NBC
There’s a delightful little detail in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” last night’s stop-motion holiday episode of Community, that fascinated me. When characters “appear” and “disappear” from the Planet Abed fantasy world, they open a little curtain in the fabric of the fantasy, through which you can see—the study room, which they other characters, playing along with the fantasy, know they’re actually in, detailed with flyers on the wall, &c.
Like many touches and filigrees in Community, the show didn’t have to do this. No one would have written a letter to complain if it hadn’t. You could as easily have had characters simply poof! in and out of scenes. Community added this touch because it served a purpose—it represented the external reality Abed’s friends were still in—and, I’m guessing, because it was cool. That’s what Community does: it completes the extra credit. It packs in detail and incident not because it has do but because it’s better that way, and because it’s fun.
Which is why “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” strangely for an animated special, may be the most representative episode of Community yet—not to say the best, but an episode that, in a few moments and visuals, conveys the spirit, strengths (and a few weaknesses) and inventiveness of the show.
What makes Community such a pleasure to watch is that the show itself has such a strong sense of play and joy in the act of invention, and it’s contagious. Community is actually something like Lost in this sense: that drama had many things going for it, but its big intangible was its constant delight in filling in the background, adding details and Easter eggs (or, to use the operative analogy, stocking stuffers). It’s ironic that “Abed’s” included a dig at Lost—it used the season one DVD as a metaphor for a lack of payoff—but I took that more as a friendly hat tip from a like-minded show. (As apparently did Damon Lindelof and Dan Harmon in a friendly exchange of Twitter last night.)
Speaking of detail, whoever was responsible for the animated figures deserves applause: the figures look not just like the actors, but like the characters, with their distinctive soul. (The eyebrows on the Britta-bot, for instance. Those eyebrows!) For which, in turn, some credit must go to Community’s cast, each of whom has captured the essence of their characters in certain distinctive postures and expressions: Abed’s head-tilt, Shirley’s stare and forced smile, Jeff’s smirk, &c. They’ve created a vocabulary of defining, telegraphic looks for their characters not unlike, well, animated figures. (Which I mean as a compliment, honest.)
And props to Community’s creative staff as well for not going the expected route with the stop-motion fantasy. (Not Claymation! Unsurprisingly, we had Abed to disabuse us of that popular misnomer.) The typical, easy approach would be to make the whole interlude some sort of dream or fantasy sequence. Instead, the script went with fantasy—but a layered fantasy, in which Abed’s defensive retreat into the comforting Rankin-Bass landscape of his youth was acknowledged by the rest of the characters, who acknowledged that they were still in our unpictured reality. Which, in turn, led to some brilliant grade-school pretend-game battles between Abed’s friend and Professor Duncan involving teleportation and a remote-controlled pterodactyl, as well as Abed’s granular familiarity with the topography of his Yuletide escape-land.
To get to that fantasy, Abed had to become a little, well, insane, which is where the episode fell short. We’ve established that Abed sees his life in terms of pop culture, and that that situation has psychological roots: the world of TV and movies is an escape, which rules and tropes that make sense. But where in the past he’s always shown some level of awareness of that (say, when he made his autobiographical film), here he pretty much breaks with reality, prompted by a suddenly and extremely cruel holiday card from his mother (“I have a new family now”).
The admirable thing is that Community is going for something sad and real about the personal meaning of holidays. But that means it needs to be held to the standard of that ambition—not just on a doesn’t-this-look-awesome level, but on a do-the-characters-remain-believable level.
As I’ve said about Community episodes before, it’s not so much that the characters aren’t developed; I think Dan Harmon clearly knows a lot about who they are and why. It’s that they sometimes seem to become what they need to be in order to serve the narrative ideas, rather than the other way around. I’m not a mind-reader, and I don’t know how Harmon and company developed this episode. But it didn’t feel like they used stop-motion animation because it was the best way to tell their story. It felt like they told this story because it was the best way to use stop-motion animation.
For one cool holiday episode, I’d ignore that, but I’d be lying if I said it was the first time I’d gotten that feeling from a Community episode. In fact—not that you asked—”Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” is a pretty good illustration of why I included Community in my Best Episodes of 2010 list but not on my Best Series of 2010 list (though I came very, very close to putting it on). Episode by episode, Community makes some of the best half-hours on TV. But as a larger work—I still love it, but it’s not at the absolute top tier for me, for these character-related reasons. (And no, not just because “it’s too meta.”) Community is a fantastical, dreamlike jewel-box of a show, a product of Dan Harmon’s distinctive vision, and it is lovingly constructed. But it is constructed, and often feels it, in a way that keeps its characters from feeling entirely organic.
All that said—there was some good character material here too. Most of Abed’s supporting characters in this episode were rendered, literally, into archetypes, most of them getting pretty much the storylines and comeuppances I’d have expected (Jeff is too cool / sarcastic; Britta is too cold, again; Shirley, “The Christmas baby,” is intolerant). But of all people, Pierce actually got a wonderful moment, choosing to stick with Abed on his interior journey in a way that sweetly pointed up the loneliness the two characters have in common.
That’s what I love about Community at its best, and I hope we get more of it in the new year. I smiled through “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” beginning to end; but sometimes, I just want to know whether it’s the characters or the concepts that are driving this Polar Express. Admittedly, though, it’s a pretty amazing ride either way.