Community changed. Like, a fair bit. Across a few short years, the NBC sitcom s identity
shifted from a witty, referential, slice-of-life collegiate sitcom to well, not that. (clip-
SPACE ELDER FRANKIE: So sad what happened here all those centons ago.
SPACE ELDER ABED: So sad, so preventable. SPACE ELDER BRITTA: I m Space Elder Britta!
) Perhaps the most pivotal point in this shift was the show s second season, the year in which
the show s exploratory proclivities grew from the occasional homage episode into a regular
pattern of formal experimentation, in episodes like Advanced D&D and Intermediate Documentary
Filmmaking, and episodes running with truly off-the-wall ideas, like Messianic Myths
and Ancient Peoples or Paradigms of Human Memory (clip TROY: *continuous screaming*).
Fans tend to take this widening of ambition for granted, like it was the only way things could
have gone but that s retrospect talking. This change wasn t guaranteed, and it wasn t automatic.
It had to be made. But how does a shift like this happen? How do you change a show? That s the
question I want to try and answer here, by looking at the first episode of season 2, Anthropology 101
an episode which is, in many ways, the bridge between that more grounded, more conventional
season one, and that transitional sophomore year. This is also the second entry in a loose series I
m doing, looking in-depth at each of Community s season premieres so if you ve not seen my video
on the show s pilot, that should be linked up in the corner now. But let s talk Anthropology.
There s a number of more obvious ways in which this episode pushes things forward.
Instantly familiar dynamics are introduced here like Chang as an unstable villain,
as opposed to simply being a bit of a prick (clip EVIL CHANG: I told you they hate you GOOD CHANG:
No, they said they just needed more time). In following up season 1 s Spanish 101,
Anthropology 101 also doubles down on that first-episode-as-subject-101 conceit,
cementing the pattern that the show would follow until the eventual repilot. Anthropology 101 does
feel, in a good way, like Community trying on hats, like a dry run for concepts the
show would eventually spin out into full episodes. We see a harbinger of the evil
Jeff dynamic later episodes would, at times, embrace. We see a mini-version of that whole
group-angrily-spilling-secrets-in-the-study-room-then-imploding schtick that the show would go on to
use so fruitfully in episodes like Co-operative Calligraphy and Polygraphy. There are hints of
this in season 1, of course, but the stuff we see in Anthropology 101 does feel more like the
prototype for those later episodes. We see the writers and the cast become painfully,
hilariously aware of the fact that the Jeff-Britta relationship isn t endgame, isn t close,
and is indeed kind of the worst outcome possible for everyone involved (clip - JEFF: it begins,
the greatest relationship ever known) and that s an idea idea which would, of course,
resurface years later (clip - JEFF: Let s get married
BRITTA: What? JEFF: Yeah,
right? This is what matters, isn t it?) But it isn t just shades of Community s future
we can see in Anthropology 101. Change isn t just bringing new stuff in it s also choosing which
existing elements to jettison. When I started thinking about making this video, I kept coming
back to something I d read years ago. Looking back for it now, I think it must have been this post on
earnthis.net? I may have mentally mashed it up with a couple of other reviews, maybe a Reddit
thread or two but when I was thinking about the way season 2 opens, I kept thinking about the
way season 1 ends twice, the way various critics and bloggers back in the day had observed that
season 1 s finale, Pascal s Triangle Revisited, was almost upstaged by the preceding episode,
English as a Second Language. The penultimate episode felt final, too, felt conclusive but it
didn t lean so hard on the melodrama. It summed up that other side of season 1, the paintball side,
the Goodfellas side, the Buddy side. It bought into that parodic, satirical impulse,
not just recognising, lampshading tropes, but exploring them, deflating them a little more.
I think in these two episodes, these twin finales, we saw the show laying out two
possible blueprints for its future. From it s very start, Community was a show at an awkward,
ironic distance from the sitcom form it loved the genre, openly, but it could never bring itself
to embrace that genre fully, uncritically, unabashedly. Pascal s Triangle Revisited is,
I think, the nearest it ever came to this. Tropes are acknowledged, but with a knowing,
accepting smile. The episode luxuriates in this manufactured shcmaltz, and for a moment, just
a moment, it almost seems to forget that ironic distance. This is one vision of the show Community
could have become or, I guess, continued to be: a development of that balance season 1 struck
between more grounded, more emotional stories, with a tendency toward in-text recognition of
the way those stories worked but erring on the former side, keeping the love triangles, the
relationship subplots, the will-they-won t-they. The previous episode, English as a Second
Language? It isn t really that different, but it s different enough. There s schmaltz here,
but we don t soak in it, we puncture it (clip: ABED: Oh don t worry about me, I can only
connect with people through.. movies? JEFF: She s the Ark of the Covenant!). So
that same balance is here, but it leans the other way. That emotionality isn t the end,
isn t the goal, it s a tool. Our real concerns are more detached,
more intellectual, more meta. In this episode s story, Annie is, in essence,
fighting to keep the concept of the show alive for a second season (Clip: ANNIE: we re a Spanish
study group, so we keep taking Spanish, together? SHIRLEY: That s what I thought too Annie), and
Jeff, still our protagonist at this point, is trying to destroy that concept,
return to reality on an expedited schedule. And the Spanish class? Yeah, that was never
real. (clip- CHANG: I faked my way into a job as a Spanish teacher at a community college,
relying on phrases from sesame street JEFF: Oh my god.) And so on. Returning
to season 2, returning to Anthropology 101? If those twin finales did mark two departure points,
two possible routes for the show s future, I think it s clear Community picked the template
laid out by English as a Second Language here. For one, it steps directly towards the goofy,
away from the realism, the slice-of-life quality which retrospectively distinguishes season 1
and that s a trend the rest of this season doubles down on. Moreover, the episode explicitly abandons
those mushier ideas and tones Pascal s Triangle Revisited brought in. Slater s gone, obviously,
and halfway through watching Anthro 101, the idea that Britta and Jeff could be together,
could genuinely love each other, is laughable. Literally it s played for laughs. The Annie-Britta
conflict in the episode s latter half plays like a demented parody of the dynamic this
show s previous episode had played mostly straight (Clip BRITTA: will you marry me? JEFF: Yep, yeah,
of course). It s actually quite impressive how efficiently and how totally the season
2 premiere demolishes those sentimental remnants the emptiness of the Jeff-Britta power struggle,
combined with this second season s eagerness to let Abed get meta, means the warm fuzzies
are flushed away in minutes (Clip - IRISH SINGER: Britta s marrying Jeffrey Winger! PIERCE: What the
hell is this this? ABED: A wedding episode! BRITTA: oh my god!
