Analysis Paper 1 Topic: “Community”

For my first analysis paper, I’ve decided to look at the sitcom Community on NBC.  While ratings seem to indicate that Community isn’t as popular as other, more mainstream television shows (e.g. The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother), it is still extremely popular among younger viewers who don’t necessarily watch TV live (and thus don’t contribute to ratings). Its fan-base, while not adequately represented by conventional scales of audience measurement, has a highly pronounced online presence and is considered to be one of the most motivated of the various TV “fandoms.” I would argue that Community is an especially significant TV show in that its use of reflexive/meta humor and pop culture references not only challenges typical narrative/sitcom conventions but allows it to connect with an expanding young and culturally literate generation as well.

Besides being my favorite show, Community also does some really interesting things with its female characters, particularly Annie Edison. At the beginning of the show Annie is introduced as a seemingly innocent, goody-two-shoes character who cares primarily about studying, getting good grades, and doing things the right, proper way. She seems also to be relatively sexually inexperienced and repressed in the first season, as evidenced in the clip below (sorry in advance about the ad). In this episode in season one, Annie has been asked to demonstrate how to put a condom on a penis using a model at an STD fair–but she’s never actually seen a penis in person before and is nervous that she won’t know what to do. Her friends Britta and Shirley help her break into the Dean’s office to practice with the model, but they’re caught and confronted in the following scene:

(Of particular note in this scene is the fact that Annie’s sexual inexperience actually becomes an empowering aspect of her personality rather than a weakness or flaw. I plan on discussing this further in my paper.)

Especially interesting to explore will be Annie’s evolution as a character over the course of the first three seasons. Annie becomes more confident in her sexuality over time, both as a function of the organic development of her character and as a function of the writers’ awareness of young male fans wanting to see her more (and see more of her). Looking at how the show handles Annie’s status as a “sex symbol” among the fandom while also maintaining her relative innocence as a character should yield very interesting results.