Community: How to Make a Safe Pilot for Your Very Weird Show

    When using TV pilots as examples for writing beginnings, you need to keep something very important in mind, something that becomes very evident when looking at Community. See, a TV show often ends up being very different from its first episode. On the other hand, with something like a book, the ending and the beginning both get published at the same time. Books don’t have the luxury of “finding their legs” that often happens with TV shows after the first season.

    But sometimes a TV show doesn’t even have any intention of being the show the pilot says it’s going to be like.

    Maybe Dan Harmon really did intend for Community to be a simple, grounded show about a lawyer becoming a nicer person in community college. But I feel like he wrote this pilot to make TV execs happy, and it wasn’t what he would really do if he was given full creative control.

Source: slashgear.com

    I mean, take a look at some of the show’s later episodes. Imagine if the pilot had characters playing a schoolwide the-floor-is-lava game, making enormous blanket forts, and sending said blanket forts to war against a rival pillow fort. No TV executive would greenlight that. Unless they were really cool.

This episode does introduce three things that will become important for the rest of Community’s run: the show’s penchant for feel-good endings, the story arc of Jeff’s personal growth, and the characters of the rest of the study group.

    The episode starts out with Dean Pelton making some announcements, from a microphone hooked up to a boombox. It’s clear that Harmon didn’t plan for the dean to become the character he ended up being (Fun Fact: The original script gives the dean two words of description: “40s, rotund”, giving off a very different image from Jim Rash’s wiry performance. It serves as a reminder that visual descriptions in TV and movie scripts are viable to change, as that stuff’s part of the casting agents’ and set designers’ jobs.) The dean’s opening announcements characterize the school as a pretty crappy place. This isn’t a normal, respectable college, a fact the show gets a lot of comedic mileage out of in this episode and throughout its run. And Dean Pelton’s efforts to improve Greendale end up becoming a major part of his character as well.

    As the dean lists off a bunch of community college stereotypes, we’re shown Annie, Troy, Shirley, and Pierce, characters who supposedly embody said stereotypes. This sequence basically amounts to the dean listing descriptions of the cast. Straight exposition. But it works. And, partly, it works because the dean’s words affect the characters emotionally. The speech really hurts them. It drills in the fact that they didn’t want to be at Greendale. Their lives aren’t going the way they wanted them to. It all culminates in a pretty funny moment where the dean realizes he lost one of his speech cards, which means the part of that speech that was supposed to be motivational is gone. In a way, this reflects where the characters are in life. They don’t know how they can make their lives better. That’s what their journey in the rest of the series is going to be.

Source: recapguide.com

    Next we meet Jeff Winger, the de facto main character. We see Jeff walking across campus, with Abed tagging along, giving him his life story. Maybe it’s intentional that we meet them together, instead of during the dean’s announcement. Unlike the other characters, Jeff and Abed are content in life. Jeff’s an ex-lawyer who doesn’t think he has to change. Abed’s a weird nerd, but we learn later that he’s not the kind of nerd who wants to be cool and fit in. He has this kind of self-mastery, fitting his role as a genius savant whose mind is streets ahead of the others’.

 

    But we don’t know that just yet. Abed’s introduction just paints him as your typical, television socially awkward nerd. It comes across as surprisingly flat and stereotypical, considering how the show usually does a great job at avoiding making Abed’s ambiguous neurodivergence the butt of jokes. In this scene he’s practically a Big Bang Theory character. Community will have time to make Abed more three-dimensional, though, and this scene’s decent as a basic introduction to the character. It has some good pay-off when Jeff finds him at the study group meeting later on.

    The inciting incident in this pilot is that Jeff was a lawyer, but his firm found out that his bachelor’s degree was fake, so he has to enroll in community college to make up for it. It’s a particularly effective inciting incident, because the problem Jeff needs to overcome in his arc (he coasts through life and doesn’t care about others) is likely the reason he got the fake degree in the first place. It’s not a random event that has no relation to the story that sprouts from it.

Source: primevideo.com

    Jeff goes to Professor Duncan, who Jeff once helped get out of a DUI back in his lawyer days. Jeff thinks Duncan owes him one, so he asks him to give him the answers to all his tests. Duncan then lectures Jeff on his lack of morality. Like the dean’s boombox speech, having Duncan lay out Jeff’s character flaws isn’t very subtle at all. Also like the dean’s speech, it doesn’t matter because it works. The show’s justification for the talk is that Duncan is a psych professor, so of course he’d try to analyze Jeff in the middle of a conversation. Anyway, we’re interested to see what Jeff will do next, if Duncan will force him to act like a better person, or if he’ll find a way to still cheat his way through life despite Duncan making things difficult.  After agreeing to trade him his car, Jeff gets a packet of test answers from Duncan.

    I should mention that, in this episode, Jeff’s an example of a villain protagonist. We’re not supposed to agree with his mindset. We’re still interested in following him and seeing if he’ll accomplish his goal (of getting the test answers and breezing through Greendale), which makes up the “protagonist” part of the term “villain protagonist.”

    Also an important part of this episode is Britta. When Jeff sees her, he figures he can schmooze his way into having sex with her, because part of being a manipulative person who does things only for his own personal gain is faking feelings for someone to have sex with them. In this case, Jeff tells Britta he’s part of a Spanish study group, and invites her to join. Of course, Jeff made the study group up. He thinks that when she shows up, and it’s just the two of them, their studying will quickly transition into sex.

