What Can Your 21 Minute Comedy Do for You?

Chevy Chase geeking out on NBC's "Community"

The half hour comedy is probably the hardest endeavor for modern day television.   With only 21 minutes (can’t forget about those commercials now, can we), writers have to have some solid character development, great storylines, and most importantly, some really funny ideas to keep audiences even somewhat interested.  In the even larger scheme of things, seasons of these comedies need to stay fresh so that viewers don’t feel like they’re watching the same thing every time.  You’ve got sitcoms with laugh tracks, screwball workplace comedies, and of course, the animated raunch-fest.  There are millions of different kinds of comedies, while only a few really succeed long-term. Putting aside the classics like MASH and Happy Days, let’s look for a second at two shows that are on right now: How I Met Your Mother and Community.  They represent vastly different stages in a comedy’s life and how show creators can either completely fail or brilliantly prevail.

I’ve watched HIMYM since the second season and was immediately fascinated by its incredibly unique style and narrative framing.  For those unfamiliar with the show, HIMYM is narrator Ted Mosby (Bob Saget) reflecting on his romantic adventures as a young architect (Josh Radnor) in the early 2000s (aka our present day) to his children, attempting to tell them the story of, you guessed it, how he met their mother.  Ted is the epitome of a hopeless romantic, but even through his somewhat effeminate perspectives on love, you can’t help but root for him anyway.  The show is gifted with a power cast: Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) as goofy yet loyal best friend Marshall, Alyson Hanigan (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as the ever-present female voice of reason Lily, Cobie Smulders (yeah, she wasn’t really in anything big before this) as the no-nonsense beauty Robin, and of course, Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser!) as suave ladykiller Barney. The characters are extremely likable, and the writers took great care in making them seem like real people.  It was funny, it was clever, and it was heart-felt.  The five leads seem like human beings that you’d actually want to hang out with. The first two seasons were absolutely superb, as the tone, style and voice of the show were made so perfectly clear that it was hard to imagine how they could mess things up.  Every episode, however simplistic or complicated the plot was, brought critical character elements into it so the audience got a feel for who these people really were. As ridiculous as some of the jokes are, you never lose sight of what it’s all about.

Then something happened, which I speculate can be attributed to what I’ll nickname the “tv hipster syndrome.”  The first two seasons of HIMYM were easily its best.  Hardly anyone knew about it, but the people who did, critics and fans alike, loved it.  The cult following was so great that the show’s popularity exponentially grew- as of today, the HIMYM facebook fan page is inching closer and closer to 10,000,000 fans.  Once the show started becoming more “mainstream,” the quality drastically declined. Now, this is an extremely arguable claim, but as of season 3 most fans who have loved the show from the beginning will agree that it hasn’t been the same.

So what exactly happened? Did creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas realize, “Oh shit, HIMYM is going to last a lot longer than we thought, now we have to stretch this story out for a couple more seasons than originally planned?” For the overarching plots of seasons 4 and 5, this seemed to be the case.  Ted’s search for true love became painfully redundant, and how his friends could bear his whining and complaining every episode is beyond me.  If I had to listen to a 30 year old man gripe about his romantic misfortune, I’m not so sure I’d be as loyal as the rest of the gang.  Sadly, this is the danger of a comedy running for 6 seasons.  Once you’ve established strong character development, the hardest part is figuring out what to do with it.  In this case, HIMYM falls very, very flat, as the characters have become mere shadows of what they once were.  Still, it has accomplished things that no other sitcom has, and continues to occasionally shine with episodes of such quality that some shows will never reach.  Of course I’ll continue to watch, but perhaps only half-heartedly, since that’s the effort the show’s creators seem to be giving to us.

And then there’s my new love, NBC’s Community, which challenges audiences in the same way 30 Rock did when it first premiered.  As opposed to HIMYM’s plot-driven conceit, Community is 98.75% character related.  The best jokes rely on fair knowledge of who the characters are and, more importantly, how they interact and feel about one another.  HIMYM did have this, but minus Barney, viewers really come back for more clues about the mother and what will happen to the gang next.  Community, on the other hand, tells the story of Jeff Winger (The Soup’s Joel McHale), a fast talking narcissist who gets disbanded from being a lawyer when the bar finds out he forged his law school degree.  He decides to rectify the situation in the fastest way possible: get a degree from a community college.  While the idea that Jeff’s previous firm would welcome him back with a degree from Greendale Community College is a little unbelievable, that plot detail is quickly forgotten and used solely for the set-up.  He begins a study group for his Spanish class only to try and seduce raging feminist Britta (Gillian Jacobs), but before he knows it the study room is full of lovable misfits.

I watched the first season in maybe three days, and when the DVD came out, I brought out my full geek and watched all the episodes again with the commentary on it.  While listening to creator Dan Harmon, you really get a sense for how much effort he put into these character’s backstories, their motivations, and their feelings.  The chemistry of the cast is glaringly obvious, and that’s what lends itself to the quirky, fast-paced humor of the show.  The jokes are smart and don’t patronize the audience, and the episodes are cleverly designed to incorporate a light plot with heavy character analysis. 

Last week’s episode, “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” epitomizes the show’s style and what a great half hour comedy can accomplish at its finest.  The set-up for the story is a two minute cold-open narration, and the rest of the episode takes place almost entirely in one room, with only dialogue (a bona fide bottle episode).  The group takes part in a game of Dungeons and Dragons in order to prevent an overweight classmate of theirs from committing suicide.  This episode easily could’ve taken the low road and spent the whole time poking fun at people who engage in a game like D&D, but instead it uses the opportunity to let the actors shine and showcase their characters’ personalities.  The point is, I couldn’t imagine the cast of HIMYM sitting in one room for an entire episode and it being good— the writer’s don’t specialize in that kind of comedy.  Dan Harmon does, however, and it’s entertainment from beginning to end.  For a bottle episode, it’s extremely easy to lose interest, but the jokes come fast in AD&D, and while we laugh we still see the study group act in a way that’s reflective of their true behaviors.  

Will Community suffer the hipster syndrome too? If and when the show gains the immense popularity it deserves, will Dan Harmon crack under the pressure? I think not.  He’s shown his capability these first two seasons, and he’s too arrogant to let it drag out long enough for it to become bad.  The point is, Community is a great example of the high caliber your half hour comedy could be, so why should you expect anything less?