Community/Recap/S3/E08 Documentary Filmmaking Redux

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
< Community‎ | Recap‎ | S3


He never wanted to be in this commercial. He never wanted to be bald. Now he's both.


The Dean is filming a new commercial for Greendale starring most of the study group while Abed makes a documentary about it. Famous alumnus Luis Guzman agrees to be in it which causes the Dean to go overboard and over budget.

The Community episode "Documentary Film Making Redux" provides examples of:

Annie: The Dean had his seventh epiphany today, which has given me an epiphany of my own-- the Dean is a genius. He has to be. If he isn't, I've given almost two weeks of my life to an idiot! That is unacceptable. Therefore, the Dean is a genius and I will die protecting his vision.

  • As Himself: Luis Guzman, noted Puerto Rican American.
  • Aside Glance: Abed after witnessing Troy and Britta continuing to hug after the Group Hug.
  • Becoming the Mask: The longer he spends in the 'Dean' costume, the more the identity lines between Jeff and 'Dean' begin to blur.
  • Brick Joke: In Advanced Criminal Law, when the Luis Guzman statue is announced, Abed makes a list of the questions he would like to ask Luis Guzman should he arrive for the statue's dedication, while Troy makes a sarcastic comment about Guzman coming over specifically to be interviewed by Abed. In this episode, Guzman ends up being interviewed by Abed for his documentary and would rather talk to him than work with the Dean.
  • Call Back: Annie wore her hair in this episode the same way she wore it in Social Psychology. Fittingly, she went completely batshit in both episodes.
    • When the Dean strips off after his breakdown, his underwear is identical to that of Jeff's in Physical Education.
    • At the end, the Dean begs to know whether he's a "good Dean" in a similar way to Applied Anthropology and Culinary Arts.
    • Both the Dean's speech at the beginning about how Greendale asks little of its students and mainly gives, and his tearful confession to camera about how Greendale accepts him for who he is, call to mind Pierce's speech about how Greendale accepts people, faults and all, at the end of For a Few Paintballs More.
      • Also during the speech, he explains that he holds 5 dances a year because he thinks the school isn't good enough. This calls back to Pascal's Triangle Revisited when Jeff asked how many dances would the school have and the Dean responding five.
    • Leonard is listed as "Leonard Rodriguez" in Abed's documentary.
    • Chang uses the same bald cap for Jeff's understudy as he does for his "Butch" costume in the Critical Film Studies episode.
  • Comically Missing the Point

Abed: The Dean is going insane and taking all of you with him.
Troy: If you know that, then do something!

Abed: I'm doing everything I can. I only have so many cameras.

    • Also this:

Britta: It's great that he got a celebrity, but why reshoot everything?
Abed: Perfectionism. The Dean's first step down a road that ends in self-destruction.
Britta: ... That sounds... horrible.
Abed: Actually, I might end up taking this to some festivals.
[Britta looks nonplussed]

    • And:

Luis Guzman: Oh, I get it. You're worse than crazy. You're ashamed of your school. And that statue of me out there? That's just wrong.
Dean: The bronze adds ten pounds, it's not gonna be perfect...
Luis Guzman: Hey, screw you! I'm just saying -- don't worship the people leaving Greendale, worship the people that are here.

  • Creator Breakdown: In-universe.
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Abed's talking-head shot about how a filmmaker can't always stay detached.
  • A Day in the Limelight: For the Dean.
  • Deconstruction: Like the earlier documentary episode, the episode deconstructs documentaries, especially those where the filmmakers follow subjects around with their cameras to record their struggles and traumas without doing anything to help for the sake of distance and remaining 'objective'; Abed knows exactly what is going to happen and, as Troy angrily notes, could probably do something to help, but chooses not to do anything and thus lets everyone suffer needlessly. Abed then ends up rejecting this approach when he takes pity on the Dean and uses his footage to cut together a suitable commercial for the school, thus saving his job. It also once again reiterates the artificial nature of 'reality' programming, even documentaries:

Abed: Documentarians are supposed to be objective to avoid having any effect on the story. And yet, we have more effect than anyone, because we decide to tell it. And we decide how it ends.

  • Dismotivation: Jeff reveals himself as one of the 'puts more effort into avoiding the work than would be necessary to actually just do the work' types, initially going to a lot of trouble to avoid having to do anything for the Dean's commercial.

Jeff: I'm always willing to go the extra mile to avoid doing something.

