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DAY 2: FAVORITE MALE CHARACTER



This one was really difficult for me. Troy and Abed kinda both come off at the top of the list but after really thinking about it for a while; Abed wins.

Abed really stands for me as one of the most compelling television show character of all time. His ability to poke holes in the form itself and his ability to be “meta” keeps me wanting to watch him progress more and more. The show allows me to do this because out of all the characters, he probably develops the most as the series goes on.

Starting off as a TV obsessed, estranged loner who never seemed to fit in, “Everybody wants to help me, but usually when they find out they cant they get frustrated and stop talking to me”, “entombed alive in a mausoleum of feelings I can neither understand or reciprocate.”Abed builds social skills throughout the show. HOWEVER, as I say this, we see glimpses of an overly confident and even arrogant Abed early in the series: “Britta, I’ve got self esteem falling out of my butt”. This aside, we definitely see Abed character flourish as he builds his friendship with Troy and the rest of the Study group.

Something that always kept me wanting to watch more of Abed was his ability to add an extra dimension to the whole series. In a vast majority of the episodes, Abed has his own “wacky self contained escapades”, especially in the second season. Which, as the stronger season I feel is made on the backburn of Abed’s own genre driven comedic style. Abed allows the show to make fun of the fact that it is infact just a television show, and stops the series from ever taking itself too seriously. He points out the structural weakness of the show and in a way, this allows the writers of the show to make fun of them, such as in episode 208, when he prematurely alerts the audience that “this is starting to feel like a bottle episode” before destroying the sitcom cliche by admitting that ” I hate bottle episodes, they’re wall to wall facial expression and emotional nuance, I might as well sit in the corner with a bucket on my head.”

It’s this self-aware kind of comedy that leads to there being a zombie episode, a gangster film episode, a stop-motion animated episode, a space film episode, a Charlie Kaufman spoof episode, a buddy cop episode, a completely self-aware clip episode (which, features no before seen footage, destroying the very purpose of a clip show), a conspiracy film episode, three battle-royale style episodes in the themes of post apocalyptic wasteland, western, and star wars spoof, along with a host of other imitations and spoofs of classic film and television formulas.

I appear to be going of on a bit of a tangent here, so let me just wrap it up. On a personal level, I relate the most to Abed out of all the characters in the show. He was raised by television, not having much of a relationship with his family, and being an outcast growing up. This lead him to his passion of movies and tv shows as a way to cope with this. After much abuse and questioning from the characters in the series about his disconnection from the world through this obsession, we learn that he isn’t as socially incapable as he lets on; but merely a creature of observation. “I can tell life from TV Jeff, TV makes sense, it has structure, logic, rules and like-able leading men, in life we have this, and we have you.” He finds his own life boring and unsatisfying quite often, but through no fault of his own, or because he has a particularly bad life, and because of this finds escapism through association with TV and movies, often this acts as the catalysts for the previously mentioned genre spoof episodes.

Ok that was more than I was planning to write, but at the end of the day. The dude is funny, and clever, and ensures the show is never dull. For me, or at least when I first started watching the show, Abed makes community.