Community season 6 is three episodes in and rolling. The new characters are blending in with the old but there’s just one question: is Paget Brewster’s Frankie Dart too similar to Annie?
Community has had a let’s say, turbulent, experience with its supporting characters. Of the original seven main cast members, only four remain. That isn’t necessarily Walking Dead-level turnover but it’s far more than one would expect for a show about a community college.
Thankfully, the show has done a good job of rotating fresh blood in. First, there are the existing characters of Dean Pelton and Chang who can interact with the main group in numerous ways or just incorporate themselves into it as they usually do.
Season 5 saw the introduction of Professor Buzz Hickey (Jonathan Banks). He served as an interesting antithesis to the departed Pierce (Chevy Chase). Both filled the role of “out of touch old guy” but Hickey was outwardly cantankerous and inwardly sensitive while Pierce outwardly expressed a desire to belong but was inwardly really a dirtbag most of the time.
Now season 6 has introduced Francesca “Frankie” Dart (Paget Brewster) and Elroy Patashnik (Keith David) to absorb the losses of Hickey, Pierce, Troy and Shirley. Little is known about Elroy yet aside from his being an excellent computer technician and surprisingly underrated at throwing shade. But we’ve had quite a bit of exposure to Frankie over the span of three episodes and what we’ve learned has been interesting.
Frankie is smart, driven, attractive, raven-haired, detail-oriented, prone to fall in love with institutions and probably has Robert’s Rules of Order either memorized or tattooed on her body Memento style. In short: Frankie is Annie.
The co-existence of Annie and Frankie on paper is redundant at best and lazy at worst. Why wold Community introduce a new character that’s a near carbon copy of an existing character, especially when previous new characters have been designed as foils for the current cast or who they’ve replaced?
The answer, as is the answer to most things, is that Dan Harmon is likely a lot smarter than all of us. Community has always been meta-textual but as it gets older it’s becoming even more obsessed with the interplay between fiction and reality. Reality and fiction are not always two distinct lines. More frequently they are a conversation. Sometimes fiction can come across as more authentic than reality and sometimes reality throws you something so formulaic and cliche, you’d swear the hands of fate were the hands of hack screenwriters.
This represents one way that the introduction of Frankie Dart is benefiting Harmon’s storytelling mission. She represents a kind of “glitch in the Matrix” that we occasionally experience here in, you know: the Matrix. Rarely in fiction do two characters in one friend group so closely resemble each other. The assumption is that would be boring or redundant from a storytelling perspective. But reality doesn’t have a storytelling perspective. It has more of a “stuff happens” perspective. Here in the real world, We’re usually surrounded by people of our same socio-economic statuses and interests after all, so why wouldn’t a group have two “Annies”?
To be fair: Community is not just some experiment to see how much reality can be injected into fiction before ceasing to be funny or interesting…because Community is still very funny and interesting. So there is one other way that the introduction of Frankie works to the show’s advantage in terms of storytelling.
A lot of the humor and drama from the show’s earlier seasons were derived from this group of characters from disparate backgrounds clashing. These clashes weren’t always antagonistic per se but this interaction between cultures still drove a lot of the shows plot. Now that Annie, Abed, Britta, Jeff and to a lesser extent Pelton and Chang have been in each other’s lives for five years and survived character purging in Darwinian fashion, it doesn’t make as much sense for them to clash with each other on such a scale.
Sure, there will likely be tussles along the way but the chief narrative goal of Community is about a community (hey, that’s the name of the show!) banding together to accomplish a bigger purpose. That purpose is keeping their terrible, terrible school alive somehow. It’s a silly goal but everyone holds it sincerely. The characters are now aspirational instead of conflicting. Even Chang who once tried to conquer Greendale is now singularly devoted to saving it.
The fact then that Frankie resembles Annie so much then makes even more sense because Annie is aspirational and believes in a bigger purpose. In that sense it’s not surprising that Community would introduce another Annie; it already has at least seven.
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.