If you tuned in to the season premiere of Community last night, you were probably a little surprised to see the opening scene done with—spoiler alert!—canned laughter and multi-cam shots. It was, of course, a spoof on the traditional sort of sitcom that the show so regularly subverts.
If you’re a regular reader of the Reddit forums devoted to the show, however, you may have been less surprised than stunned: Six months ago, Reditor krevency described almost exactly how this opening might play out on a thread dedicated to the show.
Firstly, the intro should be replaced with a very lame sounding sitcom-esque song and clips of the actors instead of the paper fortune teller. And then it opens on the study room, but it’s clearly a different set, and the actors are behaving just a little off, in such a way that only a longtime fan would notice. And then the dean walks in, and he’s portrayed by a different actor. He makes a joke, and…there is a laugh track.
And just when all of us are crying into our celebratory wine, it should turn out to be a dream Abed’s having or something, and then the normal opening starts, and the show turns out to be everything we’d hoped for and more.
Because joking about the fans’ between-season fears is just meta enough to make me smile.
His vision wasn’t precisely on the nose—for instance, it was Pierce who was portrayed by a different actor in the sequence, not the dean—but his overall take is eerily prescient. While the feedback for the episode has been tepid, some Reddit users at the time responded favorably to krevency’s idea (even if, as at least one person pointed out, this basic gag had been done elsewhere before).
After “History 101” aired last night, Reddit readers were quick to recall his post and anoint him the prophetic leader of all things Community-related. “krevency IS A GENIUS AND I WILL DIE PROTECTING HIS VISION,” wrote one. Others decided to latch on to his thrilling success. “We made it guys,” one said. “We helped make the show.”
Could krevency actually be a writer on the series? We have not yet spoken with him, but his posting history suggests otherwise. We’ll choose to believe that, like Abed, he is a visionary. If you want to avoid spoilers for the rest of the season, you may need to avoid krevency, omniscient Community fan.
