Community

2009cult TV show / fandom memeclassic

Community is an American sitcom created by Dan Harmon that premiered on NBC on September 17, 2009 and became a cult favorite for its dense meta-humor, pop culture parodies, and the fan rallying cry of "six seasons and a movie." The show, set at fictional Greendale Community College, spawned meme catchphrases like #darkesttimeline and helped define online fandom activism during the early 2010s.

tv show memesfandom discourse memescatchphrase memeslate 2000s memesfandom hype memes

Overview

Community is a half-hour American sitcom created by Dan Harmon that first aired on NBC on September 17, 2009 and ran for six seasons across two networks1. The show follows disbarred lawyer Jeff Winger, played by Joel McHale, who enrolls at the fictional Greendale Community College and ends up in a study group of misfits including Britta, Abed, Troy, Annie, Shirley and Pierce2. Its style leans hard into meta-humor, breaking whole episodes into parodies of action movies, documentaries, Christmas specials and video games.

Beyond the show itself, Community became one of the earliest examples of a TV series where the fandom's inside jokes turned into full-blown internet memes. Catchphrases from specific episodes, most famously "the darkest timeline" from the Season 3 episode "Remedial Chaos Theory," spilled off NBC and onto Twitter and Tumblr as shorthand for any real-world disaster3. The show also popularized the fan rallying cry "six seasons and a movie," originally a joke line from Abed defending a bad show, that fans then chanted through cancellations, revivals and streaming deals.

The cast that Harmon assembled included E! host Joel McHale, Mad Men's Alison Brie, Danny Pudi, Gillian Jacobs, Donald Glover, Ken Jeong from The Hangover and Oscar winner Chevy Chase4. Danny Pudi's Abed, an aspiring filmmaker who narrates his life like a TV show, gave the writers a built-in excuse to break the fourth wall, which is a big reason Community keeps getting cited as one of the most meme-ready sitcoms of its era5.

How It Spread

In September 2010, ahead of the Season 2 premiere, the show's team seeded 14 fictional Twitter accounts written in the voices of the main cast, whose scripted back-and-forth acted as a prequel to the new episodes5. By July 2012 the official Community Facebook page had passed 1.2 million likes and the show's Twitter account sat above 120,000 followers, unusual numbers for a low-rated network sitcom at the time5.

Sony Pictures Television fired Harmon as showrunner in May 2012 and replaced him with David Guarascio and Moses Port, a decision Harmon said he first learned about through social media before publishing a Tumblr post that racked up more than 12,000 notes and pushed his name to the top of Twitter trends5. Fans revolted against the Harmon-less fourth season, and when he was reinstated for Season 5, the premiere aired on January 2, 2014 with the finale following on April 17, 20145. NBC announced the cancellation on May 9, 2014, and within an hour fans had tweeted the hashtag #darkesttimeline more than 8,000 times as an in-joke protest5.

On June 30, 2014, Yahoo Screen tweeted #CommunityLives and picked the show up for a 13-episode sixth season, finally getting the fandom halfway to their "six seasons and a movie" chant, with Sony president Zack Van Amburg telling The Hollywood Reporter that a movie was a real possibility5. The revival cemented Community's status as a template case study for online fan campaigns and turned its slogans into recurring memes about cancelled shows in general.

How to Use This Meme

The Community meme surface is basically its stock of quotable in-jokes. People typically drop "we're in the darkest timeline" as a caption on screenshots of bad news, election results, sports upsets or general everyday chaos, often paired with a still of Abed in his felt goatee3. "Six seasons and a movie" gets recycled every time a fandom starts a campaign to save a cancelled show, and reaction GIFs of Troy walking into an apartment full of pizza fire, Annie surprised, or the entire cast air-conditioning school paintball war are common on Twitter and Reddit threads about any absurd escalation.

Cultural Impact

Community pioneered the modern TV fandom cycle where fans turn scripted lines into hashtags and organize save-our-show campaigns online. The Harmon firing and reinstatement was covered as a live social media event, with his blog response driving the show back into the news cycle and 12,000-plus Tumblr notes acting as proof-of-fandom5. The Yahoo Screen deal in 2014 was one of the earliest and most-discussed streaming resurrections of a broadcast comedy, prompting outlets to point to Community as evidence that engaged Twitter fandoms could keep a cancelled show alive5.

The show's legacy is also tied to a 2018 public reckoning between Harmon and former Community writer Megan Ganz. On December 31, 2017, Harmon tweeted that 2017 had been "the Year of the Asshole" and Ganz quote-tweeted back the next day asking him to "be more specific," adding "redemption follows allocution"7. Harmon apologized on Twitter for treating Ganz "like garbage" during her time on Community, and later recorded a longer apology on his podcast Harmontown that Ganz publicly accepted, an exchange Vice and The AV Club both covered as a rare example of an accountability conversation playing out on the same platform where the misconduct's aftermath first surfaced89.

