikuru a run for her money.
  • Abed most likely wasn't an intentional example, but his generally gentle and adorkable disposition (along with the increasing number of woobie moments he gets over the course of the series) can evoke this.
• Nightmare Fuel: There's something deeply unsettling about "Greendale Babies", the Imagine Spot "happy place within a happy place" TV series Abed creates inside his head in Season 4. It's all cheery and bright, but it takes place in a confined room, and the premise seems to be that all our beloved characters are stuck in some sort of infinite childhood. Plus, you know, there's a stuffed Human Being plush.
  Abed: Greendale Babies will be right back. Forever!
  • Don't forget about the "Human being" costume. Brrr...
• No Yay:
  • "Physical Education" has a scene where Jeff has a pool match with his aging, overweight new billiards instructor. It features both of them getting naked and the instructor walking up to Jeff while both are still naked and then kissing him on the lips.
  • Surprisingly, Jeff and Annie can be this for some people. As noted above, the couple was a favorite throughout the series' initial run for a large portion of the fanbase, but new fans taking an Archive Binge of the show often find the couple uncomfortable at best due to the early show's clear portrayal of Annie as that much younger.
    Jeff: Annie's pretty young, we try not to sexualize her.
• One True Threesome:
  • A few fics have Jeff, Britta and Annie getting together.
  • Annie/Abed/Troy is also a common triple ship for fics, often referred to as "Trobedison"
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Dan Harmon had little involvement with the fourth season, which is considered the show's worst season.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In the first few episodes, Britta seemed to be the typical Manic Pixie Dream Girl-slash-Women Are Wiser love interest, which came off as pretty bland and cliched compared to the rest of the cast. As the first season went on the writers and actress started playing her as being So Unfunny, It's Funny and Adorkable, with fans starting to find her a lot more likable as a result.
  Britta: Do you know sugar is like baby meth? That’s what my homeopath says.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • While Brie Larson wasn't exactly unknown when she guest-starred in Seasons 4 and 5, her profile has since risen exponentially as a result of her Academy Award-winning turn in Room. This effect was magnified further by her performance as the titular character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe tentpole Captain Marvel, which grossed over one billion USD worldwide in 2019 and got positive reviews from critics, making her by far the most popular actor to appear on the show.
  • Mel Rodriguez appears as a security guard a few years before becoming a recognizable actor on Better Call Saul and The Last Man on Earth.
  • Kumail Nanjiani stars as Custodian Lapari in Seasons 5 and 6, but it wouldn't be until his starring role in Silicon Valley that Nanjiani's popularity would explode.
  • Brit Marling appears in a Season 2 episode as Paige, the straight girl who befriends Britta because they both mistake the other for a lesbian. Marling would go on to become an indie film darling, co-writing and starring in the films Sound of My Voice, Another Earth and The East as well as the series The OA.
  • Jacob Bertrand, who played Young Jeff in "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism", has gone on to play Eli "Hawk" Moskowitz on Cobra Kai.
  • Brendan Hunt, now better known as Coach Beard on Ted Lasso, appears as the hitchhiker who sings "Jesus Loves Marijuana" in "Studies in Modern Movement".
• Rooting for the Empire: Evil Jeff isn't real, but he makes legitimate points to Jeff when they confront each other. All Jeff wanted to do is return to his law career, and he is ready to grow up while his friends are stuck going through the motions and using Jeff as emotional support. The Season 5 premiere proved that Evil Jeff was right when Jeff goes broke trying to do good and his friends want to reenroll at Greendale after their dreams fail. If not for evil Jeff isolating Jeff from his friends, then he'd be completely right and sympathetic.
• Salvaged Story: The episode "Repilot" dismisses the entirety of the widely-hated Season 4 (the only season not overseen by Dan Harmon) by claiming that the school had suffered a massive gas leak, explaining everyone's inconsistent and decidedly Out of Character behavior. Jeff explicitly calls out all the Flanderization the group has gone through, and the remaining cast members make effort to improve themselves as a result. Especially notable is Chang, who immediately drops his unpopular "Kevin" schtick and returns to being a Sadist Teacher like he was in the first season.
• The Scrappy: Britta's parents. The lazy Retcon that seems to have been applied to Britta's Dark and Troubled Past of being molested as a child and her parents being Innocently Insensitive and Good All Along did not go over well with the fans, and a combination of their annoyingly cheery demeanor and asking their abused daughter to forgive them and let them back into her life made them pretty instantly hated by most of the audience.
