Community vs. Cheers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Community vs. Cheers - Essay ExampleIt featured a cast of loosely blue-collar characters who spent all their snip hanging out together in a bar called Cheers. A more recent addition to the atomic number 90 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 approximately 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 small(a) sleazy and an unrepentant womanizer, barely he is a good man at heart. Community has Jeff Winger, the even sleazier former lawyer who has to attend a fellowship 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. Each of the two shows has a nave, dumb character Communitys Troy corresponds to Cheerss jalopy and his replacement, Woody.... 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 earreach 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 kn own for the clever way it breaks the fourth argue, 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 universe 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 its 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 cliche, 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 Aspergers 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