There’s a certain subsection of Jeff/Britta shippers who are these people who poured way too much energy into identifying with the asshole straight man early season 1 version of Britta who concoct these elaborate ideas about how Britta was “derailed” due to misogyny or was ruined so J/A could happen and its like bro will you please chill. Community premiered during the early days of fan engagement via Twitter and Dan Harmon and the staff writers paid close attention to reactions to the early episodes so they could figure out how to optimize the show.
Troy and Abed got big reactions so they downplayed the Troy/Pierce dynamic and we got TroBed.
Jeff and Annie really popped in episode 6, so they tested the waters with Debate 109, it got positive reactions, and J/A became central to the show.
Britta was consistently unpopular until they started playing her up as kind of an awkward fuck up rather than trapping her in the stereotypical woman-in-a-sitcom role where she just lectured everyone for being funny.
It was around the early-midpoint of the season that these shifts started happening and its not a coincidence that people pretty commonly say episodes 7-9 are where the show gets good.
Honestly in its first 5 or 6 episodes, Community is good, but its kind of generic and bland. Its not that different from Outsourced or any of the other sitcoms at the time that would last a year or so and then fade away. The changes made to its characters and their relationships are what propelled it to the heights it eventually reached.
It just seems so bizarre and boring to me to get hung up on those very early episodes and then sit through 5 and a half seasons of the show Community became, hating it for not being what you want the whole time.
To add on to this, there’s also something fans tend to miss if they don’t have the DVDs or listen to the commentaries on the DVDs:
1) Dan admits in the commentary for pilot that Britta as a character literally had no motivation. She was nothing more than “the prize.” That was her whole purpose. She didn’t even have a motivation. She had no character. And worse…Dan even to this day admits that he doesn’t know if Britta believed Jeff’s lie about him being a Spanish tutor.
To give you an idea how bad this is (considering that Britta was originally supposed to be the female lead of the ensemble): Annie and Shirley actually had more character motivation and the writers’ room knew their motivations while writing the pilot while Britta was nothing more than a plot point. In fact, Dan says in the commentary for the pilot that Annie was originally set up to be Jeff’s antagonist for the series, which you can clearly see in the pilot and the first couple of episodes.
2) It was the women in the writers’ room who were behind the change in Britta’s character in mid-season one and beyond. The *HATED* Britta. They told Dan that if they knew Britta as she existed in the first half of season one in real life,they would avoid the shit out of her. They were the ones that made her a kind of loveable loser.
3) For anyone who things Britta got dumbed down or turned into a slacktivist fake, clearly didn’t watch the second episode where Britta flat out admits she’s a slacktivist fake who often talks out of her ass. Imagine the second episode of the series in Season 3 where people say Britta is the most flanderized. Do you think that would be all that out of place in Season 3? Now take “Science of Illusion” (the one where Britta decides to play a practical joke on Chang and it spirals out of control) from Season 1 and put it in Season 3. It’s a perfect fit! What I’m saying is, if either one of these Season 1 episodes were filmed and aired in Season 3 instead, people would be claiming that Dan was Britta-bashing.
The thing is, Britta had elements of being a loveable fuck-up underneath the humorless straight-man cipher “man prize” that existed for most of Season 1. I often wonder if people who look at Season 1 Britta as if that version of the character was the best version of Britta were watching a completely different show.
couldn’t remember the name of the band the cranberries or any of their songs the other day so i had to google “and abed hired an irish singer” so i could click through google results to find out what song they were parodying there and/or what band wrote it, absolute sitcom brainrot