• Seasonal Rot: The first three seasons are near-unanimously considered to be prime Community, with Season 3 as somewhat weaker than the first two but overall great, and Seasons 5 and 6 causing some division due to cast changes and a general shift in tone. Almost everyone agrees, however, that Season 4 is the low point, due to Dan Harmon's lack of involvement and failing to make use of the shortened episode count.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Community fans get along well generally, but there is some Britta vs. Annie sparring when it comes to who should end up with Jeff. If you root for Jeff/Britta as your OTP, Jeff/Annie shippers will have a field day ranting about how supposedly unlikable Britta is or how the duo lacks romantic chemistry. If you openly advocate Jeff/Annie, the BP&J shippers will declare their disgust with the age gap and claim that their massive differences could never be reconcilable in a relationship. Shippers of all other pairings seem to be much more civil.
• Ship Mates:
  • Fans of Jeff/Annie will often ship Troy/Britta, who in Season 1 were romantically linked to Annie and Jeff respectively in canon. On the flip-side, Jeff/Britta shippers will often ship Troy/Annie (or Annie/Abed), in order to keep Annie away from Jeff.
  • Annie/Abed fans have a slight problem doing this in a way that hinders their ship. If they ship Troy/Britta it leaves the Jeff/Annie ship open. If they ship Jeff/Britta it leaves the earlier Annie/Troy ship open. With Troy/Britta being sunk and Troy's departure in the fifth season, it makes Jeff/Britta the obvious choice of ship mate pairing.
• Shipping Bed Death: More than a few fans of Britta/Troy ended up being disappointed when they actually got together because the writers seemed unable to do anything interesting with them. Considering they'd been getting ship teases from the first season, the fact that almost no one was sad they broke up is rather telling.
• Signature Scene: "Modern Warfare" and "Remedial Chaos Theory" are easily the series' most highly regarded and well-remembered episodes, for encompassing everything that set the show apart from the standard sitcom and made it genuinely unique.
  • As far as individual scenes go, the Spanish rap from the second episode, the study group considering one another as sexual prospects in "Romantic Expressionism," the "Notches" gag from "Intro to Political Science," and the entirety of Timeline 5 from "Remedial Chaos Theory" are all good contenders for this trope in regards to the series proper.
• Spiritual Sequel: "Geothermal Escapism" is essentially one to the Paintball Episodes of past seasons, with a high-stakes school-wide competition being the main focus while also tying into a major ongoing plot arc (in this case, Troy leaving Greendale).
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Whenever the idea of a Spaced American remake comes up, many bring up the fact that it would be a lot like Community. Both shows are about a gang of weirdos coming together to help each other grow, both are thoroughly obsessed with pop culture and both have had exceptionally memorable Paintball Episodes.
  • The show has effectively the same premise as Louis Sachar's classic Wayside School books, which are also all about wacky hijinks at a bizarre school that plays by its own rules. One could make a pretty good case for calling the show "Wayside School for grown-ups".^note  Amusingly, Wayside School also features a Running Gag involving a mild-mannered Nice Guy named "Todd" continually catching hell despite never doing anything wrong.
• Squick: In and out-of-universe, the study group is horrified and grossed out that Pierce's dad has an ivory toupee because he doesn't want a wig made of human hair. Jeff for his part tries to refuse it when Pierce's dad leaves it to the one who killed him — in this case Jeff gave a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Cornelius and made him suffer a fatal heart attack— but Pierce insists to honor the terms of the will.
• Strawman Has a Point: Buzz Hickey is meant to be in the wrong when he advises Jeff to not let Annie undermine his authority in class and use underhanded means to depower her, but he's actually right. A student should not be lecturing a teacher on how to teach, especially when they are one anxiety attack away from a nervous breakdown. While Annie accurately pinpoints that Jeff doesn't love his job and is wasting the students' time, Jeff starts teaching his way when she leaves the class in a huff, and the students are impressed because Annie never loses an argument.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • During the first Valentine's Day episode, Troy and Pierce dance with Chang to a song very similar to The Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow."
  • The end credits theme is very similar to the Fine Young Cannibals song "Good Thing".
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The general consensus regarding the Dan Harmon-less Season 4. It should be noted, this was also the cast's reaction to the season, with Joel McHale leading them in getting Harmon rehired as showrunner for Season 5.
  • The loss of both Pierce and Troy in Season 5, followed by the loss of Shirley in Season 6 elicited this response from some people.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Todd is in a handful of episodes, a Handicapped Badass and Only Sane Man who calls out the study group for being selfish, petty, and catty. He also is implied to be a Determinator. Even so, he is reduced to being someone the group hates for calling them out on their bull, who appears solely to react to them.
