Abed Wasn't Breaking Community's Fourth Wall – He Was Protecting It
The NBC college sitcom "Community" wasn't afraid to break the mold, and one of the key pieces in keeping it fresh was the character of Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). Abed viewed the world through a lens of fiction, interpreting everything through pop culture references and understandings of tropes. He even told his friends with some regularity that they were in a TV show and he offered examples, but everyone always brushed him off. It's kind of a strange fourth-wall breaking because while Abed is absolutely correct in assuming he's on a TV series, it's never confirmed in-universe. For that reason, series creator Dan Harmon always believed that the character wasn't breaking the fourth wall, he was "protecting" it.
In an interview with MSNBC, Harmon explained his reasoning, revealing that Abed represented all of the geeky, potentially neurodivergent pop-culture fans out there who would question their reality if they were in similar situations. For many — myself included — Abed is incredibly relatable, and his willingness to poke at the fabric of his very existence makes "Community" feel somehow much more real.
One seriously relatable character
When asked why people seem more likable when we share their pop culture preferences, Harmon dug deep into what makes Abed so vital to "Community" as a series:
"I think it just lowers your defenses. It makes you realize that they're real. And that was the job of the character of Abed in 'Community,' which often the kind of threshold guardians would mark as me playing with the sanctity of the fourth wall, but which I was always trying to explain, no, this is a shoring up of the fourth wall, because he's there caressing it. Breaking the fourth wall would be to launch a sitcom at that late stage of the broadcast game that pretended TV didn't exist. That would make people more conscious of the fact that it was a TV show than if a character on the show said, 'I may or may not have a personality disorder of some kind, but for whatever reason this feels like a TV show to me, does it not?' And then everyone watching the show can go, 'Oh, so he's real. Because if I were in that situation that's what I'd be saying.'"
Harmon is dead-on that people in that sort of situation might say similar things. I've had moments in my own life that felt like something out of a TV show, and I've commented as much. This kind of understanding of the world might not work for everyone, but for a certain subset of geeky folks (who may or may not have "personality disorders of some kind"), it's the only way of seeing things. The first time Abed started talking about how TV made real life make sense, I turned into the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme. That's me.
Seeing things through a TV eye
Harmon put a lot of himself into Abed, and the character even helped the writer realize that he was on the autism spectrum and get a diagnosis. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a teenager, which shares a lot of overlap with autism, and Abed's whole outlook on life is a whole lot like mine. I've written at length about how shows like "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" helped shape who I was as a young person because fiction has always made more sense than reality, and Abed's experience mirrors my own, even if I don't have my own Dreamatorium. Abed's running commentary on the absurdity of the situations happening around Greendale, and their relationship to TV tropes, makes "Community" feel more real and lived-in. No one ever fully agrees with Abed, except maybe Troy (Donald Glover), which is pretty accurate to what it can feel like as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world. We still have the same dreams, desires, and fears, but we understand and communicate things just a bit differently, and that can be extremely isolating.
There are quite a few of us Abeds out there, obsessed with various forms of fiction because they make the real world make a little more sense. Other characters assume that Abed doesn't have a firm grasp on reality, but he's often the most stable and level-headed person in the study room. Abed Nadir is a neurodivergent hero, and I'm thankful that Harmon and Pudi brought him to life.