After reading Mittell’s “A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory”, which emphasizes the negotiation between specificity and generality with genre studies, I wanted to know how this concept would be applied to Community, one of my favorite TV shows. Community is often categorized as a sitcom (or at least a satire of one) and follows the main character, Jeff Winger, a lawyer who is disbarred for faking his undergraduate degree and must enroll in a “community college” in order to resume his career. He is surrounded by a motley crew of students, who fit into various narrative archetypes, ranging from the tense perfectionist to the arrogant athlete.
Despite being referred to by popular media outlets as a sitcom and/or comedy, the show incorporates various non-comedic genres, structuring the narrative around tropes and conventions from TV, movies, and pop culture in general. There is so much going on within Community that placing the show under the label of a singular genre would be an overgeneralization. In order to apply media genres to the show, I decided to follow Mittell’s idea of narrowing the analysis to focus on a “specific aspect of a genre’s definition, meaning, history, or cultural value”, which avoids the “problems of overgeneralization that have been typical of more traditional genre studies, as well as acknowledge that genres are too multifaceted and broad to be understood in their totality”(70). In particular, I think a significant component of genre analysis within Community is its use of cinematic language and cultural references. Not only is Community about the semiotics of the sitcom and the tropes of almost every single genre, but it touches on the shared culture that the audience brings to the show.
Since it would be challenging to pick up every single allusion to literature and pop culture, every viewer is able to find their own path through the series. Each episode is a unique riddle, which allows the audience to find personal significance in the content. By engaging the audience through various cultural references, Community reifies sitcom conventions and connects them to the lives of viewers themselves.
