A Postmodern Masterpiece…

4 min readAug 17, 2022

Postmodernism explained simply…? Let’s look further.

How does ‘Community’ come into this? Well…

‘Community’ is an American television sitcom, created by Dan Harmon, which ran for six seasons and aired on NBC, and later, on Yahoo! Screen, from 2009 to 2015. Set in a fictional town in Colorado at a community college, the series follows seven students from different diverse backgrounds, who come together for a Spanish study group and form real friendships.[1] The show is known to make heavy use on pop culture references and have a play on genre and narrative in a way which can be viewed as postmodern. Community consistently questions the truth of modern narratives so much that traditional expectations and narratives are flipped, and the critique of meta-narrative is at play. Mike Rugnetta suggests that the sitcom ‘Community’ might be perfectly post-modern television[2] and being a postmodern masterpiece, it relies on themes, techniques, and literary devices such as irony, parody, and intertextuality to convey its critique.

The question:

Is the TV show Community a postmodern masterpiece?

What kind of narratives emerge in the place of grand narratives in the tv show Community and what literary devices does postmodernism rely on as a means of critique?

First, let’s understand the meaning behind postmodernism and what its role is in contemporary media.

The term postmodernism itself is indefinable, however it can be described as the process of critiquing established ideological and historical norms and destabilising those beliefs by employing concepts and literary devices to question what we perceive as ‘truth’[3]. Jean-Francois Lyotard, a French philosopher, described post-modernism as “an incredulity towards meta-narratives”[4], which are the overall narratives that categorise other narratives, such as capitalism or religion. To give an understanding on what role post-modernism has in contemporary media, Rugnetta explains it simply that many post-modern works are built on reference, pastiche, genre, agnosticism and rather than the betrayal of expectation, but more so question whether expectations are even important in the first place[5].

Community is well-known as one of the closest pieces of work to portray post-modernism and the use of encompassing many forms of grand narratives. For example, Rugnetta identifies that ‘Community’ is sceptical and playfully judgemental of culture are occasionally hostile to metanarratives. For example, the show replaces the meta-narrative of family with a study group and the meta-narrative of education through a dysfunctional book-learning setting.[6]

A literary device consistently used in ‘Community’ is irony in the form of ironic sexism as well as diversity representation- or misrepresentation we should say. Let’s look at ironic sexism to start with. It is basically when the writers of the show write jokes which are blatantly sexist, everyone in the audience knows it’s sexist and is in on the fact that treating woman in that particular way, is horrible and not socially acceptable.[7] Community portrays sexist irony in many ways throughout the season, writing in very stereotypical scenes and with women doing sexy things, and ultimately objectifying them. All for post-modernism, right?

To drive its post-modern message further, ‘Community’ is recognised for its pop culture references through the use of intertextuality and parody. The show mixes various genres, environments, and narratives such as sci-fi, the western, and horror to name a few, and references and imitates several pieces of work throughout the series to produce comedic effect. The clip below provides examples and is a great side-by-side overview of how the show uses these literary devices to its advantage and as a post-modern device.[8]

Community and its Movie References Side by Side. Credit: Yaron Baruch

In A Death of the Author, Roland Barth says that “the text is not a line of works releasing a single theological meaning, but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of the original, blend and clash”.[9] There are television shows out there that are seen to be a post-modern reference, such as Family, the Simpsons, and Arrested Development to name a few, however ‘Community’ is known to be successfully many levels ahead as a post-modern work as it absorbs, comments on and challenges the legitimacy the of almost all meta-narratives and all the elements in the multi-dimensional space which Barth suggests.[10] Because of this and its use of many literary devices and tactics, ‘Community’ is renowned at being one of the most influential post-modern masterpieces in society today.