I watched the first two seasons of Community because it was great television. As far as I've heard, the third season was also the bee's knees. I stopped watching because I was tired of the show's attitude that the only reason they're not popular is because America is stupid. It's insulting, and there's plenty of smart shows on TV who manage to put out great content without being insulting to those who simply don't watch their show. It's juvenile, at best.
You've heard all the great things about the show. Shirley, for one, is one of the best characters on television today. Troy is amazing and I want to lick his face because Donald Glover. Britta is also fantastic, an incredibly multi-dimensional character that I want to be best friends with. The show is creative and fun and comes up with really compelling stuff. Part of the issue is that I think meta jokes are funny once in a while, but can grow old very quickly. Community as a show disagrees with me on that score, and that's fine.
But one of the BIG problems I had with this show is what they did to Annie's character between seasons 1 and 2. In season 1, Annie was a freshman in college getting over an adderall addiction because of the stress she put on herself. She wanted to be a top achiever and was type A to the point of being OCD. Annie's character was going to grow, loosen up, become an adult. She had a really beautiful coming-of-age story to tell, and I was excited to watch it.
Between seasons 1 and 2, Dan Harmon realized that she had boobs, GREAT boobs, and that the fan boys on the internet love boobs. And thus began the destruction of what could have been a fascinating character on television.
Because 9 out of 10 storylines concerning Annie now had something to do with how sexy she was. The weird relationship with Jeff. Troy and Abed staring. A monkey named "Annie's Boobs" (which, under different circumstances, could have been really funny if I wasn't already so annoyed). Hell, Dan Harmon even said he created scenes of Annie running so the internet could make gifs of it. They took a multi-dimensional character with a coming-of-age story to tell and turned her into a sex object.
Now I know she still had other storylines. Her relationship with Pierce, her relationship with her parents, even her future came up once and a while. But compare that to the sheer number of storylines or jokes about how sexy this nineteen-year-old character was. As a girl who started off relating to Annie and has no interest in being a sex object, I found this depressing.
I love Katrina Bowden's character on 30 Rock, whose main punchline is also how fuckable she is. The difference? One character shows up rarely, every few episodes, and that was ALWAYS the joke. The other is a major character who was supposed to be well-rounded and fully-formed and THEN got degraded to a sex joke.
And maybe in a way that's Community commenting on how, in this society, even a girl with that much potential is going to be marginalized if her boobs are nice enough. Or maybe it's just them contributing to the problem.
Annie could have been so much more than her boobs. And for a show that prides itself on being so smart, that sure as hell was a damn stupid move.
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