3 Ways Community Has Ruined My Life

2009 was a big year. Not only was it the last year of the glorious decade that was the noughties, with all of its...stuff, but it was also the year that we lost a lot of great people; artists who touched the hearts of millions and were beloved by all. We all still miss the master of 80's teen rom coms: John Hughes.

Other notable deaths included an albino cuttlefish in a shoddily crafted human costume.

With every death, however, there comes rebirth, and although we had to say goodbye to some, our sorrow was stemmed by the release of something so perfect, something so ground-breakingly awesome, that our lives would be forever altered. 2009 was the year Community first aired.

At last, the second coming!

I was only introduced to the show this year so I'm pretty late to the party but I think those of you who have also been graced by the touch of this genius will agree when I say that Community is possibly the greatest TV show ever made. If you, like me until so recently, have managed to miss this perfect storm of entertainment, please feel free to go watch it now. We'll wait.

But heed this warning well, dear reader, for once Pandora's box has opened it may never shut again and life as you knew it shall cease to be. To be touched by the glory of Community means to be changed forever, and those changes are not always good ones; something I had to learn the hard way. In order to save you from the same pain and to give you the chance to steel yourself against this unstoppable force of awesome akin to a televisual Ark of the Covenant ghost-splosion, I would like to draw to your attention three things that may never be the same again once you hit play:

Community giveth and Community taketh away.

TV

Picture this: you're walking down the street one day when you get yourself a hankering for some pizza. Now plain old readily-available gutter pizza ain't going to cover this hunger so you decide to at long last take up your good friend (Jim, we'll call him Jim) Jim's advice and try out this place called Domino's or something. 

Scrabble's?

One sweet, gooey mouthful and you're hooked. You devour all 14 inches (that's right ladies) of cheesy goodness in seconds, but the victory is short lived. You realise that after tasting something this good, how could you ever go back to the old, ignorant ways of scraping unwanted cheese off the cobbles like everyone else? I think you get the jist I'm going for. Now replace that analogy with hard drugs.

They never put enough drugs on my pizza...

Community is the heroin to Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones' crack, Adventure Time's ecstasy and Big Bang Theory's Pritt Stick in a sandwich bag. All other shows are just a gateway to this end point. I've raved a little too long about how great Community is (did I mention how great it is!?) but in all seriousness it's not like other shows. It's so meta it hurts and the references come thicker and faster than is possible to keep up, meaning you spend most of each episode trying to remember where you saw that last thing from.

Tron?

So when you go back to normal TV or film, you realise you're thinking "I remember when they referenced that...oo, I should go watch more." That's a cycle that's hard to break out of.

Friends

Remember back in the late nineties/early noughties when everyone watched Friends and we all insisted we could fit our own band of unholy misfits into that group dynamic? Suzie was Monica because she has to have everything on her plate organised by the visible light spectrum and Craig was Joey because his parents dropped him as a baby. Jim was Ted from How I Met Your Mother because he's a dick and he's not allowed in our group any more after selling Craig's car for drug pizza money.

Fuck you, Jim/Ted.

You can't do that with Community. No, not because any of the characters are particularly unique; hell, the show actually actively makes fun of the fact that the group is an ideally selected group of misfits that cover every necessary sitcom tick-box. You can't compare your friends to the characters in Community because your friends aren't good enough. Observe:

Troy and Abed have the single most adorable bromance in the history of everything cute, ever. No real life pairing of man, woman or beast can possibly live up to that. Sadly that does mean that, just like comparing your sex life to German shizer orgy porn, your friends no longer meet the high standards of friendship that have been set by not just this pair, but the whole group. Would your friends hold a Dungeons and Dragons tournament just to help a depressed fat guy learn to believe in himself again? I didn't think so.

Although I'm sure some of our friends can be just as creepy.

Speaking of sex...

Sex

Hey, guess what's fun. Sex. I know right? It's great, free (usually) and best enjoyed with others. What's not to love?

Chlamydia.

That said, I made a huge mistake. I thought it would be really nice for myself and my lovely girlfiend to have yet another TV show that we could watch together. Sadly she's almost as geeky as me, although in a more cute-geeky way rather than angrily-passionate-geeky way, which means she has fallen in love with Community. Hard. Heh, hard.

This leaves us with quite a dilemma. Amongst our busy work schedule, we only have so much time to spare for extra-curricular activities, which means we often have a difficult decision to make. Community or shaggen?

Choose!

I'll leave you to guess which one usually wins out. I have to go take a cold shower and order Season 3.