  • Gilbert is introduced at the end of Season 3 as Pierce's half-brother, who wants the inheritance from their father. They start bonding after Pierce forfeits the money because he says Cornelius didn't treat him as badly as he treated Gilbert, and he always wanted a brother. Given he's a lawyer —thus he and Jeff have common ground— Gilbert could have helped them catch Chang when the latter took over Greendale and help the study group with their lives. Sadly, Gilbert only appears in a handful of episodes where he admits he is Desperately Seeking A Purpose In Life because he spent it taking care of his father and he wants to take care of Pierce now. Though for what it's worth, Pierce later dies having a good relationship with him so he wasn't alone in the end.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Troy in one episode lies about being molested in drama class because he thinks he doesn't have a tragic backstory to share. But he does; he sabotaged his football scholarship after Annie broke down in high school, saw Pierce's mother's corpse without warning, and lost his uncle that same year. Any of these stories would have been sufficiently tragic, since Britta was a witness to a lot of them.
  • After Season 2 ends with the big shake-up of Pierce declaring he's finished with the study group, he's then welcomed back into the group in the very next episode.
  • Pierce seems to undergo some Character Development in Season 3 when the gay community adopts Hawthorne Wipes as a product for them, and he decides to get involved until his father intervenes. Nothing more comes of this; the company fires Pierce as soon as his father is dead and the campaign is over before it can properly begin.
  • A few episodes of Season 3 seem to hint at Jeff suffering some kind of mental breakdown, but nothing ever comes of it until Season 4 when the evil Study Group reappears as part of a potential hallucination.
  • Britta and Troy's relationship in the fourth season. After being established as a couple in the first few episodes, their relationship is barely mentioned before they break-up towards the end of the season, which arguably comes out of nowhere because the writers seemingly forgot they were dating for most of the season.
  • After setting Jeff up as a Greendale teacher in "Repilot", only one episode of Season 5 actually focuses on Jeff being a teacher (and that was the episode immediately after "Repilot"), leading some viewers to complain of a missed opportunity to explore Greendale's eccentric teaching staff in the same way that the previous seasons had explored the eccentric student body.
  • The same episode implied an Odd Friendship was beginning to form between Abed and Shirley (two characters who almost never interact outside of the group). Nothing ever came of it.
  • When Pierce dies, you'd expect the lawyer in charge of the "lie detector" investigation would be Gilbert. It'd be hilarious to see his reaction to the funeral, to the secrets that everyone is forced to spill per Pierce's Last Request, and learning about the test to sail around the world, which Gilbert never had to do since Cornelius never acknowledged him as family. Instead, a new guy we've never seen before is the lawyer.
  • Troy joining the Greendale football team. It's the focus of an entire episode, and it could have fueled numerous future episodes poking fun at collegiate athletics and sports movies, but it's never even mentioned again (other than in "Interpretive Dance", where Troy mentions that his football coach encouraged him to take dance lessons). If nothing else, you'd think it might have figured into Greendale's rivalry with City College.
  • In "Intro to Felt Surrogacy", Jeff's "most terrible secret" turns out to be that he ended his relationship with a single mother because he couldn't handle being a stepfather, ultimately leaving her without a goodbye after failing to show up at her son's baseball game. Their relationship easily could have been the focus of an entire episode (if not a whole multi-episode storyline), since it touches on Jeff's continuing struggles with his father's abandonment and his fear of fatherhood in a very poignant way. Instead, it's just mentioned in a single verse of a musical number, with his girlfriend and her son never even showing up onscreen. They don't even get names!
    "I found the perfect girl for me, and then I met her kid,
    I said it didn't bother me, but truthfully it did.
    I promised him I'd make it to a baseball game he had,
    But I bailed and never called again,
    And now I'm just exactly like my dad."
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: While Season 4 is generally agreed to have suffered from a noticeable decline in writing quality due to Dan Harmon's firing, most fans agree that the main cast's acting remained remarkably strong in spite of it. In particular, Joel McHale's performance in "Cooperative Escapism in Familial Relations" is often cited as a highlight of his career.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The Season 2 episode "Intro to Political Science" revolves around then-Vice President Joe Biden giving a speech at Greendale, dating it to the Obama years. Amusingly, though, the episode unintentionally predicted Biden being elected President in 2020.
    Biden: Y'know, I just had a dream that I was a regular President...
  • In Season 3, Annie explains to Jeff how to acquire and use emojis, which they both call "special icons."
• Unpopular Popular Character:
  • Pierce and Chang. Both are often barely tolerated by the rest of the group, but they're popular characters with the fans (or at least some of them—see Base-Breaking Character above).
  • Britta as well. Although not exactly disliked by the study group, they frequently call her a killjoy and is widely seen as The Friend Nobody Likes, and she's apparently not too popular with the rest of the Greendale student body, either. However, after moving past being a Satellite Character and Romantic False Lead to Jeff, she became very popular with the fans for her passion, goofiness, and nature as a Jerkass Woobie:
    Vicki: You're the worst!