Frequently Asked Questions

Community

2009cult TV show / fandom memeclassic

Community is an American sitcom created by Dan Harmon that premiered on NBC on September 17, 2009 and became a cult favorite for its dense meta-humor, pop culture parodies, and the fan rallying cry of "six seasons and a movie." The show, set at fictional Greendale Community College, spawned meme catchphrases like #darkesttimeline and helped define online fandom activism during the early 2010s.

tv show memes fandom discourse memes catchphrase memes late 2000s memes fandom hype memes

Overview

Community is a half-hour American sitcom created by Dan Harmon that first aired on NBC on September 17, 2009 and ran for six seasons across two networks1. The show follows disbarred lawyer Jeff Winger, played by Joel McHale, who enrolls at the fictional Greendale Community College and ends up in a study group of misfits including Britta, Abed, Troy, Annie, Shirley and Pierce2. Its style leans hard into meta-humor, breaking whole episodes into parodies of action movies, documentaries, Christmas specials and video games.

Beyond the show itself, Community became one of the earliest examples of a TV series where the fandom's inside jokes turned into full-blown internet memes. Catchphrases from specific episodes, most famously "the darkest timeline" from the Season 3 episode "Remedial Chaos Theory," spilled off NBC and onto Twitter and Tumblr as shorthand for any real-world disaster3. The show also popularized the fan rallying cry "six seasons and a movie," originally a joke line from Abed defending a bad show, that fans then chanted through cancellations, revivals and streaming deals.

The cast that Harmon assembled included E! host Joel McHale, Mad Men's Alison Brie, Danny Pudi, Gillian Jacobs, Donald Glover, Ken Jeong from The Hangover and Oscar winner Chevy Chase4. Danny Pudi's Abed, an aspiring filmmaker who narrates his life like a TV show, gave the writers a built-in excuse to break the fourth wall, which is a big reason Community keeps getting cited as one of the most meme-ready sitcoms of its era5.

How It Spread

In September 2010, ahead of the Season 2 premiere, the show's team seeded 14 fictional Twitter accounts written in the voices of the main cast, whose scripted back-and-forth acted as a prequel to the new episodes5. By July 2012 the official Community Facebook page had passed 1.2 million likes and the show's Twitter account sat above 120,000 followers, unusual numbers for a low-rated network sitcom at the time5.

Sony Pictures Television fired Harmon as showrunner in May 2012 and replaced him with David Guarascio and Moses Port, a decision Harmon said he first learned about through social media before publishing a Tumblr post that racked up more than 12,000 notes and pushed his name to the top of Twitter trends5. Fans revolted against the Harmon-less fourth season, and when he was reinstated for Season 5, the premiere aired on January 2, 2014 with the finale following on April 17, 20145. NBC announced the cancellation on May 9, 2014, and within an hour fans had tweeted the hashtag #darkesttimeline more than 8,000 times as an in-joke protest5.

On June 30, 2014, Yahoo Screen tweeted #CommunityLives and picked the show up for a 13-episode sixth season, finally getting the fandom halfway to their "six seasons and a movie" chant, with Sony president Zack Van Amburg telling The Hollywood Reporter that a movie was a real possibility5. The revival cemented Community's status as a template case study for online fan campaigns and turned its slogans into recurring memes about cancelled shows in general.

How to Use This Meme

The Community meme surface is basically its stock of quotable in-jokes. People typically drop "we're in the darkest timeline" as a caption on screenshots of bad news, election results, sports upsets or general everyday chaos, often paired with a still of Abed in his felt goatee3. "Six seasons and a movie" gets recycled every time a fandom starts a campaign to save a cancelled show, and reaction GIFs of Troy walking into an apartment full of pizza fire, Annie surprised, or the entire cast air-conditioning school paintball war are common on Twitter and Reddit threads about any absurd escalation.

Cultural Impact

Community pioneered the modern TV fandom cycle where fans turn scripted lines into hashtags and organize save-our-show campaigns online. The Harmon firing and reinstatement was covered as a live social media event, with his blog response driving the show back into the news cycle and 12,000-plus Tumblr notes acting as proof-of-fandom5. The Yahoo Screen deal in 2014 was one of the earliest and most-discussed streaming resurrections of a broadcast comedy, prompting outlets to point to Community as evidence that engaged Twitter fandoms could keep a cancelled show alive5.

The show's legacy is also tied to a 2018 public reckoning between Harmon and former Community writer Megan Ganz. On December 31, 2017, Harmon tweeted that 2017 had been "the Year of the Asshole" and Ganz quote-tweeted back the next day asking him to "be more specific," adding "redemption follows allocution"7. Harmon apologized on Twitter for treating Ganz "like garbage" during her time on Community, and later recorded a longer apology on his podcast Harmontown that Ganz publicly accepted, an exchange Vice and The AV Club both covered as a rare example of an accountability conversation playing out on the same platform where the misconduct's aftermath first surfaced89.

Frequently Asked Questions