  • Documentary Episode: Like "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking".
  • Drunk with Power: The Dean.
  • Easter Egg: In the Dean's mental breakdown video, he is shown wearing Jeff's orange underpants.
  • Epic Fail: The Dean's task of shooting a simple commercial ends up shutting down classes for 12 days, goes $17,125 over budget, and results in the mental breakdown of several characters. Including himself. Also, whatever he did to the ice cream machine.
    • Jeff also gets this too. Any attempt he makes to reduce the amount of work he has to do backfires enormously, resulting in a nightmarish amount of distress. He could have just been in a simple commercial, had he actually just decided to do the work instead of trying to avoid it.
  • Fridge Horror: Does the Dean simply own a copy of Jeff's underwear, or did he steal them from Jeff?
    • This may be a call back, since Dean Pelton was looking pretty closely at them during the billiards contest in "Physical Education."
  • Fruit of the Loon: Scene IV.
  • Genius Bonus: While Abed diagnoses Annie as having Stockholm Syndrome, she is actually displaying a phenomenon psychologists would call "insufficient justification." It all starts when someone goes through a lot of effort/pain, and doesn't have a really good reason for why they did it, so they try to convince themselves otherwise. She's basically reducing her mental distress by convincing herself that the Dean is a genius, therefore justifying all the work she's done, since there wasn't any real reason for her suffering at all.
  • Genre Savvy: Abed pegs from the beginning that the Dean's commercial is going to lead to insanity, hence his decision to follow the proceedings with his documentary cameras.
  • Gilligan Cut:

Jeff: What if this shoot drags on another day?! Or, God forbid, two!
[Caption on black: Four days later]

  • Group Hug
  • Hypocritical Humor: The Dean's efforts to end racism and "pull a four-hundred year old dagger out of America's heart" by having Troy and Britta hug on camera eventually ends with him promising to restore segregation to the school if they screw up one more time.
    • There's really only one word to describe the way Shirley delivers the line about the Dean using the word "sassy".
  • I Can Explain: The Dean, after the study group views his original commercial / nude emotional meltdown on camera:

Dean: Ugh, before you say anything... nope, I've got nothing. Can you just forgive me?

Pierce: I'm an actor not a circus freak!

  • Insult Backfire: Jeff's imitation of the Dean is very camp and mocking. The Dean thinks he "hit gold."
  • Ironic Echo: In a meta-sense -- in the earlier Documentary Episode, Pierce's prima-donna antics were the centerpiece of the plot and had significant impact on the other characters. Here, his similarly prima-donna antics go completely unnoticed by the others and he spends most of the episode unseen in a trailer.
  • It Will Never Catch On: Inverted for laughs by Leonard, who's apparently a bit out of touch:

Leonard: I'm thinking of getting into the TV game, because it's apparently sticking around.

  • Just Friends: One occurs between Troy and Britta after the Dean asks if it would be awkward for them to hug for the commercial.

Britta: Yeah, Troy and I are buds, best buds, air buds even.

