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| Three women, two black people, an Asian guy, and a Polish- Indian guy. And I have the audacity to complain about this show's diversity... (S) |
Surprise, Dan's gonna talk about American TV again! Well, it is fall, when all my favourite shows are returning from summer break, so I think I can be forgiven. And Community may be my favourite television program currently on the air. It's about to start its fourth season, which is surprising to some, since it's never had huge ratings and has been close to cancellation more than once. Right now, some of you might be thinking "Yes! Community is amazing!" Some of you might be thinking "Seriously? Community isn't that great..." But you're more likely thinking something along the lines of "What the heck is Community?" The answer to that last one is deceptively complex. In short, it's a sitcom. A sitcom about a study group at a community college. But it's really a lot more than just that.
It's a sitcom, but it's also a celebration of sitcoms, often intentionally evoking tropes and cliches, sometimes to humourously tear them down, and sometimes to sincerely employ them as a means to engage the audience. It's about a study group, but it's also about how the members of that group grow to become friends and, in a sense, family. It is, at its heart, a show about people.
And it's about a variety of people, with different backgrounds, ages, and personalities. There's Jeff (played by Joel McHale), a recently disbarred lawyer; Britta (Gillian Jacobs), a 20-something hipster activist; Troy (Donald Glover), a self-important ex-quarterback and prom king; Abed (Danny Pudi), a socially awkward film and television geek (it's suggested he has Asperger's); Shirley (Yvette Nicole-Brown), a recently divorced homemaker and mother; Annie (Alison Brie), a driven young go-getter; and Pierce (Chevy Chase), a wealthy old moist wipe tycoon. Women make up 3/7 of the study group, for the first two seasons exactly 50% of the main credited cast is non-white, and every member of the study group is of a different religion. Yet all of them are fully fleshed-out characters, managing to move beyond stereotypes, and they all manage to connect with one another as unlikely friends.
It's the presence of such diversity in other areas that makes me really notice the show's lack of sexual diversity. Pierce, as the old, rich, set-in-his-ways guy, often makes racist comments and jokes about other people being gay. To the show's credit, we're generally meant to laugh at Pierce's ignorance rather than at the expense of gay people, and I can't even begin to count the number of times the other characters point out his racism and/or homophobia. But, while the show actually gets a chance to present non-white people as valuable and fully rounded characters, all the members of the study group are pretty explicitly cis and straight. In one way, I can see why they'd do it; having the characters all be straight makes it easy to come up with a number of potential boy/girl romantic plot lines, a staple of the American sitcom. A gay character would throw the balance off. But I'd like to point out that making characters bisexual or pansexual would only serve to increase that number; it's clearly not just about the pairings. There is actually one recurring character on the show that isn't totally straight: Dean Craig Pelton (played by Jim Rash). And I gotta say, in the past I've been really conflicted about his character.
On the one hand, Jim Rash is just a really funny guy, and his delivery always makes me laugh. As the ineffectual, insecure dean of a community college who is constantly striving (unsuccessfully) to make it more like a university, he can be both hilarious and sympathetic. But there's also a lot of humour that's drawn from his... less than mainstream sexuality. This includes things like his "dalmatian fetish", an almost stalkerish attraction to Jeff, and dressing up in women's outfits to promote school events. Now, these things can arguably be funny in their own right, and sometimes I can't tell if I should be laughing or not. For example, when it comes to his cross-dressing, I think the humour comes less from the fact that he's wearing women's clothes and more from the fact that he'll use any school event as an excuse to dress in an elaborate costume (e.g., dressing as Catwoman to promote "Feline Aids Awareness Week"). After all, he can pull off something more neutral like a toga or a conductor's outfit and be just as funny.
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| It's time to Tina TURNer the clocks ahead. Happy Daylight Savings! |
Even though they're more often than not played for laughs, I suppose don't necessarily have a problem with any of the dean's traits, save for one thing - they're all part of just one character. He's the only non-straight character, and one who crossdresses, but he's also presented as something of a sexual deviant: he has an unhealthy obsession with one of his students, he has a thing for animal costumes; at one point Shirley calls him an "innocent pervert" and he's been called a "happy pansexual imp". It's this conflation of non-heterosexuality (and to an extent, transvestitism) with more extreme aspects of sexuality and perversion that gives me pause about his character. It suggests, and enforces, a connection in people's minds between certain sexual orientations and being "weird". I'm always wondering how he's written, and how the audience preceives him. A running gag is that Pelton is constantly finding ways to touch Jeff's abs and shoulder - is this intended to be funny because of the way he tries to make it so casual, or is it just because it's between two guys? Would the dean be funny as a straight woman? As a lesbian? It's not exactly easy to answer.
But sometimes, especially more recently, a sympathetic light is shone on the dean and
his sexuality. In one episode of season 2, Pierce falls in with a group of
trouble-causing elder students who turn out to be a bad influence on
him. When Pelton tries to lay down the law, one of them calls him a
"fruit", to which he replies "Hey! Unacceptable, and none of your
business, and barely the whole truth." In a third season episode, the dean dresses in
half masculine and half feminine clothing (demonstrating the duality of man, to
tell everyone he has "good news and bad news"). At first, he begins to
wonder if he's gone too far, crying and saying "I have to go to the
bank today. What am I supposed to tell people?" But at the end of the
episode, he returns in high spirits to tell the study group that people
loved it. As it turns out, he ended up having one of the deepest and most liberating conversations of his life with some of the people he met
at the bank. The storyline is short and a little silly, but it brings up the question of the outfits he wears and, in a sense, reaffirms it as something interesting and personal that he shouldn't necessarily change. This may seem weird for a plot line that took up maybe 1-2 minutes of the episode, but I quite frankly found it touching.
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| The cast, plus Jim Rash as Dean Pelton (third from left) (S) |
Over the course of three seasons, the dean has grown closer to the group, and in the process has become a more fleshed out and sympathetic character (Jim Rash was actually promoted to series regular in season 3). By the third season, he even becomes the main character in one or two episodes. In a way, he's become almost like another member of the study group. Community, and many other comedies, are really successful when they can both make us laugh at and empathize with their characters, often about the same traits. Jeff's been the butt of a few lawyer jokes, but it's also revealed that part of the reason he became a lawyer was because of certain emotional and personal problems. When Abed makes a social faux pas, it can be humourous, but it's also touching when we're shown the difficulty he has connecting with people. The dean started off as a relatively normal character, but started wearing stranger and stranger costumes and showing more and more layers of his odd sexuality. But as of the third season, he's evolved beyond just being a walking joke about sexuality, and I think the writers have started really redeeming themselves with his character, which gives me hope.
Sometimes I'm still not sure what parts of him I should actually be laughing at. And I still think I would have liked the show better if one of the original study group members had been LGBT from the beginning, especially considering the way the show, quite successfully in my opinion, tackles diversity of things like race and religion (Then again, there's always the chance one of them could still come out! Not that I'm holding my breath). But it shouldn't fall just on the shoulders of Community or its creators to show sexual diversity, and it's actually much better about things like race and religion than a lot of shows out there right now. It may seem like I'm singling it out, but it's actually kind of the opposite. Sometimes, when a show like this is so good in some areas, it's disappointing when it's not so good in others, simply because you expect more from it than from other shows. There's plenty of programs that could do better when it comes to LGBT representation, most of them much worse than Community; it's just that I'd expect it more from a show as smart as this one.
This is one of two posts that I'll be writing about Community. Since it's a show I love, I have quite a bit to say about it. In the next post will focus more on minor characters and how the writers of the show handle LGBT issues when they come up.
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