So I watch a lot of television. But here's the thing; I don't just watch the shows I watch. I engross myself. I talk about them with my friends. I discuss them on blogs. I read and participate in meta-analyses.

And okay, I also do plenty of mindless geeking out. I'm only human. And an enormously nerdy one at that.
So falling just behind dystopian societies, morally-ambiguous characters (especially ones in power), cyborgs, plagues, and complex female characters, one of my favorite things to find in a tv show is deliberate playing with tropes.
In case you don't know what I'm talking about, a trope in television is different from the literary ones you learned about in high school. Instead of being a piece of figurative language, a trope in television is a device or convention that commonly occurs in works of fiction. It's one of those things that has become unofficially officially a thing just through common use. It spawned from looking at tv shows, but now is used to describe any work of fiction, and diving into the world of tropes can be a really interesting and revealing way to look at the way we tell stories. A classic example of a tv trope would be "jumping the shark": that point in a show when things go downhill and the quality sharply declines yet the show just. keeps. going. Some other very common ones include "the antihero," "will they or won't they?," "ugly guy, hot wife," "jerk with a heart of gold," "give him a normal life"... and those are just the very very tip of the iceberg (eyyy see what I did there? Literary trope to talk about tv trope. Amazing.). There are literally thousands. Some of them venture into the realm of clichés, but that's not the idea.
ANYWAY.
If you are a fan of the show Community, you know that they are all about tropes. Pretty much every episode is devoted to exploring one or more common television tropes, and thanks to Abed's obsession with them and his fourth-wall-flirting descriptions, we usually know exactly which ones.


There was an episode where Troy and Abed got into a fight over whether they would build a blanket fort or a pillow fort, and the entire episode was formatted like an overly-dramatic history documentary.


Another one was a straight-up parody of Law and Order: SVU.


Zombie movies. Buddy-cop shows. Video games. Christmas specials. Glee. Old west. Terrible horror movie. Alternate timelines (my personal favorite).


You name it, they've done it, or at least referenced it. This season, the actor playing Troy was only in the first few episodes because he decided to leave the show to pursue his music career. The writers didn't even try to pretend it wasn't happening.



gif replacement due to language: Troy says, "That son of a *****!"


Okay, they seriously just had Abed tell us, "Look, we know this might suck because Troy was one of your favorite characters, but we're going to do the best we can. And also we're still a little bitter that Donald is leaving and we're going to make him apologize to you."

And it's not just the plotlines. It's the main characters, too.

Jeff, the jerk with a heart of gold, aware of his own good looks, works hard to be lazy, daddy issues, glue of the group... I could go on and on.

My personal favorite character, Shirley, the overly-sweet yet also sometimes emotionally manipulative mother type. Kills with kindness. Christian who accepts other religions but whoa hey actually doesn't really.



Don't get on her bad side.


To avoid this turning into an entire dissertation, I'll leave you with this: this show is a treasure and you should watch it and enjoy the genius of its writing, because it has everything that someone who is interested in actively participating in their media consumption could want in a tv show.

Also bad puns.