  • Leave the Camera Running
  • Line in the Sand: Backfires; see Tempting Fate.
  • Lost in Character: Jeff.
  • Motion Capture: Garrett is put in a green mo-cap suit with ping pong ball sensors for the commercial.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Jeff made the cameramen shoot in front of the Luis Guzman statue so he could use lawyers to pull the commercial. Then Luis calls and says he wants to be in the commercial, leading the Dean to go through a mental breakdown, just because he didn't feel like being in the commercial. And to rub salt in the wound, the Dean had almost finished production, under budget.
    • Also Luis Guzman himself, albeit inadvertently and unwittingly -- he helpfully calls the Dean to sidestep the 'trouble' that's arisen around the use of his issue to offer his services for the commercial (and as noted above, at exactly the point where the commercial is about to be wrapped) which leads to the Dean's breakdown and all the resulting stress of the episode.
  • Noodle Incident: In the throes of his breakdown, the Dean apparently did something rather unpleasant to the ice-cream machine, and begs no one to eat from it until it's been cleaned.
    • Judging from him explaining that the Janitor knew how to clean it, it can be inferred that this isn't the first time it's been done.
  • Only Sane Woman: Shirley is apparently the only person in the school -- and certainly the only member of the study group other than Abed -- who manages to remain sane during the entire affair.
  • Overly Narrow Superlative: According to the 1990s commercial, the primary reason to choose Greendale as a place of study was that it had "the most advanced typing class in the south-western Greendale area." And you can submit your application by fax!
  • Poe's Law: In-universe; Jeff's impression of the Dean is clearly supposed to be over-the-top and insulting, but is actually remarkably close to the reality. So it would make sense for the Dean to think it's a golden performance.
  • Political Correctness Gone Mad: In more ways than one; the Dean ends up convinced that the scene where Britta and Troy hug is intended to solve racism, which prompts him to drive them to nervous breakdowns by forcing them to repeatedly hug for twelve hours straight while screaming at them.
  • The Prima Donna: Parodied; Pierce is outraged when he learns the commercial shoot won't be catered and announces he won't leave his trailer. When he learns that the shoot also won't have trailers, he rents a trailer and refuses to leave it until he receives a trailer which he can refuse to leave until the shoot is catered. And so on, in a series of events which leads to him spending the entire time in a trailer which is eventually towed to a movie set in Hollywood.
  • Prima Donna Director: The Dean was already dangerously close to the edge at the start of production but throws himself off of it screaming and flailing once Luis Guzman signs on.
  • Sanity Slippage: Pretty much everyone except Shirley and Luiz Guzman goes through this while working on the commercial.
  • Ship Tease: Britta and Troy do a lot of hugging in this episode, and usually get very giggly and sheepish around each other because of it. Until the Dean makes them hug each other for twelve hours straight while screaming abuse at them the whole time, by which point nervous breakdowns start looming.
    • And then at the Group Hug in the end. When everyone let go, Britta and Troy held on to each other.
  • Shout-Out:
    • To both Apocalypse Now and Hearts of Darkness, the former's "making of" Documentary.
    • The Dean gives Annie an orange in one scene telling her to place it. This goes with a well known Francis Ford Coppola quirk of putting oranges in various scenes throughout The Godfather as foreshadowing.
    • Abed is also wearing a De Blob shirt, in one scene.
    • Britta says Troy and her are Air Buds.
    • "I merely dreamed of having hair. And now the bald man is awake."
    • Ryan McPartlin's appearance in the original Greendale commercial. Chuck, his usual NBC show, aired an episode a few weeks before this one in which his character replaced an equally-outdated commercial for the Buy More.
  • A Simple Plan: All they need to do is film a simple commercial showing off Greendale and its student body. It doesn't quite work out like that.
  • Small Name, Big Ego: The commercial is supposed to be a basic twenty-to-thirty second TV spot. The longer he films it, however, the more the Dean's ego gets completely out of control as he becomes convinced he's making some kind of statement.
  • Springtime for Hitler: Jeff's attempt to derail his role in the commercial by firstly doing an over-the-top caricature of the Dean and then having his scenes filmed in front of the school's statue of Luis Guzman (thereby meaning that it will have to be scrapped when Guzman denies permission for his image to be used) backfires when the Dean loves his interpretation and Guzman, learning about the issue, offers to appear in the commercial.
  • Stockholm Syndrome: Annie, who is absolutely convinced of the Dean's genius until he replaces Jeff with Chang.
  • Strange Minds Think Alike: Abed and Luis Guzman both say that Hearts of Darkness is way better than Apocalypse Now.
  • Take Our Word for It: We don't see the original cut of the Dean's commercial, but from what we hear -- and Luis Guzman's reaction to it -- it's not good.
  • Take That
    • A possible one to Charlie Sheen

Dean: I'm surrounded by assassins. My own school's paper has turned on me. But when this is all over, I'll have a commercial with Luis Guzman in it, and all they'll have are their words and their fears and whatever embarrassing photos they can get from my two-faced mother.

Abed: Some flies are too awesome for the wall.

  • Tempting Fate: At the climax of his Prima Donna Director weight-throwing, the Dean yells that anyone who doesn't want to help him with his movie can leave. Everyone, having been driven up the wall with his madness by this point, has gone before he even finishes the sentence.
    • Also Jeff, who confidently predicts that his Dean impression "won't make the cut" and that Guzman's lawyers will intervene to stop the production (and thus his role in it), only to almost immediately be proven wrong both times.
  • Troubled Production: The Dean's commercial ends up more than $17,000 over its $2,000 budget.
  • Two Plus Torture Equals Five: After twelve days of wearing a bald cap, Jeff comes to believe he is bald, and "only dreamed of having hair".
  • Unfortunate Implications: In-universe example. Amidst his nervous breakdown, Troy points out how "to meet different people" can actually mean the opposite of what the message is supposed to be.

Troy: [sobbing] Stop saying I'm different!

  • What the Hell, Hero?: Luis Guzman gives one to the Dean for being ashamed of Greendale.
  • Wilhelm Scream: heard in the cut of the commercial shown to Luis Guzman.
  • Yes-Man: Annie seems to become one of these for the Dean, although in her defense it is primarily due to a stress-based psychological breakdown. Subverted in the one occasion we see her about to act as the Dean's Yes-Man, in which she realizes the lunacy of what she's supporting halfway through and immediately rejects it:

Annie: Shut your face, Britta! If the Dean wants his role to be played by a Chinese man in a blonde wi-- oh my God, you are insane.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Community/Recap/S3/E08_Documentary_Filmmaking_Redux?oldid=1209867"