I know I’m ten years late to the party, but the season 1, episode 9 storyline in Community where Jeff and Annie compete in a school debate is one of the best pieces of television writing I’ve ever seen. It is an economical, dramatic, ironic lynchpin that, in a few words, stages the show’s thesis.
Jeff is a sleazeball disbarred lawyer in his thirties whose exploits in the series to this point are mostly shallow sexual pursuits. His major crises — losing his condo and sleeping out of his car — have not really forced him to grow in the expected ways. Seeing that Jeff won’t necessarily use this humbling experience to become a more sympathetic or less materialistic person, his friends conspire to steal his beloved sink fixtures out of his repossessed condo in order to inspire him to regain his former position in life, shallow as it may be.
Annie is an 18-year old wallflower with a huge sexual confidence problem. In the very previous episode, she is so incapable of confessing her feelings for a boy that she fakes appendicitis to get his attention — a Freudian degree of repression. She later runs out of the hospital pantsless intending to stop a romantic encounter, only to falter and demand that the boy merely return her grandmother’s quilt before making out with another woman on it. It is painful to watch. Her sexual repression perhaps maps onto a larger failure of self-confidence that has inhibited her in school and life.
Jeff gets roped into joining Annie on the school’s team for a debate competition, where they’re huge underdogs. The community college they represent is, from the series’ first words, the refuge of every type of deeply flawed person. Bringing these characters into the light of self-acceptance and then growth is the show’s mandate.
Jeff and Annie compete against City College, a way better school that represents a kind of elitist purity in the world of the show. Their star debater is an almost obnoxiously sympathetic fellow in a wheelchair, and our characters despise him. The debate topic is literally whether man is good or evil. The elitist goody-goodys must argue that man is good, and the oddball fuckups must argue that man is evil. The stakes are already dramatically aligned.
In the process of preparing for the debate, Annie and Jeff both grow in surprising ways. Annie, it turns out, has some serious confident energy the moment she steps into the debate arena. This in turn attracts her to Jeff, who has a native, if somewhat repugnant, confidence in bamboozling people from his lawyer days. The age difference between the two is seriously problematic, but at the same time, that this attraction is rooted in a kinship on the debate stage, rather than childish crushes or objectification, represents real growth for both of them. It is also, because of the real moral complexity of the age difference, an unexpected match to the audience.
The debate itself is an impressive little moral survey in quick sound bites. Where the episode knocks it out of the park, though, is in the debate’s last moments.
The wheelchair-bound star debate for City College has one final rebuttal, and he knows he’s losing. In a fit of inspiration, he tears up his notes, pushes his wheelchair as fast as it will go at Jeff, and throws himself across the stage in a moment of visual absurdism that sees him almost graze the auditorium rafters in slow motion. The room is breathless.
Jeff catches him. The boy, still in Jeff’s arms, turns to the judges and says, “He hates me, but he caught me! Man is good!”
Following stunner with stunner, Annie grabs Jeff to kiss him. Jeff spins on his heels, drops the boy, and reciprocates the passionate embrace. Annie then lets go of Jeff, turns to the judges and points at the cripple lying face-down on the stage, saying, “He’s horny, so he dropped him! Man is evil!”
The underdogs win.
It is such a tight, expressive, loaded sequence, I’m still in awe. At this point, the debate takes expression not through man in the abstract, but these characters in particular, and the series uses them to punch its philosophic thesis: Jeff is not a good man, but he will catch the cripple. Jeff will kiss an eighteen-year-old, but when he does it is out of the most pure sense of respect that he’s shown for anyone in the series so far. Annie sees with full clarity that Jeff is not a good man, but she loves him in that moment in part because she sees in him a kinship through the same pursuits that are now liberating her character. She knows that tempting Jeff to drop the cripple in order to win a competition is, in a way, sharing in his callousness. But still she seizes that connection, not with fully liberated libido, but with a liberated spirit that can begin, at least, to access its libido. The moment is a repudiation of the moral dichotomy altogether, as the victors celebrate over the defeated binary still lying face-down on the stage before them.
They are each, in short, neither good nor evil, but in engaging their flaws they find their noblest moments. I think “engagement” is the correct word here — Helene Cixous lamented once that English does not have a word with the same with/against connotation as the French “contre”, but I think “engage” comes close, as we engage in war and we engage in marriage. We embrace and reorient, we dance with our flaws, we find a way to acknowledge the evils in our character that have led us to some low position in life, and then use them in a more constructive way. Every characteristic can be deployed in healthy or unhealthy ways, and we can choose between them if we first understand and accept that characteristic. We cannot simply renounce our flaws, but must, rather, engage them.
It is, in a few words, both a satisfying philosophic statement of the show’s thesis, a breakthrough moment of character growth, a dramatic seesaw confrontation on the stage, and an excellent bit of verbal and physical comedy. I marvel at what stars aligned in that writer’s mind to make it so tight and synchronous. It sits in my mind as perhaps the best bit of television writing I can remember, in either drama or comedy.
In this way, Community is a much more morally complex show than its close cousin, Schitt’s Creek — for while both are about flawed people getting better through their engagement in a community, Community doesn’t offer us any binaries to see its world through. In Schitt’s Creek, the bad people essentially get better by going and staying among the good people and unlearning their badnesses. That’s it, pretty much. The good people are slouchy and silly, but they code as morally good in all the important ways. In Community, the show takes the bold posture that the community college is, well, kind of full of bad people. It doesn’t romanticize or sanctify the hoi polloi. To be in this community college, they have probably failed themselves in life in some serious way. They must become better. But, the show insists, their growth will not be through rejecting the traits that brought them here. When Jeff tries to live in poverty, it doesn’t enlighten him. He must learn to engage with his materialism in ways that inspire him to live a better life. If he’s a sleazy bamboozler at heart, maybe he can use that to find a wholesome respect and kinship with a young woman in need of that trait in her life.
And that’s the posture of the show itself, dramatized in a little bit of debate competition, expressed through its characters’ growth in that moment, and underwritten by a tight bit of physical comedy. He hates me, but he caught me. He’s horny, so he dropped him. Thirteen words. Leap, drop, embrace, engage, reveal.
