sciatrix

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...which means I'm back to mainlining Community. I trailed off watching it midway through S4 when it was actually coming out, and I never picked it back up again. So now that I'm watching early S5, I'm watching totally new material for me.

And okay, okay, okay, I'm like five years late to the party, but making Jeff take on a teaching role at Greendale? Fucking genius, oh my god. It's so fun watching the shift from student to teacher mentality, and watching people negotiate the new role of being an Authority Figure at the same time as they're learning how teaching actually works.

Also I got to watch as the Dean wailed internally in French song that Jeff wasn't paying attention to the Dean's excitable journey into learning Excel, and T went from casually paying vague attention to what was going on to zeroing in on my laptop like a dog who has just heard an extremely confusing whistle.

...and all over again, I'm struck by just how unusually good Abed was/is, as autistic characters go. I think he is still the only character I have ever seen who would tone up the robot impersonation when it was useful, or who was cheerfully capable of stepping into an acting role and putting on a totally different persona when it was fun, or who was insecure not about who he was, but about whether people would stick around and find who he was interesting.

I ought to go back to watching The Good Doctor, come to think of it. But--Abed's special, and part of why Abed is special is that Abed's not particularly special, but his perspective is so clearly formed by someone writing out rather than someone looking in. And I still haven't seen anything remotely like that in the--hell, it's been almost ten years since Community kicked off. People didn't know what emoji were yet. It was revolutionary then and it still is, for all it's a flawed show (but then, what isn't?).