NBC's "Community": Community College as New Educational Hope in America

You have to say one thing about a few of the new slate of TV shows for the 2009-2010 Season: Some of them managed to tap into the current soul of America this time around. This isn't to say these promising shows won't be the first casualties of the season, based on the fact that the soul of America is always complex and filled with absurdity. Those genres never do well with the mainstream. But in my recent review of CBS's "The Good Wife", I noted the complex side of America through the under-analyzed topic of political couples staying together after infidelities. When I saw the generally funny and absurd previews for NBC's "Community", I had to write a note to self that this show may have found the converse absurd side of America's soul.

That might sound depressing when it relates to one of the better educational options in America: The community college.

Yet part of America's absurdities comes from the frustrations of the American Dream being siphoned away in recent years. It goes without saying that absurdity helps filter those frustrations in fiction better than any other literary mechanism. And if you truly must give Chevy Chase a new sitcom, it might as well be absurd. Only, it might be telling us more about our educational system in America than we care to admit.

How Chevy Chase managed to get mentioned in a pitch meeting for a sitcom about a community college is one I leave another writer to seek out. After one thinks about it a while, though, a wider picture starts developing in picturing a character just like the one Chevy Chase is going to play going to a community college out of necessity. No doubt, too, some of them are all-American-named Pierce Hawthorne just like the name of Chase's character in "Community." Keep in mind, however, the star billing of the show goes to E!'s "Talk Soup" host Joel McHale who brings the most absurd aspect to this show as the worst reflection of America's educational system today.

McHale plays a lawyer named Jeff Winger who so happens to get disbarred because his eight-year legal degree is considered null and void. His only option to start over is to head to Greendale Community College in Colorado where he meets Pierce and a whole other set of offbeat characters who don't fit the standard description of 20-something students going to such an educational institution. At one time in this country, a community college would generally have a student body of mostly 20-somethings who were merely going for an Associate's Degree in an applied trade.

In more recent years, it's turned into ground central for the middle-aged who lost their jobs in a faltering economy and a jumpstart for true professionals to get their first two years toward a larger degree done in an affordable learning environment. The only mystery to those who haven't been to a community college is whether the environments and situations you'll be seeing in "Community" truly exist there or if it's merely an exaggerated extraction from Ivy League universities.
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While I went only briefly to a community college in the early 90's, I can tell you middle-age students were already starting to dot that landscape then. Perhaps it was because the economy was in its tail end of being slow again right before the exuberant rebound of the 90's. The only difference was that you wouldn't have seen a true professional in the role of a lawyer going to community college to pick up the pieces of their shattered career by learning a new career.

Now when you enter a classroom at a community college, if you could read the stats of more than half the class, you'd see former professionals who once made close to six figures a year now starting over and using the cheaper tuitions of these colleges to their advantage. It's also a complete shun of major universities that not only continue to cater to those with upper incomes, but currently only take in the most upper crust of the American and world population.

"Community" doesn't make it subtle that Ivy League schools are out of the picture for most people nowadays if perhaps being reduced to elitist status in the minds of those who can still afford to go to one. Also, if it was at one time hip and fun to make TV shows and movies about the fast and wild times in the dorm rooms of a real or imagined Ivy League school, then we might be surprised to learn what really goes on in a community college when the varied student body isn't too old to be a little rebellious.

Even though there aren't any dorm rooms on the grounds of a community college, the amount of time spent among students is considerable. Because it's a sitcom, "Community" is going to show every oddball detail of how human beings sometimes act when having to spend long days with one another while getting educated. While perhaps there isn't any sex (yes, arguable), beer binges or bizarre initiation rites, I saw firsthand how casual things can be during the in-between time of classes, including during classes. The professors of community colleges are more apt to keep things on that level with their students rather than appear more scholarly than thou.

When you have every possible age group interacting in such an environment, the truth about all of us as people is more apt to be found. Whether "Community" becomes the biggest bomb of the season or not for NBC, it's going to bring the new realization of the profoundly widened dichotomy between Ivy League colleges and community colleges. The former has become a parody of itself with evolvement into an isolated island of non-reality. The latter now basks in the epitome of its name and brings all demographics together to interact honestly and understand one another.

Both are likely going to provide sociological fodder in movies and TV for years to come...

Source:

http://www.nbc.com/community/