ANNIE: You slept with her and then kissed me? BRITTA: What?).
That move takes the tonal template we saw in English as a Second Language and supercharges it,
laying the groundwork for the 25 episodes to follow. And this isn t to say that Anthropology
101, Season 2, or even English as a Second Language for that matter,
abandons sentiment. It doesn t they don t. In every case, we resolve on a return to sentiment,
to emotion - but that sentiment isn t straightforward, or uncomplicated. It
isn t external, it isn t imported in with the tropes, the love triangles, the will-they-won
t-they. That s the hollow sentiment we see mocked in Anthro 101 and indeed throughout season 2.
The sentiment Community always comes back to, that it embraces after the shallow,
the superficial is dismissed? It arises after all that tropey framework s been set up, used,
and abandoned. It blossoms in the resulting weird, zany, hodgepodge. It coexists with the bizarre,
the surreal, the goofy - (clip- JEFF: And without each other,
we ll go extinct. And that s a fact.) But that s all still a bit abstract,
right? So let s move on to one last point, one last thing Anthropology 101 does to change
Community, to push this show into the thing it d become. We ve talked a lot here about the way this
episode exists in a complex relationship with the show s past, particularly that season 1 finale,
and that wasn t just a stray observation on my part. No, I think it s key here because it shows
us the final thing I think this episode does to push Community forward. What this episode
does is take that parodic, satirical impulse the show d had, right from the start, and turn
it inward ripping on that past schmaltz in the way earlier episodes had jabbed at Dead Poets Society,
or Robocop (Clip- KICKPUNCHER:I guess it s just a bad day for drug-dealing terrorists, and
a good day for Kickpuncher!). Season 1 was self-aware, of course it was, but not to this
extent, and not in such a pointed way. So if nothing else, what the season 2 premiere does,
the biggest way it changes things, is by extending that whole pomo, nothing is sacred , playfully
cynical attitude to cover.. itself. Nothing is forbidden, everything is fair game for pastiche,
for mockery, for intellectual scavenge. And I think there s a fairly direct link between this
move and the way subsequent season 2 episodes like Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples get
conceptual without any regard for the viewers this might lose, and also to the way this episode can
really dive to unprecedented depths in the our characters actually aren t great people
well (Clip JEFF: Lemme explain it for you Men are monsters who crave young flesh. The end.).
This might all sound pessimistic, but here? For Community s second season, and everything that
followed? This sense of abandon is liberating. So how did Community shift from the witty realism
of season 1 to the zany, unrestrained pastiche we saw in later years? How do you change a show?
Well, to a point? You don t. You just stop doing the things that don t work so well,
and double down on what does. They say writing s easy, you just have to cross out the wrong words,
and same principle. You readjust. You commit. And in a way, that principle does cover that bigger,
more seismic shift we see in season 2, in Anthropology 101 too the way Community starts
to treat even itself with a qualified irreverence, because that irreverence was always there. It just
wasn t total, wasn t self-effacing, until this point. I don t want to oversell this shift.
Season 2, including its premiere, is a bridge to the show s absurd side, but it s not some
instant warp there. More than anything this whole sophomore year is a transition -we do still get
more season 1 type episodes, school life episodes, the type we stopped getting so much in seasons 3,
5, and 6. But it s such a fun period of this show s run precisely because of this. It goes from
grounded to wild in a way no other season does. Our characters are no longer the archetypes they
started as, but they haven t become caricatures yet looking at you, Britta. It s when Community
started to really know what it was, but also what it wanted to become. So yeah season 2,
Anthropology 101, and the way that episode ushers in this new era, the way it knows what works,
knows how to double down on that, and knows not to hold itself back? Streets ahead.
Thanks for watching, and don t forget to let me know what you think about all this down below.
Next one of these probably won t be for a while, since the viewcounts on my community videos rarely
tend to be, well, streets ahead but make sure to sub if you don t want to miss that eventual
video and the ones coming afterwards. And big shoutout as always to my supporters on Patreon,
especially Daniel Goldhorn, Heather Long, Ryan Emerle, and WeirdyBeardy.