    Britta’s characterization in this episode differs from in the rest of the series, where she’s more of a comedic character, a feminist-parody stoner girl. The pilot contrasts her strong sense of morality with Jeff’s lack of it. They’re presented as the show’s big eventually-to-be couple, which I feel like is another attempt to placate TV execs. For the remainder of its run, Community just isn’t interested in pairing its characters up in Office-style happy endings. But at least for this episode, it presents Jeff with another interesting dilemma: the only way for him to get Britta is to actually care.

Source: tvfanatic.com

    That night, Jeff walks into the study room, and – surprise! – it’s full of people. The people we saw earlier during the Dean’s speech, and Abed too. Britta invited them because they said they needed help in Spanish too.

 

    What’s interesting here is that we see all of them from Jeff’s perspective. And to Jeff, who knows he just made the study group up to get sex, they look pretty stupid. The fact that they care about something as meaningless as a grade in a community college introductory Spanish course, and sincerely want to attend this study group, makes them look really naïve compared to jaded Jeff. And it ties back to the dean’s speech, when we first met them: these people still feel really inadequate. They look up to Jeff, because he’s what they think a successful, better-than-Greendale person looks like.

    In an effort to get the rest of the group away as soon as possible, Jeff does what he does best: talk. More specifically, he’s going to deceive them into thinking what he wants them to by toying with their emotions, like he did countless times in courtrooms before.

Rest in Peace, Steve. Source: decider.com

    There’s a point in here where Abed references The Breakfast Club (establishing Abed as “the pop culture reference guy”), and that’s a succinct explanation of what Jeff is trying to do here: he’s trying to give them their Breakfast Club moments. (I also feel like this is another example of Community's pilot playing things safe. Later episodes have a lot more obscure references, but everybody knows The Breakfast Club.) In this scene, we learn more about the rest of the cast: Annie was an Adderall addict, Troy lost his football scholarship after dislocating his shoulders, and Shirley’s heading back to school because she and her husband split. This is the first of many Winger speeches Jeff gives the gang, but as the series progresses he actually starts believing them. His speech really does come off as impressive, especially the bit with the pencil. Yeah, a little bit of me did die inside when he snapped it.

    At the end, Jeff announces to the group that they are now a “community.” This is the part where I imagine the network exec reading this going “Wow! Clever! They said the title of the show!” It’s cheesy, but that’s exactly the point. It’s cheesy stuff like this that Jeff thinks is dumb, but absolutely awes the open-hearted study group members. They’re all down to come back next week.

    There’s a nice little twist at the end, too: when Jeff opens up Duncan’s packet, he finds a bunch of blank pages. This is the second time where I imagine the TV exec going “Wow! Clever!” Jeff doesn’t have the answers. It’s a somewhat standard sitcom reversal, but it serves some important purposes. First, it’s Duncan’s way of saying “two can play at that game”, giving Jeff a little morality lesson. Second, it symbolizes the fact that Jeff doesn’t have the answers in life, despite pretending he does at the study group. Third, it gives Jeff a reason to attend actual study group meetings, thus continuing his arc into the rest of the series.

Source: overmental.com

How to wow the suits like Community:

    Maybe your concept is weird. But there are ways to give a corporate-friendly version of your work while still staying true to its full self. At the very least, you can introduce your audience to your characters.

    Community characterizes its cast in really un-subtle ways, but that’s okay. It gets the introductions out of the way fast, so we can just have fun with the characters now that we know them. 

    This is also a pretty plot-heavy episode, especially by Community’s standards. All that stuff with getting the test answers for the whole rest of the year feels like the long-form storytelling The Office does, whereas Community is more like “fun, pop-culture parody concept episode with a character learning a moral lesson at the end.” So, that’s another strategy to approach a beginning from: the plot-heavy beginning. The overarching plots might not be the most important part of Community, but a lot of its episode plots stem from Jeff trying to breeze through Greendale and being dragged into actually caring about it by his friends. The pilot shows the beginning of the journey Jeff goes through in those episodes. In a way, it lets them happen. 

    The plot and its pilot also connect intrinsically to Jeff’s character. Community fleshes out its supporting cast in later episodes, giving them each a turn in the spotlight. It has Shirley episodes, and Abed episodes, and Troy episodes. But the pilot focuses on Jeff’s journey. It tells the story of how he came to Greendale. Most of its events stem from his actions, and its messages primarily center around the flaws in his worldview. If we ignore the fact that this episode does the work of building Community’s cast, tone, and setting, it’s still a stellar Jeff episode.

Source: businessinsider.com

 

    As I watch more and more pilot episodes, I’m realizing that there are very, very few shows whose first episode is the best one. Sometimes, that’s because great episodes need build-up (Gravity Falls’ “Not What He Seems”, Stranger Things’ “The Bathtub”), or because they have a different format than the rest of the series (Doctor Who’s “Blink”, or Community’s own, hugely-popular “Remedial Chaos Theory”). But it’s kind of reassuring, isn’t it? That maybe you don’t have to make a perfect beginning to make a great story? Seriously, I can’t think of a single show I’ve watched where I’d genuinely call the first episode my favorite. That would actually kind of suck, for a show to peak on episode one.

Source: geekgirlauthority.com

    Despite all the hype people give to opening lines and pilot episodes, it’s the stuff that comes after that that really matters. A good first episode like Community’s just needs to set the show up so the rest of it can happen. That means establishing the premise, kicking off the plot, and introducing us to the characters. It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that.

    And let me know in the comments if you can think of any show where the first episode is your favorite – not just as a good pilot, but as a great episode in general. See you there.