Community vs. Cheers - Essay Example

Community vs. Cheers NBC’s Thursday night lineup has been applauded for its excellent ensemble comedies for nearly three decades. The first of these shows was Cheers, a sitcom set in a bar in Boston. It featured a cast of mostly blue-collar characters who spent all their time hanging out together in a bar called Cheers. A more recent addition to the Thursday lineup is Community. It also features an ensemble cast of friends: A group of students at Greendale Community College. On the surface, these shows seem very similar. However, the styles of the two shows are actually quite different. Cheers was a traditional sitcom that followed the old rules for TV comedies, while Community is perhaps one of the most ground-breaking shows ever to air. The two shows do have some striking similarities. The apparent lead characters seem very similar at first glance. Cheers has Sam Malone, the former baseball player who owns Cheers. Sam is a little sleazy and an unrepentant womanizer, but he is a good man at heart. Community has Jeff Winger, the even sleazier former lawyer who has to attend a community college after he is exposed as having a fake degree. Like Sam, Jeff becomes the leader everyone depends on. Cheers has Diane Chambers, the prissy, self-righteous blonde whom Sam hires on the first episode as a waitress because he wants to sleep with her. Community has Britta, another self-righteous blonde who is nearly as prissy as Diane. Like Cheers, Community begins with the “alpha male” character trying to sleep with the blonde. Jeff tricks Britta into joining his fake study group, to which she invites the diverse characters that make up the cast of the show. Each of the two shows has a naïve, “dumb” character: Community’s Troy corresponds to Cheers’s Coach and his replacement, Woody. Each has a “mom” character: Che­ers’s mean-spirited Carla and Community’s passive-aggressively nice Shirley. Each has a “blowhard” character: Community’s obnoxious Pierce Hawthorne and Cheers’s know-it-all Cliff Claven. Both shows are about the deep friendships between unlikely groups of friends. Both shows use somewhat flat, two-dimensional characters, and both shows make these characters seem human and appealing to the audience in different ways. Both use a mixture of long-running plotlines and episodic plots. Yet these shows have more differences than similarities. Cheers is filmed like a play in front of an audience with the three-camera format that has long been standard for sitcoms. Community is filmed in the modern style like a movie, in a single-camera format without an audience or laugh track. Filming style is not what makes the shows so different from one another, however. Community is best known for the clever way it “breaks the fourth wall,” the invisible wall through which the audience views the characters as their stories unfold. Traditionally, sitcom characters are supposed to go about their lives as if they are real people, unaware that they are fictional and being watched by the audience. This is the way that Cheers works, and this is the way things have always been done on television up until recent years. On Community, the characters verge on being self-aware, communicating to the audience with a wink and a nod that they know it’s not real, yet they still come across as loveable and believable characters. Despite the apparent standard “handsome white man as leader” and “beautiful blonde as love interest” cliché, over time the viewer begins to see that the key characters on Community are not Jeff and Britta. The most important character is Abed Nadir, a young Arab-American with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of autism. Abed is fixated on movies and television, and he sees his life as fictional plot. Each episode parodies a particular movie or genre of movies, but in a much more clever and subtle way than other TV shows have done before. Abed interprets everything that happens around him through pop-culture references, and the show the audience sees is filtered through Abed’s fantasy life. This allows the writing of the show to be self-aware. There are numerous jokes about the plot of the show being derivative of other shows, and references to the movies or shows that the plot of the episode is mimicking that week. The first episode references the movie The Breakfast Club, and later episodes draw from mafia movies, post-apocalyptic films, and even zombie movies. At one point Abed refers to Jeff and Britta as “our Sam and Diane.” The long running storyline on Cheers is the question of whether Sam and Diane would get together. This is one of the things about the show that was unique when it first aired. By the time of Community, this kind of relationship has become formulaic, and the show plays off of this idea occasionally, without giving in to the plot device as a crutch in the series. Community also has somewhat more intelligent and absurdist humor, including peripheral characters like “Post-ironic Disco Stu.” Cheers is an exceptionally smart and well-written comedy compared to other traditional sitcoms. It was groundbreaking in many ways, and dozens of shows that came after it tried to copy its style. It does, however, contain many TV clichés. Unlike Community, which uses clichés ironically, Cheers uses clichés earnestly. The jokes in Cheers all come from within the show itself, and it doesn’t require the extensive knowledge of pop-culture that Community does. Cheers and Community are both clever and funny shows, but only Community truly breaks the rules of television to create something new. While Community is more likely to be considered a cult hit among TV lovers, since it isn’t as popular as Cheers was, both shows are likely to be considered classics for years to come; in fact, Cheers already is. Name Comparison and Contrast Essay Title: Community vs. Cheers: Two Comedies, Two Styles Thesis: The TV shows Cheers and Community are ensemble comedies that seem similar in some ways, but Cheers was a traditional sitcom that followed the old rules for TV comedies, while Community is perhaps one of the most ground-breaking shows ever to air. Topic Sentence 1: On the surface, these shows seem very similar. Topic Sentence 2: However, the styles of the two shows are actually quite different. Body Paragraph 1: The two shows do have some striking similarities. The apparent lead characters seem very similar at first glance. Cheers has Sam Malone, the former baseball player who owns Cheers. Sam is a little sleazy and an unrepentant womanizer, but he is a good man at heart. Community has Jeff Winger, the even sleazier former lawyer who has to attend a community college after he is exposed as having a fake degree. Like Sam, Jeff becomes the leader everyone depends on. Cheers has Diane Chambers, the prissy, self-righteous blonde whom Sam hires on the first episode as a waitress because he wants to sleep with her. Community has Britta, another self-righteous blonde who is nearly as prissy as Diane. Like Cheers, Community begins with the “alpha male” character trying to sleep with the blonde. Jeff tricks Britta into joining his fake study group, to which she invites the diverse characters that make up the cast of the show. Read More