    Britta: Okay, she is just saying that to fit in!
  • The study group in general appears to be this to some degree; they're very close-knit with each other and are, of course, very popular with the fans of the show, but there's some evidence to suggest that they're not that well liked among the student body at large in Greendale. Although given that they are very judgmental regarding who they socialize with and prone to grabbing the Jerkass Ball, it really isn't that hard to believe.
  • Dean Pelton is also a popular character with fans, but in-universe he's clearly not respected by his staff and the Study Group finds him irritating more often than not. It's made explicitly clear in "Introduction to Teaching" when the "Save Greendale" Committee is formed and their first order of business is to bar him from attending meetings. Frankie, despite her rule about being constructive, eventually breaks down after he spends thousands of dollars on Honda merchandise, and she lays into him with a 30 second long epic verbal smackdown for the Dean being an idiot, being "so stupid", and for not having any idea about how stupid he is.
• The Un-Twist: Chang is lying about his "Changnesia" in Season 4.
• Vindicated by History: Community was never really appreciated during its time on NBC, being frequently Screwed by the Network and suffering from ever-decreasing terrible ratings among audiences. Nowadays, thanks to a combination of the series being put on first Hulu and later Netflix and new fans brought in from the widely popular Rick and Morty thanks to Dan Harmon having (co-)created both shows, Community is seen as a beloved Cult Classic and one of the best television shows of The New '10s.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Zig Zagged for the Australian DVD release of Seasons 3 to 5. The series was broadcast with both a PG and M rating, meaning children are able to watch the episodes with some parental guidance. When the three seasons were released on DVD and online, it was classified with the very child-unfriendly MA 15+, which is an equivalent rating to ultra-violent media like Grand Theft Auto! Essentially, younger fans would not be able to buy any physical copies of the series. The reason why is due to the very foul-mouthed special features, including the commentary tracks.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: Platonic and business examples:
  • The School Board members we see are two guys, both whom are not the brightest tools in the shed nor the nicest, and one is a proclaimed alcoholic. They are also utterly useless and serve as The Millstone at best from Seasons 3 to 6. Yet, each time the Dean refuses to expose them as incompetent or press charges for not realizing he had been kidnapped and replaced, forcing him to take charge of an "amnesiac" Chang who was said kidnapper, and leaving to die in an underground bunker with his favorite students after selling the university to Subway. He even says that's what Deans do: they cover up problems. It gets to the point where the Dean tries to flee from them in Season 6 and they have to corner him to ask him to become the token gay board member. Why would you keep sticking your neck out for them, Dean?
  • The Dean himself, as noted in Seasons 5 and 6, having the former study group and Frankie bail him out on a regular basis. He has Ultimate Job Security due to his big heart, but he is ridiculously incompetent, as shown by him accidentally causing a Zombie Apocalypse by buying discount meat from a store. Even back in Season 1, Annie wanted to run a story about how the Dean texted only black students about a concert, with the latter's defense being that he had low cellphone data but had learned his lesson by getting an unlimited plan. Jeff only killed the story in the school paper because he was worried about Annie getting in trouble with the school administration and having the Dean breathing down his neck. While the study group made the right call in saving him from Chang's imprisonment, since otherwise the school would have been blown up and no one deserves to be kidnapped for months on end, it's hard to see why they keep helping him. In Season 5, Jeff finds out that the Dean is shredding papers relevant to a student designing a dangerous bridge, and gets furious about him willing to overlook the moral hazard of a school that is more of a degree mill. The Dean claims he doesn't know how to be anything but a dean, and persuades Jeff to make him better by working as a teacher at Greendale. Needless to say, it doesn't take. And as the former study group agrees, hiring Chang again after lying about his credentials, becoming a de facto dictator who would blow up the school, and Faking Amnesia is downright mind-numbingly idiotic. Even Frankie at one point hits her Rage Breaking Point and gives the Dean a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how he's so stupid that he doesn't even know he's stupid when seeing he used the school budget to impulse-buy at least a dozen Honda vehicles. Why not replace him with something more competent?
• The Woobie:
  • Abed, particularly in "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas". Then the second half of Season 3 hits, exploring more of Abed we never knew. "Virtual Systems Analysis" has major insight to his issues.
  • Todd in "Competitive Ecology". Possibly the nicest guy on the show and an Iraq War veteran to boot, he spends the entire episode as the study group's punching bag (he is even insulted by some of the nicer members like Troy and Annie), none of whom want to be lab partners with him.
  • The Dean can become like this, at times.
  • Professor Kane. He spent 25 years in prison for a crime it's implied he didn't commit, dealt with some horrible students, and quit after a nervous breakdown from the death of Starburns. It gets worse when you find out Starburns faked his death, meaning Kane quit over nothing.

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