At what point is it fair to criticize a television show for it not being exactly what you want it to be? I asked myself this question earlier today reading editor Becky Lang’s article The Problem With Community, which basically, and rather bizarrely, takes NBC’s wildly inventive cult comedy to task for not adhering to some strict code of conduct for community college believability. Regardless of the fact that comedy as a entire genre often has to stretch the realm of what’s normally accepted to function, or the fact that now’s an awfully odd time to knock down Community when it’s barely getting by with one of the smallest viewerships in network television, there’s a lot about Becky’s article that misses the true core of what Community attempts and aims to offer television viewers on a weekly basis.

1. Community is exactly what network comedy needs

There’s not exactly a shortage of good comedies on TV right now (Parks & Rec and 30 Rock obviously come to mind), but Community continuously manages to be the single most fearless and boundlessly creative show on television today. While it’s true that the show has largely shifted away (although not entirely) from its initial community college premise, this is an evolution that actually works in the show’s favor as it largely lets the writers avoid hackneyed “classroom shenanigans” tropes. Instead, Community has essentially shifted into something much more difficult to define, at once restless with creative energy and completely dedicated to challenging and skewering the conventions of modern sitcoms and pop culture as a whole. This was always a part of the show’s DNA, or else Abed’s character wouldn’t have been there from the beginning. In a country where the recycled sex puns of Two and a Half Men are what the majority of the nation turn to when they’re in need of a laugh, how refreshing is it see a show completely buck expectations and clichés and turn in scripts as varied and clever as last year’s animated Christmas special or the completely bonkers “life as My Dinner With Andre” episode from late last year?

Community frequently references pop culture (a crucial component to how Abed interacts with people, and this show is ALL ABOUT communication) but it’s never done in a Shrek way where the mere mention of a pop culture commodity serves as the joke. Community uses convention to heighten existing elements of the story, such as last season’s documentary episode, which took cues from mockumentary shows likes The Office and Modern Family. If there was one episode that felt like a pure parody (still a funny one), it was the mafia-referencing battle for chicken fingers from season 1 which was mentioned positively in the article, so go figure.

My main point here is that it seems confounding that a creative writing blog would lambast the show that’s inarguably the most experimental on TV.

2. Community has a lot of heart

Community is and has always been about broken lonely people. If the premise of these mix of strangers spending so much time together doesn’t feel credible any more, step back and examine who else these characters really have in their lives. Shirley has a baby and a husband now, but it’s actually slowly becoming a strain on her place in the group, and she originally came in as a divorced woman looking to start fresh. Community explores issues in modern relationships that most shows don’t even attempt to touch, mainly the issue of co-dependency. The most recent episode, “Remedial Chaos Theory,” probably the best in the show’s brief history creatively used alternate timelines to isolate and showcase the way the politics and changing dynamics of friendship altered the course of an evening’s fate. These are complicated relationships, often full of petty squabbling and strategic shift forces the way real interactions are, but underneath every insult and newly formed alliance rests a group of people who are looking for friends and slowly learning how to accept the good things that can happen when you genuinely let people in. People accuse Community of having too much of a cool-kid ironic vibe, but if you really examine the motivations of the characters, chiefly Joel Mchale’s puppet master Jeff, you begin to realize how much this show quietly suggest dropping defense mechanisms and letting people in. At the end of the most recent episode, there’s a moment of unabashed joy that comes only when all of the characters quit trying to play one another and stop and enjoy observing each other do what each would normally do if they were free of mind games.  Shifting power dynamics are a facet of human relationships that hasn’t been dissected much in TV outside The Real Housewives franchise, and for someone who’s seen every episode, no motivations ever come off as completely left-field for me. At worst, some of the romantic entangles feel a little shoe-horned, but you also get the impression it’s not actually important to the writers and is there to serve as a critique of “Ross and Rachel syndrome” that infects so many TV comedies.

3. It has one of the best ensemble casts in recent memory

From Gillian Jacobs’s supremely underrated and loony Britta (I’m personally drawn to characters who hide their vulnerability under a jaded mystique but really just love everything life has to offer, i.e.: Six Feet Under’s Claire Fisher) to the sense of earnest childlike qualities Donald Glover brings to his reformed jock character, every single character on Community is fully realized and the bulk of this falls on the extremely talented cast. I’d argue that the writers don’t always best know how to incorporate Yvette Nicole Brown into the fray as best as they should, but Community feels like the one true ensemble show that manages to balance out its characters without costing the flow of the story the way Modern Family does.  As for the issue of whether Ken Jeong’s character is offensive or not, I’d argue that it isn’t, especially when you compare it to the actor’s work in movies like The Hangover in which the entire joke is that he’s Asian. Community references his ethnicity on a regular basis, but his negative qualities don’t have anything to do with his race and more to do with the fact that he’s completely crazy. Crazy people exist in all ethnicities. This isn’t a show that’s afraid to show all of its characters in a negative light on a regular basis, so Jeong’s character isn’t alone in getting less than admirable traits either.

4. It’s funny

This goes without saying. Community is one of, if not the quickest comedy on television (Cougar Town is its closest competition) that manages to pack more laughs in a single minute than most shows do in a whole 24-minute window.  Any show that’s self-aware and clever enough to reference the TV standby “bottle episodes” in which budget restrictions force writers to save money by keeping the action in a single room while also pulling off one of these episodes earns a gold-star in my book. The notion of this show being reckless with money is sorta laughable, not only when you consider how some of the best episodes have actually been bottle episodes (last week’s, the Dungeons and Dragons episode, the one with Annie’s missing pen), but also when you notice the show’s school-scenery destroying paintball episodes actually covertly reference how much of the school’s (read: show’s) budget was spent to pull it off. The latest season opened with an entire B-plot about cutting costs, for God’s sake. It literally couldn’t be any less subtle.

The notion of believability in TV sitcoms is already dangerous territory considering the genre usually works in extremes (is 30 Rock believable? Not at all), but a careful examination of Community’s characters actually reveal them to be varied, complex, and at most, reasonably held together by each one’s loneliness and desire to connect. So what if it isn’t about the daily routine of a community college student anymore? Does that even matter when it’s morphed into something much, much, much more unique?